Imagination in my lesson planning

Writing a lesson plan for me was always about using my imagination. My students ranged from grades 7-13 and I knew that attending class would have to be a planned experience for both of us and therefore I used to sit for hours and think of ways that I could take the class activities out of the box so as not to bore them to tears. I knew the strategies  and activities admin wanted me to use but I wanted to give a different experience to my ‘short attention span students’.

Imagination for me is the action of forming new ideas from my ‘learned experiences’. In my classes I know of many instances where my imagination got the best of me and during the middle of the lesson I realize the plan was not going to work out and I had to say things like “OK let’s forget all of what we have done so far and try this instead” and sometimes it was a smooth transition, sometimes it was not and even I had instances of students figuring out and completing what I wanted to do even before I saw it to completion (sometimes I still do not know how they got it done) but I continued using this technique of imagination and lesson planning sparked discussions in my classes and intrigue such as the far away planet where aliens spoke in only 1’s and 0’s as I struggled to teach binary to my grade 8 students in 2015 (they just did not see the application) but once I told them to imagine that AN ALIEN force was coming to take over the earth and the only way to communicate was in their binary language then the idea of the lesson changed. A few months ago (March 2019) a student currently in grade 11 reminded me of the alien story from 2015 and how they spoke in binary and this was one of the few things she remembered from grade 8. These are the benefits of thinking outside the box as more than often they remember the stories and the experiences and not the actual content. Sad to say!

But the imagination depends directly on the “richness and variety of a person’s previous experience because this experience provides the material from which the possibilities are driven”. I had to set the scene in my classroom (sometimes moving away from the suggested lesson) and ensure that the experiences used to build the story was followed by my students (building their so called social experiences) and then at the end of the activity we would both have shared imaginations (though each still having a different level of uniqueness as theirs were created based on their individual experiences). E.g. My aliens are green with two fingers. These sessions allowed us to connect as a class and learn through a variety of experiences as they were able to conceptualize something from my narration or my experiences which they never experienced and used it to follow along with my strangely developed lesson plan.

I was fascinated by the quote that said “Only religious and mystic ideas about human nature could claim that products of the imagination originate not out of our previous experience, but from some external, supernatural force” and I thought of the man seeing the bird and thinking how it can be a plane but science argues that these thoughts have been “extracted from reality and have simply undergone the transformational or distorting action of our imagination” which drew my attention to my dreams which are VERY DISTORTED based on my daily interactions. I read an article that says the brain compartmentalizes our daily experiences during REM sleep to sort out and make sense of our day but fortunately for my students I use my CRAZY thoughts to spark and create awesome lessons.  

With the introduction of technology as a part of our daily lives the exposures that students now have make it much easier for us to use concepts of imagination in the classroom as their experiences are very broad and resources are readily available to make the foundation for any activity that is required. The age of technology and the changing role of the teacher must always be on the forefront as the lesson plan that worked for my parents will not work for me and my lesson plans will not work for the generation yet to come as the child’s learned experiences which changes exponentially as time progresses will give them a very vivid and creative imagination far above our experiences at their age at that given point in time.

I end with this quote from the reading

He is not limited to the narrow circle and narrow boundaries of his own experience but can venture far beyond these boundaries, assimilating, with the help of his imagination someone else’s historical or social experience. In this form, imagination is a completely essential condition for almost all human mental activity. When we read a newspaper and find out about a thousand events that we have not directly witnessed, when a child studies geography or history, when we merely learn what has been happening to another person by reading a letter from him—in all these cases our imagination serves our experience.