What to Do When Your Lesson Goes Kaput

Five minutes in, Josh Stock knew his lesson about “theme in literature” was bombing. Not prone to giving up, he powered on while his sixth-grade English Language Arts students began doodling in their notebooks or staring into space.

“Some kids were bored. Some didn’t understand what I was talking about. Some just didn’t care to learn that day,” Stock recalls. After 20 minutes, “I threw in the towel. I knew that I needed to regroup and wouldn’t have a better plan until the next day.” He directed students to retrieve their choice books and let them read for the remainder of the period. 

Well played, Josh. But for many teachers, even a temporary loss of classroom focus is a terrifying thought: What if, in spite of painstaking prep, the lesson falls flat? How do you recover in the moment, decide to persevere, or try again another day? After the fact, how do you put things into perspective?

“You have seconds to decide how to proceed,” says first-grade teacher Anne Gillyard, describing her own experience with a sinking ship. “All you see is a carpet populated with 30 wiggling students, their faces looking blankly at you, some of them now audibly whining.” 

To put you back on track, we checked in with veteran teachers across grade levels, set the scene, and asked for guidance.

To pivot or not: When signs of lesson failure appear—students look unfocused, pockets of chaos begin to form, a quick formative assessment reveals that they’re not getting it—pause for a moment to decide next steps. “Sometimes a flop is a flop and there is no recovering from it,” Gillyard says. Lessons can often be salvaged, but sometimes it’s a total fail and there’s “no point in fighting it,” she says. Instead, pivot to another activity, play a game, offer choice reading as Stock did, or try an academic sponge activity—a quick exercise like a free write or grammar scramble, designed to soak up time and keep learning on track while you reset. You can reflect later about what went wrong. 

Recognizing when a lesson begins to fall apart “before you get too deep” isn’t always straightforward, commented educator Ashton G when we asked readers how they handle lesson flops. “This was a learning curve for me. Several of my mentors in the past told me I have a tendency to overcommit to lessons—partially because I like to believe that students will get something out of the lesson, even if it’s not what I had intended.”

Stay calm and have a backup plan: Most important, don’t freak out, teachers told us. “I always remind myself that it’s OK,” advises educator Miraina D. “The best thing to do is stay calm and flexible.” Remind yourself that the classroom is made up of “living and breathing lives, and that’s not something I can control or predict all the time, and it’s OK,” says teacher Amelia F.

When rapid instructional adjustments aren’t salvaging things, it’s helpful to have a tool kit of backup options so you’re keeping students “engaged and learning, even if that means making changes on the spot,” says Miraina D. “Having a backup plan helps me feel more confident in case something doesn’t go as expected.”

Backup plans shouldn’t be fussy or overly complicated; there’s no need for “a MacGyver kit of escape supplies,” says high school English teacher Jason DeHart. He favors wall charts that list ideas for early finishers such as online research related to the lesson’s topic, simple graphic organizers, question stems, or quickly-drawn T-charts to help students dig into stories or other content. 

Brief jots in response to a preselected text—for example, having students connect themes from the reading to their everyday lives—can be a quick, but meaningful, pivot activity. “Freedom can be found on the side of a panic-stricken moment to engage in some of the work that we’ve been meaning to get around to,” says DeHart. “The beauty of teaching isn’t that we need a full candy store of complicated ideas with multiple copies, materials, and practice pages. Instead, a few go-to strategies to pull out of our back pockets can be a wonderful step.”

Modeling mistakes: It’s clear that students benefit from examining mistakes, but teachers’ mistakes also offer excellent fodder for discussion or even collaborative problem-solving, several experienced educators reminded us in one of our threads about lesson flops. 

Lesson fails are “a great opportunity to show students that mistakes are inevitable for everyone, and a way to grow and learn,” teacher Tammy R comments. These moments provide opportunities to “tap into students’ creative thinking and ask them to help you,” added educator Ms. M. When they’re struggling to follow a discombobulated lesson, for example, she might ask students to research the material independently and write up a few of their own test questions as a way to check for understanding. 

When students witness a teaching fail, she writes, “it shows that learning is a journey that continues throughout life. It fosters trust and connection.” To normalize mistakes in a public way, educator Vincent N says, he allocates “a corner of my whiteboard for recording my mistakes so that students can see that I make them too, and that it’s OK,” he writes. “I love it when they start spotting my mistakes and putting a hand up to let me know, so I have to add another notch on my failure chart.”

Reflect and adjust: Across dozens of responses, teachers told us that lesson flops are an opportunity for reflection because “improvement only happens when you regularly reflect,” says Gillyard. “Make it a habit after every lesson. Once you do, you may even find it happening while you are teaching.” This doesn’t need to be a massive time investment—even five minutes a day dedicated to jotting down what went well and what didn’t will make a difference.  

Using a backward design model, educator Tammy R reviews “my intended outcome and the strategies I used to get there” after the lesson. “Then I adjust, eliminate, and add to tweak the lesson.” Along with examining her lessons for obvious gaps—would a quick movement break have helped students reset, for example—preschool educator Briana asks herself questions such as “What could have been done differently,” and if the setback was in her control, “How could I do better next time?” 

Examining instruction and lesson materials to ensure that they’re “clear, engaging, and manageable” for students, notes Miraina D, picking up a theme we heard from several educators, is a crucial part of reflection. One way to do this is by asking students, collectively, to walk you through their understanding of an assignment while you write the steps down on the whiteboard, giving them opportunities to offer refinements and corrections, and clarifying instructional gaps. Additionally, consider “their learning needs and attention spans,” Miraina D advises, and examine how the lesson might have been improved by adding, for example, “movement, hands-on activities, or discussions.”

Forgive yourself and move on: Even with extensive planning, kids and the day-to-day classroom environment are unpredictable and sometimes chaotic—making the likelihood of a lesson blunder nearly unavoidable. It’s important to keep things in perspective. “I recently saw a tweet from one of my former students who was disparaging the way their teaching day went,” writes DeHart. “I recognized a fellow perfectionist immediately and was moved with compassion for this former student and for myself as a young teacher. We never attain perfection, and the reality of the classroom demands that we give ourselves permission to play—to try, to fail, to try again.”

It’s hard, but it helps to adopt a work-in-progress mindset, veteran teachers say. Starting from a place “where you recognize that you’re going to be imperfect, that teaching itself is going to be messy and there will be mistakes,” is key, says former middle school teacher John Spencer, an author and associate professor of education at George Fox University. 

Think of yourself as a learner, suggests educator Lori Friesen. “I hate to state the glaringly obvious, but the reason you don’t feel like you know everything as a new teacher is because you don’t. You’re a new teacher. That means you’re a beginner—just like your students,” says Friesen. Instead of setting rigid standards of success for yourself and then being hard on yourself after hiccups occur, “do for yourself what you are so good at doing for your students: Choose one skill area to work on at a time, and give yourself the grace and permission to fail as you improve—just as you ask students to do.”