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.

Planning is something I think that will always bring me joy while simultaneously frustrating me.  It gives me an opportunity to be operationalize my creativity and my knowledge of students as learners.  I often get overwhelmed with excitement thinking about ideas for lesson, but these lessons often take on numerous iterations and formulations before they reach students.  Backwards planning has honestly been a godsend in terms of getting me to think about planning in a way that keeps me sane.  During my academic semester I had the opportunity to create two different unit plans based on academic coursework.  Thus, I was able to apply my experience of working with unit plans to co-construct a unit plan for my student teaching semester around slavery with the guidance of my mentor teacher (Artifact One).  The structure of the unit plan brings an overwhelming amount of simplicity and ease to daily lesson planning, especially because it outlines the skills I want students to be practicing, the knowledge I want students to gain and the assessment measures I want to implement to measure these.  The biggest challenge of creating daily lesson plans is thinking about individual students.  I’ve learned that being prepared for a lesson also means knowing who I’m going to cold call and support to get to an answer as well as who I’m going to call on to give an exemplary answer.  It also means knowing which student groupings are going to be most productive.  I practiced thinking about these matters daily and I provide a sample lesson plan that displays how I’ve organized lessons around these matters (Artifact Two). 

A huge place where I’ve both grown and shone, is around giving instructions.  Early in my teaching career I would fall into the habit of giving too many instructions, not checking for understanding and then wondering why students were confused around expectations.  I’ve gotten immensely better at giving verbal instructions that are clear and simple and giving students the opportunity to show me they understand or ask questions.  My written instructions have also become a lot more succinct, specific and thorough (although I often have to remind students to read them over again). I provide the instructions I gave for presentations on life on slave plantations.