Standard 7 Reflection
Planning instruction for the classroom is possibly one of the most important aspects of teaching. Especially in the first couple years of teaching when I am still learning, it is important to have detailed planning on order to make sure the lessons go as good as possible. Obviously there are going to be imperfections but planning everything out avoids many of those mistakes.
Along with daily lesson plans, I believe that making a year plan and unit plans is important as well because then you have long term goals as well as short term goals. Taking the time to do the year plan and unit plans helps the focus of each of the lesson plans. When I was doing my practicum at St. Peter High School, I wrote a unit plan for the mythology unit I was beginning. I experienced that it really helped me focus the unit I was writing for methods and I thought I would see how it worked in the classroom. I found that, because I was so organized and knew ahead of time what I was going to do each day, my lessons became easier to write and more student involved. I knew already that it was easy to write a lecture-based lecture because I know most of the information and it’s easy for me to tell that information to my students. I also knew that writing a student-focused lesson was a lot harder because it takes more time for students to figure out the information than it does for a teacher to tell it to them. When I then wrote the lesson plans for the mythology unit, I found that the things I wanted to get covered were going to take a lot longer than I thought. However, when I taught those lessons, my students retained the information a lot better than they would have if I would have lectured about it.
Now, after seeing the affects of student-focused lessons, I am striving to write all of my lessons as student-focused. Now, in my student teaching, I am planning on doing very little speaking during class and let my student discuss, present, and find the information for themselves. As shown in my second artifact, I am attempting to make my lessons and the literature we are reading connect to my students’ lives. It is crucial to do this because students will be able to see this connection and, ultimately, become more interested in the topic we are discussing.
The hardest part about all of this is incorporating standards, learning theory, and curriculum development in with the student development and student interest. I have so many ideas about how I could connect many pieces of literature to my students but I also know it’s more important to think about learning theory and curriculum development. Without these crucial pieces, the connections may not stick in the students’ minds or it may be just completely random lessons all thrown together. All of these things combined shows the importance of planning on for both the long and the short term.