Revelations

Hey all, it's awesome to hear about your successes (or lack thereof) in this unit process and resources that you're finding! I wanted to share some revelations that I've been having throughout this process.

#1: It's crazy to think back on awesome units that we've experienced as high school students. Imagine how much work and planning went into those units! Kudos to those awesome teachers.

#2: I realized that, sure, we can come up with a conceptual framework and think of other factors or topics that fall under that framework, but most of my ideas are coming from me reading the texts I've picked out for my unit. I'm reading the young adult novel I picked, Vivian Siobhan's "The List," and I'm finding certain themes that fit great into my unit. It seems very obvious, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that the texts are informing my unit and it's conceptual framework, not the other way around. I had to take a leap of faith and hope that the texts I picked for my unit are good representations of Identity, and I'm finding that I'm happy with what I've picked because reading them brings up more topics that I never thought of exploring.

#3: Our personalities and the kinds of teachers we see ourselves as informs the activities we choose to do in our classrooms. This is another obvious point but it is becoming more real and clear to me as I construct this unit. I find myself leaning towards discussion, self reflection, and visual/artistic representations of learning. It will be interesting to see how this will manifest in my unit.

#4: TIME and COMMUNICATION are key to this planning process, at least for me. I needed time, especially, to pick out my texts, and this was because of my fear of commitment. Once the texts were picked, it was a matter of figuring out where they fell in the crazy messy spectrum of my unit map. After that, reading the texts from the perspective of yourself as the teacher and as your students leads to identifying themes/ideas that could lead into a number of activities. It is all very time consuming, and I didn't really get a grasp of this until recently. I thought, I can think of a concept, find books that represent that concept, come up with some fun activities to really drive it home, and BAM, there's a unit for you. Little did I know...
What I mean by communication is key to this planning process is that literally, talking out my ideas with someone, anyone, really helped me see the ups and downs to my ideas. I also got some great ideas from the people I talked to. It's just very therapeutic in a sense to lay out what you have in front of someone and let them put it in a different light for you.

I am in the process of creating a syllabus that maps out the logistics of reading, activities, and assessments.

Until next time,

-Ramina Odicho