Tweaking

This week has been a struggle in many ways.  I'm getting over tonsillitis, it's been a crazy week at school (and yes, it's only been 2 days so far!), and I'm very overwhelmed with the research study right now. 
I can't seem to master being able to teach and deliver my lesson and also take notes at the same time.  I am too busy teaching, redirecting, and working with the kids during the lessons to be able to take notes, and though I'm trying to video tape the lessons so I can review them after school, that adds another couple of hours to my day on top of the regular duties I have as a teacher.  Managing my time and getting good observation notes is absolutely my biggest struggle right now.
Another struggle I have had is the feeling that my students are not as engaged as I would like during our lessons.  We are reading a lot of non-fiction and currently studying how to use text features to read and understand that type of text.  We are applying these strategies to non-fiction texts about the Earth.  I have been trying to have students exposed to a lot of different text about our topics because studies I have read on teaching content through literacy have found it is most beneficial if you don't simply rely on one text (for example, the science book).  I thought everything sounded good to go when I originally planned out my units, but after watching through the taped lessons, I see several students who are not engaged.  They seemed to perk up a bit during today's lesson when we addressed a question they had earlier in the unit.  When we discussed the layers of the Earth, my students wanted to knw how scientists knew what the inside of the Earth was like if they couldn't dig there.  It was a great question, and I let them know I would dig up an answer.  Today, they weren't particularly interested in what we were talking about when suddenly we came across the answer to their question in the text we were reading.  They became excited about it and wanted to know what it said. 
That incident got me thinking...maybe I need to have more student influence in my units.  I don't feel like they can completely guide where we go in our study because I have certain content I need to address, but perhaps we could start a list of questions we have at the beginning of each mini-unit and actively see if we can find the answers to those questions as we read.  This question of how to keep students engaged while still teaching them the content they need is one I am going to ponder for a while.  I am going to try a few different tactics during tomorrow's lesson to keep them engaged while we are reading and see how that works out.  During the next couple of days, I will be in "tweaking" mode for sure.  Stay tuned to see how that turns out!