Breaking News! - Unit Continues to Develop!!!

For this week, I had to do a little bit of backtracking on my unit development. I have “completed” several of my pieces for the unit (the final project, the assessment plan, the annotated bibliography, the map, objectives, and my description), but needed to go back and edit them to make adjustments and revisions. This proved to take more time than I originally thought, since I kept trying to add more to each piece. I think the effort was worth it in the long run, since I found (what I consider to be) a few key flaws in part of the planning. The other major revision I have been working on (and am still in the process of) has been to my teacher’s journal. I had a lot of in-text notes and comments in nearly a dozen of my texts that I need to enter into my teacher’s journal to meet the criteria for the piece. I feel like this portion of the unit development process is the one I am struggling with the most. The double-entry style journal is not something that I like to use when I take notes for other classes, and the extensive amount of notes that we are being required to make has been a painstaking process. I feel as if this is a bit much on the side of reflectiveness. Not that I do not see the value of the note taking and reflection processes, but I think this effort is exhaustive for me as a student. Just a thought.

 Along with my revisions, I am working on my lesson plans and my methods overview. These pieces seem much more manageable to me, but I am going to be working very hard on trying to integrate different strategies and techniques into my plans to reflect my depth of knowledge in these categories. I am going to be expected to mix it up strategically when I begin my student teaching (maybe not as much right away, but definitely as the semester goes on) and I hope that by challenging myself in this exercise, it will benefit me and my students in my student teaching. I am relying on my notes, handouts, and methods texts to help generate appropriate and obtainable exercises for my particular students. I’m glad I saved so much of my materials and texts from other classes so that I can always go back to them for instructional purposes and to generate ideas.

My methods overview is the one thing I am yet to start. I think once I am done using sources to find additional strategies and ideas, then I will write about all the methods and the texts that influenced them from my lesson plans and unit. That’s all I have for now, good luck everyone and have a wonderful break!