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Meeting Standard Three ~ Planning

The student teacher’s lesson plans are carefully written and detailed, noting content and skills objectives, describing activities, and noting special learning and diversity needs where appropriate. Lessons exhibit clearly focused, sensible connections from one to the next, and are designed to promote construction of knowledge by students. The student teacher takes time to explain lesson objectives to students and, using a variety of strategies, checks that students are clear about what they are doing and why they are doing it.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
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DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

This summer was my first go-round with planning my own lessons and I think one word sums up my experiences and feelings with planning: time.  BSHS was only four weeks long, and two of those weeks had only three days of class.  My co-teacher and I didn’t have too much time to dive deeply into too much content, so we had to be very parsimonious about the breadth of topics, and more intentional and thoughtful about the depth of what we did bring into the classroom.  Before the summer started, we wanted to make sure we had a cohesive narrative of topics that made sense to us and that would also make sense to students.

 

Now, lesson planning for each day turned out to be a whole other beast, whose middle name again was time.  One of these such lessons is Artifact One.  Naturally, we over-planned, which I think is better than under-planning for each day.  But over the summer, I definitely got the hang of holding myself accountable to time, but also knowing when to give students more time.  Planning each lesson was a lesson in itself, because we also had to make sure that objectives were clear, achievable and met by the end of the lesson.  One of the examples of these objectives and how it was executed is Artifact Two.  One of my strengths being my ability to break down big ideas into more bite-sized thoughts, I really was able to flex the muscle of creating lessons that were clearly focused on making sure students got an idea through a variety of strategies this summer.  I think I started to hit my stride by the end of summer when I planned out the time for students to work on their final projects and gave them a checklist with the tasks required for each part of the project (Artifact Three).  Nevertheless, being realistic and honest about time was something I was working on throughout. 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.