Standard 2: Content Area and Pedagogical Knowledge

Standard 2 - Content Area and Pedagogical Knowledge – The competent teacher has in-depth understanding of content area knowledge that includes central concepts, methods of inquiry, structures of the disciplines, and content area literacy. The teacher creates meaningful learning experiences for each student based upon interactions among content area and pedagogical knowledge, and evidence-based practice.

Rationale

This artifact is my first attempt at planning out a lesson unit. It contains a unit introduction, the standards covered in the lessons, the learning outcomes of the unit, a few lesson plans for the unit, a 10 day overview of the unit, two videos outlining activities in the unit, the safety contract of my future classroom, a safety poster for my future classroom, a unit assessment exam, and explanations of two videos used in the lessons. It was produced in May of 2020 for my Middle School Science Methods class at Trinity Christian College.

This artifact is a massive 32 page document, and that is for good reason. This document shows how I meet six main IPTS knowledge and performance indicators. More knowledge and performance indicators would be met in a classroom setting, but without being in a classroom, this document meets as many as possible. These knowledge and performance indicators are:

1. My understanding of major concepts, assumptions, debates, principles, and theories that are central to the discipline (2B)

2. My ability to access and use tools/knowledge related to most recent findings (2F)

3. My understanding of the theory behind introducing new topics for the first time while promoting good learning (2G)

4. My ability to exploit the various kinds of learning to my students benefit (2C)

5. My ability to adjust my lessons to meet the needs of my students (2P)

6. My ability to facilitate learning experiences which relate to aspects of other content areas and the personal lives of my students (2N)

Creating this unit plan has taught me more things than I could have imagined. The biggest thing that I learned in this artifact is how to manage my classroom scheduling. This is a much greater task than I believed it to be before I started this artifact. Making sure that there is enough time to go over each concept is something that I believe needs to be done in the moment of teaching. The best way I believe to do this is to constantly ask students formative questions to figure out if another day needs to be spent on a topic or not. Having a rough outline can help a teacher plan around these types of scenarios accordingly.