Definition of "Planning Instruction"
A teacher must be able to plan and manage instruction based upon knowledge of subject matter, students, the community, and curriculum goals. Well-planned instruction that is aligned to the content standards and needs of the students is a teacher's most powerful tool to engage students, manage the classroom, and improve student learning. Instructional planning always starts with the goals: What content must be learned? What skills must be developed? What themes and concepts must students understand? Using these as a baseline, the best teachers will next identify areas of strength and weakness of incoming students, determine the interests of the class, and modify or develop new learning experiences that fit the needs of the group. In class each day, a well-prepared teacher has a tentative schedule and a set of alternative ideas that provide an opportunity to adapt in real time as needed.
Supporting Artifacts and Analysis
My instructional planning has a huge up-front focus on the learning objectives students will need to achieve. The artifacts below show how I designed a Statistics course starting with both content and "soft skills" objectives, how I designed a modularized Algebra 2 unit infused with reflection, and how I built in literacy instruction into many areas of my math courses.
Building a (Statistics) Course:
I re-designed this course based on its role in the curriculum -- engaging juniors and seniors in an elective math class that prepares them for college. Building on my coach's goals, I decided to create a book-less curriculum for the class. I used the core of the AP curriculum to drive much of the content, but then re-ordered the content to fit into coherent projects that would increase student engagement and teach the real-world use of statistical ideas. Breaking from the textbook opened many opportunities to re-shape the course: I could reset the pacing of a topic to go through faster or explore it more deeply, I could focus more on conceptual understanding than procedures, and I could now control the ordering of topics to teach a relevant problem or project in each unit. Course design, especially when breaking away from a textbook, is an enormous undertaking. However, my background in design and engineering prepares me very well to take on major instructional planning, and given one area to focus on during my Spring 2012 semester, I decided that this project was the best fit. I have learned a great deal about what works -- clear and focused lessons, short direct instruction, and time to practice skills in the context of engaging projects. In the process of building the curriculum, I have also revisited the goals of the course to better clarify what I am trying to build and how I will know I am succeeding. This artifact details the process I went through and how I made my design decisions throughout.
Algebra 2 Online Exponential/Logarithm Unit:
This is a unit I created with backward design principles. From the start, the goal of this re-designed unit was to improve student achievement on the department's Accelerated Algebra 2 / Trig common assessment on exponentials and logarithms. I found the organization of topics in this unit, a remnant of the old textbook, to be confusing. I broke down the material into smaller, focused modules where students would watch a video, complete the guided notes, and practice a few problems of each type that they would be expected to know by the test. I also built in space for students to do their own real-time reflection, measuring their own progress on homework, verifying how they did on quizzes, and looking back on their study patterns after the test.
When I built the new sections, I used historical data to identify problems that students were likely to struggle with so I could provide additional examples or more detailed explanations in my videos. The best part about the design of the new unit was the ease of improving it in future iterations. After gathering feedback from students about the different sections and looking over quiz and test results, I was able to identify a handful of sections that needed to be redone. When re-teaching the course, I am able to go back and focus my attention on these specific areas to quickly improve the overall unit. Follow the link to this artifact to see examples of the videos, notes packet, and planned revisions for the Spring 2012 course.
Whenever a math teacher tries to bring literacy into a lesson, the common response from students is "we can't write in math class!" Nonetheless, the ability to read, write, and present on technical information is a critical 21st century skill. In my Algebra 2 and Statistics classes, students are expected to memorize lists of vocabulary words relevant to the topic we're learning. Vocabulary is important to teach explicitly because many students fail to pick it up in the context of an already challenging lesson. To help students memorize vocabulary words, I created videos and guided notes for some units that walk through the definitions more visually. In Statistics, I created an assignment to compliment a project my coach created on "An Inconvienent Truth" -- we discussed the ways that data and narrative was presented in the film, and then I created a counter-argument article that students analysed using THIEVES, a pre-reading exercise to examine the purpose and bias in the article before reading. I also asked my stats students to write a technical paper. I provided an example paper and gave them daily feedback on their progress (which I had live access to using Google Docs). I believe that it is important as a math teacher to build literacy in many forms into the instructional design of my courses so that students are prepared to critically read and communicate technical information.
Synthesis
The curriculum is one of the key components that drives the content, the instructional methodology, student engagement, and classroom management. As a designer by training, I want to build a curriculum that motivates students to explore the many powerful applications of math in their world. In the thick of learning hard concepts and skills, I want students to understand the big picture of what they are doing and why it matters. I also want students to feel that they are making progress as they work through each lesson and complete each unit. Instructional design always begins with clear learning objectives, both in content and "soft skills," and how these objectives will be assessed. From there, it is up to the teacher to design a set of engaging experiences, including projects, homework assignments, discussions, games, and more, that best help students reach these goals. Finally, the best teachers improve on their instructional design semester-to-semester by analyzing past data from projects, surveys, and tests to help even more students from the next group to reach proficiency on the learning objectives.