Standard 3: Planning for Differentiated Instruction

This artifact is a lesson I taught during my first placement of student teaching at the middle-school level. As part of the district-wide curricculum plan, a geography unit was planned to be implemented first. My cooperating teacher and I taught each of the five themes of Geography. This lesson is on Location, and involves finding latitude and longitude.

This lesson meets Indicator 3A, which states that the competent teacher "understands the Illinois Learning Standards ... curriculum development process, content, learning theory, assessment, and student development and knows how to incorporate this knowledge in planning differentiated instruction." I was teaching this geography according to the Illinois State Social Science standards, particulary those of geography and the skills associated with the discipline. This required me to shape my lesson around making sure the listed standards were met.

This was a lesson that was taught early in my placement, so there was a lot to be learned here. Most importantly, it taught me about the need to make sure my directions are clear. There was initally confusion about the activity towards the end of the class, where the students switch papers with one another. However, the more periods of this class I taught, the easier it was to explain and anticipate questions.

This artifact is a unit on the American Civil War that I created for my High School

History Methods course. I timed it for 3 weeks of 5 days each, and included the activities I wanted to do, concepts covered, and primary and secondary sources to be used. Finally, I also created an assessment for the end of the unit.

The unit meets Indicator 3B, which 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." With this assignment, I did my best to plan every daily lesson with differentiated methods of instruction and different types of assessment. I also made sure to adhere to the Illinois State Learning Standards that I had set out to meet, and provide goals for the unit.

I learned a lot from this assignment. It was the first in-depth unit plan I had done. It was great practice in creating a targeted, deliberate long-term plan for a hefty historical topic like the Civil War. In the future, I plan to use this template with large units.