The competent teacher plans and designs instruction based on content area knowledge, diverse student characteristics, student performance data, curriculum goals, and the community context. The teacher plans for ongoing student growth and achievement.
Artifact 1
For my EDUC335 course, we were tasked with creating a Curriculum Integrated Unit Plan consisting of at least 5 lesson plans all centering around the same general topic. We were also tasked with creating a letter to parents, a letter to students, a calendar showing what lesson would be taught and when, as well as a brief summary of how the same topic could be taught in other disciplines. The topic I chose was civics and ethics. Another challenge of this assignment was to center our lesson plans around student voice, giving students the opportunity to offer their thoughts and opinions and let that shape the lessons.
This assignment was difficult in part because I had never done anything like this before; this was my first interaction with Curriculum Integrated Unit Plans. I had to think of how other disciplines could interact with the topic and in turn how a Social Studies class could interact with other disciplines.
Standard 3B states that the competent teacher "understands how to develop short- and long-range plans, including transition plans, consistent with curriculum goals, student diversity, and learning theory." While I only needed to create 5 lesson plans, I had to determine how best to schedule them, what topic/lesson they should occur before, and what topic/lesson they should occur after.
Artifact 2
As a student teacher, I was required to create tests as well as modify the tests for IEP students. The tests linked here are the original test and the modified test that I gave to my students. Students with IEPs also had the test read to them in a small group. Originally, we (my cooperating teacher and I) modified the test to be 16 multiple choice questions for a point each, but after talking with some of the special education teachers, we agreed that this might be too much for 6th graders with an IEP, so we shortened it to 8 questions for 2 points each.
The challenge here was determining what information students needed to know most and what information could be cut from the modified test. This also required that some short answer questions be turned into multiple-choice questions, which presented another challenge. It took us a few days to finally settle on the modified test.
Standard 3A states that the competent teacher "understands the Illinois Learning Standards (23 Ill. Adm. Code 1. Appendix D), curriculum development process, content, learning theory, assessment, and student development and knows how to incorporate this knowledge in planning differentiated instruction." Thanks to my cooperating teacher, I know how to modify a test for students who require a modified test.