Meeting High Level Demands with Mini Lessons

Lately, I've been falling behind schedule, especially in geometry. I'm still trying to figure out how I should pace things. However, with winter break coming up, I'm setting hard deadlines. I haven't been spending a lot of time on topics that students seem to understand relatively quickly. It's hard for me to not do a ton of practice problems and make sure that students really understand before moving on. 

I think that it is important to break material down into mini-lessons. My students get bored and chatty if I talk for too long. I've been trying to incorporate more opportunities to involve students in their own learning. I like to break up lessons by starting out with a warm-up (sometimes I'll collect it to keep students on their toes). Then, we move on to guided notes and practice problems (if I can, I prefer to scaffold problems with the I do, we do, you do method). I feel that as time goes on, I will get better at planning more effective lessons by chunking them into more manageable pieces.

For SLOs, my department is doing what we call "throwback skills." Every month, we do a mini-lesson on an old skill from algebra 1 to better prepare students for the SAT. Usually, I incorporate my throwback skills into a warm-up and follow it up with a short discussion in order to prepare students for the quizzes. I believe that it is important to break up material and allow for student feedback. Overall, mini-lessons encourage students to meet higher-level cognitive demands.