This week my two groupmates and I completed writing an entire unit plan which included 20 lessons, at least one material from each day, and hours of stress. This is my reflection on the experience.
Oh to be at the end of this unit plan. This unit plan was a hulking behemoth which seemed to be an incomprehensibly enormous body of work. It turned out to be just that. I had glanced at a few teachers’ unit plans well putting this together and always walked away astounded by the breadth and thoroughness these teachers accomplished, or planned to accomplish, in their unit. Looking back at the 149 page document which is the beast of a lesson plan I helped to create, I am shocked and humbled by the breadth and thoroughness my group members and I achieved with this unit plan.
I am a better teacher having taken part in this unit planning exercise. Even if I never teach this unit, which I hope is not the case, the ripples of this experience will still be trembling with me. I have written lessons and even lesson sequences, up to four consecutive corresponding days’ worth of lessons before, but they do not hold as much weight. So many little skills or necessary jobs have will be expected when I have to create a lesson plan for students instead of a grade. From a close reading of the guiding text to arguing with colleagues about which activity to use to filling in the proper assessments to measure exactly what I want them to test, this was been a long journey. I helped see an enormous task from beginning to end, for me, that means a great deal.
One of my weaknesses (or as Mrs. Whatsit would probably point out, one of my strengths not properly directed) is my ability to take a large task, break it up into small workable portions, focus on a small chunk of work at a time, and drive towards the end goal. I have no shinning, wonderful story about how this activity completed me, how I am now a fully functioning and capable teacher. Far from it. My group mates Ms. Roth and Ms. Bradley were instrumental to my success on this project. We each brought different strengths to the project, they just seemed to bring more. Their attention to detail, undeterrable work habit, and intense exploration for ways to improve their product drove me to push my own work forward. I could not have done it, or even my part of it, without them. If we have to pin this down to something I gained from the experience of having worked on this project then I have this: I have learned the undeniable necessity of partners and collaborators. Even if a year from now when I will hypothetically and hopefully be employed as a teacher when I am writing a unit plan for my students, I would count myself lucky if I could argue with Ms. Roth about how students learn best, what activities would best engage their attention, what content would have the most impact. I would be lucky if Ms. Bradley and I tinkered with each other’s lessons pushing them to be the most thought out they possibly could be.
That is my main take away from the project. There are many more which are much more technical based. I have now practiced writing rubrics, scaffolding lessons and activities, and thinking of objectives which will push students to engage and put forth effort during a lesson. I had conceptions of these words and practices before the lesson plan, but I had never put them together before in such a rigorous collection. I will continue to revise these techniques as I progress as a teacher, however now I feel as if I have access to a warehouse of knowledge and skills, the next few years will make taking items off the shelves in that warehouse more expedient.
In terms of my knowledge in regards to the topic we geared our unit towards, I am much more invested in the idea of identity and self-exploration especially in the middle school years. This should be the focus and drive of education, to learn more about oneself. Research supports this is what adolescents are already preoccupied with and what helps them be successful academically. I want to drive that forward in my future teaching. I also want to use auxiliary means of meeting this goal. Using cross-content knowledge helped deepen my understanding of a Tesseract/hypercube and I may go on to explore more about it (and the years of Euclidian mathematics, Physics, and Geometry necessary to understand it). If I can do that for my urban students, many of whom need a venue to explore who they are and who they can become, they may not become English teachers or English Lit majors, but they may discover a bit more about themselves and come closer to comprehending their own identity.
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