Planning

My planning strategies and lesson plan techniques gradually transformed as I progressed further into my student teaching timeline. I utilized Tomlinson and McTighe's (2006) Understanding by Design lesson plan template throughout my student teaching to ensure that I was always creating lessons and activities that addressed essential questions and prioritized student learning goals. Using the Ubd template, I created lesson plans for each week prior to the start of classes on Monday. In each lesson plan, I established essential questions -- both for the current unit and for each week specifically -- and student objectives for the week. In each of my weekly plans, I created a schedule and layout for each day's class. These outlines helped me organize assignments and tasks for the week and ensured that each class was appropriately working towards meeting each week's goals. Because the classes I was teaching were project-based and valued the role of project management and process, it was essential that I planned each class with the intention of making progress in both our desired skills and our project work.

Prior to my student-teaching, I knew that lesson plans were essential foundations to teaching classes, but my teaching this year has taught me that effective and flexible lesson planning is a skill that is strengthened through practice and implementation. Because my placement school did not have any requirements for lesson plans, I had the opportunity to experiment with format and organization. As I created lesson plans and discussed with my cooperating teacher and supervisor, I learned what was most effective in planning. I also developed a greater comfort in balancing preparation and improvisation. Lessons and assignments did not always go as planned; sometimes, a discussion question I thought would engage students would actually lead to a short conversation. Sometimes, an assignment I thought was straightforward and clear would cause more confusion than learning. I learned that is okay, and even necessary, to make small changes in order to keep students engaged and ensure that they are successfully meeting the goals for the week. Once I grew more comfortable with that balance, my teaching and planning improved.

The lesson plan provided above is one that led to a particularly challenging yet successful week of classes. In the final month of my student teaching, I began a unit based on Thanhha Lai's poetry novel Inside Out and Back Again. This weekly plan took place during our second week with the novel. At the start of this week, students were introduced to the concept and purpose of critical literary lenses in literary analysis. I introduced the students first to the Marxist theory, given that the novel takes place during the Vietnam war and follows a young girl and her family who leave Vietnam to escape the threat of Communism. Students were asked to annotate a summary of the theory then use the lens to read and analyze a selection of poems. At the end of the week, students wrote analytical summaries answering the question: "Where do characters get their power from in this poem? Is it power from their community, their family, their resources/money, their political power? Somewhere else?" In planning the progression from annotating to understand, annotating to apply, and finally writing to analyze, I guided students towards self-directed learning in which they could learn from and with one another.

Prior to teaching these lessons, I was worried that the work may be too overwhelming and the objectives too abstract for students to meet. However, after mapping out the week and articulating the essential questions and objectives in writing, I felt more confident that I could lead this collaborative learning process. Of course, everything did not go exactly as planned: specifically the timing and pacing of our class discussions and group work time. However, by the end of the week, students and I were able to reflect on what we had all learned throughout the week, and the class data showed that students had internalized and applied critical lenses to their reading and writing. I utilized the parts that did not go as planned to adjust for the next few weeks, as they had a similar outline but different critical lens in focus. Ultimately, I learned how to learn from my lesson plans in order to strengthen my planning and teaching and grew more comfortable in my pedagogical practices.