UplanReflection

All in all, I truly believe that my UPLAN addresses the four components that we have highlighted in class: Scaffolding, Diversity, Alignment, and Relevance. I also believe that the conventions that I use within my unit plan are consistent and do justice in conveying the goal I want to achieve, although I did find this challenging at times. There was so much that I wanted to do with this unit, but I wanted it to remain in the same ‘color scheme’ as it had been. What I mean by that is I mostly did a pretty good job at keeping my instruction manageable, but for the activities that I got REALLY excited about, I felt that it was tempting to talk in a way that might go over the students’ heads. I was tempted to go into such detail with my words that it would probably have been painful to look at to someone who doesn’t love this book as much as I do. This challenged me to break down my activities and ideas into manageable tasks and segments. It was hard to draw the line between my knowledge as a college student and the way in which I should articulate that knowledge to high school students. It wasn’t always easy. However, I think that once I got in the swing of things and got better at keeping my ** ultimate goal in mind, **I began getting better at evaluating myself and the way I was going about my instruction. This realitzation arrived when reading my feedback. (One of the ideas I was going to touch on in my lesson was how culture and folklore are intertwined. Dr. Sherry pointed out that breaking that idea I down into more scaffolded segments would be beneficial. This was great advice. Now, when discussing topics that I personally get REALLY excited about, I keep in mind questions like, “Is this building off student’s prior knowledge and experiences from the last lesson?” “I’m not throwing too much at them, am I?” “Are my lesson topics going at a pace that is appropriate?”  I also found that creating a purpose at the start of each lesson REALLY helped me. In my purpose, I would explain why I was teaching this lesson, how it built off of the information from the previous lesson, and what I wanted students to gain from this lesson. It was very much like a rationale for the unit as a whole, but one that was used for each lesson. It helped me to stay on track, exercise alignment and be sure to diversify the topics I would be discussing. In terms of differentiating my instruction, I took some feedback from Dr. Sherry into consideration. The first few lessons don’t touch upon technology much at all. However, in later lessons (the second half of my unit plan) I incorporated technology by using dipity, a virtual timeline creation program. I also included a lesson in which students must move around (They chose a corner of the classroom that they feel best represents the survival of a character), be sure to give students the opportunity to reflect on their own lives, and work in groups to achieve a common goal. This engages students of multiple intelligences to be active in the learning process. I believe this is very important in thinking about differentiated instruction. The more diverse the activities, the more likely it is that all students are getting an equal chance at displaying their talents, resulting in an increase in motivation. One thing that I found very valuable in my feedback was avoiding questions that I would already have a predetermined answer to. Students are in our classroom to learn, to discover their own knowledge and potential, and to truly LEARN. One sign of actually learning to me is when I apply things without thinking about it, and realizing after. I want students to get to that point. I want them to have fed their brain a lot of valuable knowledge, but not think of it as something that is trying and full of struggle. For this reason, I want to be sure that my instruction and assessments are targeted to fostering student’s discovery---not ‘quizzing’ them. Overall, creating my unit plan was a very rewarding experience. I plan to use it someday, and take all that I learned and apply it.
 * Uplan Reflection **