Too Much Prep

Every effective teacher preps lessons well. There is a link between careful planning and a student's learning. However, there are times when I wonder if my prep is outweighing the value of relating to my students:

1. I can be so planned that I teach content and miss connecting with my students.
2. I can overplan and lack the flexibility to teach in the moment.
3. I can drive through the curriculum and hide behind the content, missing the opportunities to be real with my students.

There is another way to go about this. I can be fully planned (and more often than not, overplanned) and then relax, using what is relevant for the day in the situation and according to how my students are responding. If I don't get through everything I've planned, chances are that I've made the content more connective and meaningful to the students. So teaching less content but relationally has more value than teaching a lot of content without understanding where the students are emotionally, socially and cognitively.

Do you overprep, underprep, or prep just enough to allow for spontaneous, open spaces?

When do we stop prepping?

All effective teachers need to prepare their lessons. If there is content to be reviewed in order to know it enought to teach, we do it. If content is not an issue, we still need to think about how to deliver it in a way that will reach our particular group of students.
But how much prep is too much? The answer for me is when I lose my focus on the students themselves, that

A Teacher's Bad Dream

I had a dream two weeks before school started up again. I was in my classroom staring at my lesson plan  -vacant, a blank page!  I felt disoriented, tense, unable to focus on what activity to do with the students.
I've had many similar dreams over the years. What's going on in my subconsciousness? Is it that I haven't prepared adequately in advance? Probably not. Does this lost feeling come out of reliving moments when I've had to reassess what I've planned and in the heat of the moment  -thus creating a moment of insecuirty and stress?
The fact is, I always feel I need to be in control of what I'm teaching, when and how. Circumstances -an unresponsive group, time left over, a hot afternoon sometimes dictate otherwise. Perhaps it is the unpredictability of teaching that haunts me. You never know for sure how things will go. The dream played out what I was most afraid of....