Hi everyone! It has been a busy, yet rewarding first three and a half weeks of classes, but it feels so nice to finally be into the "groove" of what classes happen when and what is expect of me on a weekly basis. As we have been working through these first few weeks, we have also been working through our first large assignment. This assignment was for AEE412: Methods of Teaching Agriculture and was titled "Model Unit Plan". For this assignment, we were tasked with writing one unit plan and submitting it for two rounds of peer review. I decided to write a unit plan titled "Exploring the Poultry Industry and Local Production Processes", which I will be teaching at Biglerville this spring during my student teaching experience. I chose to write this unit plan because it is a topic that I am somewhat comfortable teaching as far as content, but I felt as though there was still plenty of room for growth.
As I started unit planning, I found it to be a little overwhelming. I like things to be very organized and I found it challenging to create a unit plan format that was easy to navigate and functional, while still containing the 14 essential elements of a unit plan that are required from Penn State. After spending a decent amount of time constructing a unit plan format, this is what my final product looked like:
I think one of my biggest obstacles to overcome while unit planning was embracing the concept of Backwards Design, also know as, "beginning with the end in mind", or Understanding by Design. This approach tasks educators with first setting learning goals, then considering the assessment of learning, then developing the content that will be taught.
This was difficult for me in practice because it seemed, well, backwards. However, now that I have gone through this process, and have created lesson plans based off of this same theory, it leaves me feeling more confident that my students will be reaching the goals I am creating.
Another obstacle I faced was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of resources that are available for each content area I will be teaching. (Although, this is definitely not a bad problem to have!) It was very difficult to 'weed' through all of these resources and decide what was important for me to consider in my unit. Lucky for me, backwards design does help lead this process as I already know what I want my students to gain from the unit!
I am very glad that I had the opportunity to receive peer review on a unit plan so early in the semester. I think my biggest take away from my unit plan is that I really need to work towards making strong unit and lesson objectives. I think this is where the backwards design makes unit and lesson planning difficult for me. As we learned at AEE bootcamp, objectives need to be measurable, however, I find it difficult to create measurable objectives when I am not year positive what specific content I will be teaching.
As I move throughout the rest of the semester, I am excited to further explore backwards design and work on strengthening my ability to create learning objective. I also appreciate any resources or advice that anyone reading this post may have.
3 (and a half) weeks down, 12 more to go!
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