Starting this program, I felt comfortable discussing a
curriculum, but not really critiquing or altering a curriculum. As this year
has progressed, I feel my ability to do just that has grown with each passing course.
During this past quarter I have begun to feel quite comfortable with both
critiquing and altering my curriculum. With the initial discussion about what
actually constitutes a solid curriculum I was forced to look deeply at the curriculum
I am using. Luckily, I had some practice with this during this past school year
as I participated in a curriculum adoption. I found this adoption process,
along with the discussion and points of view of my peers, to be invaluable in helping
me to determine what elements of my curriculum and lesson planning are good and
what things need tweaking.
To start, I had to determine what my curriculum had going
for it and what areas needed support or adjustment. Upon completing this
(Module 1 Paper), I began looking at the standards, at least the
major ones, to determine what is essential to the unit I was looking at in
detail. This work is not something I have too much experience doing, but found
that through our classwork and the guidance of my peers and professors that this
was something that I felt comfortable doing. I was able to pare down the eight
standards covered to a focus of three standards (Module 2 Paper). Moving
forward, this ability to recognize the standards central to a unit is going to
serve me well as knowing what is necessary for my students to understand and
what is extraneous, or at least not as important, is vital.
Moving forward, we see began looking at learning targets and
designing lessons. My school requires learning posted for student information,
but we have not had much work around the aspects of a quality learning target.
Through the readings, particularly (Knowing Your Learning Target),
we see what it takes to have an effective learning target. The anecdote of
driving somewhere without knowing where to go or how to get there really struck
me as a key reason why having an effective learning target is so important. To
guide my students as well as possible, I need to ensure that my students know where
we are heading in a lesson and how we will know we are there. This learning and
practice will prove instrumental in becoming the teacher I want to be.
To get students to achieve the learning target, we see the
importance of engaging students in the learning. We first created brief engagement
activity explanations and then completed several full lesson plans. This
portion of the class proved to be the most challenging for me. I feel
comfortable putting lessons together, but I often lack diversity in engagement
plans. This is something I know that I struggle with and want to improve and as
we created plans with more details I received several strong ideas and
suggestions to change things up from my normal lesson routines. These ideas,
although strong, are still difficult for me to plan and are pieces of my
practice that I will be focusing on the years ahead. To show my progress, I
have attached my brief and full lesson plans (Unit Plan). These initial plans and changes
to my plans represent the most significant portions of my learning in this
course.
Finally, the aspects of differentiation, evaluating learning
and adjusting plans comes into play. These portions of planning are areas where
I feel I have a bit of experience, but I definitely want to improve. One of the
differentiation techniques (see lesson 6 in my unit plan) I
borrowed from a peer (Erin Hocevar-Ortiz) is to create a handout of the
definitions previously learned, including the terms we will define during that
lesson, for students to tape into their journals. This acts as a resource for students
to refer to and will help increase the use of the academic language. I also
switched an exit ticket for an assessment problem creation (an idea from How to Keep Kids Engaged in Class)
to aid in evaluating
student learning (see lesson 2 in my unit plan). This represents
another shift in my focus from having students solve problems to them creating
problems to show they understand how polynomial multiplication. These two
examples of adjustment represent another step I have taken this quarter in
improving my practice.
All of the work undertaken this quarter in Curriculum Design
really has been beneficial to my overall process in planning lessons and units.
Looking at program standard nine, evaluate and use effective curriculum design,
I found many connections to the work completed in this class. We worked through
a unit from start to finish, looking at strengths and weaknesses, essential
standards covered, learning targets and preassessment, engagement activities,
and complete lesson plans. This practice will allow me to move forward in my
practice to become the teacher I want to be.
Frondeville, T. (2009). How to keep kids engaged in class.
Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-student-participation-tips
Moss, C.M., Brookhart, S.M.,
& Long, B.A. (2011). Knowing your learning target. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar11/vol68/num06/Knowing-Your-Learning-Target.aspx
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