Module 3: Lesson Planning & Curricular Development

For this concept map, I referred to the readings focused on the process of learning, assessment, and integration of technologies in the classroom. 

For thinking about the process of learning, I considered a few methods that allow students to absorb, retain, and recall information from a lesson. At the start of most of my classes, I have students complete a launch as a warm up for the lesson ahead, recalling a topic they learned in the past. It is my belief that students retain more information during a lesson when they are able to say it aloud. This could look like responding to a whole class discussion or collaborating with a group or partner to come up with responses.

For assessing student understanding, I was thinking about timely formative assessments as well as overall summative assessments. For summative assessments, I mainly focus on understanding as opposed to grading to clear up student misconceptions with the topic of the day.  Grading takes time, so less grading means I can spend more of my energy and time on my student's growth instead. I would love to give out more types of exit tickets as well.  At this point, I have only been giving out questions on paper, but after working on this activity, I can see the appeal of visual-style formative assessments or even online exit tickets. As for summative assessments I allow my students a cheat sheet, but it may be interesting to integrate the use of technology and include deeper, more critical questions on unit and final exams. 

For the technology portion, I was reflecting on its function in education. In the classroom, students should be building up these technology literacy skills for the modern world. They can practice with independent work, collaborative work with peers, and whole class work. This way, students should be able to see how their own thoughts, work, and opinions connect and compare to those produced by others in their class, much akin to how discussions work in higher education as well as the broader world. I would also love to use it more to connect with my students outside of classes, to help them apply for extracurriculars and keep up with how they are doing.

I also used this framework to include a topic dedicated to accommodations, as that makes a huge difference for understanding, and by extension motivation in my class. Besides the more general ideas about making content more accessible and chunked, I also considered how technology can make learning easier. This may look like allowing students to search topics up to learn on their own or providing additional content and resources to build on what we learned in class.

During this ideation process, the toughest portion was deciding which were the "big topics" for this concept map. I threw a bunch of ideas onto the table and found that certain were related or fell under other topics already. That process of putting out all my ideas felt like finding the materials before constructing a framework. I found that helpful as all I had to do was rearrange some of the components to fit a rational design. At the end of this activity, I feel that a concept map assessment could be incredibly useful for chemistry, as students may not fully realize how interconnected all the topics and terms we learn in class truly are.