02. Planning and Designing
Candidate designs instructional plans that incorporate knowledge of students’ developmental levels, interests, abilities, and learning accomplishments consistent with content goals and district standards.
I love designing lessons and curriculum, it is one of my favorite things to do in education. I feel that a well-planned lesson is crucial to better classroom management and student motivation in the classroom. I have taken the information that I learned from Texas Tech, Pacific, and SIOP to discover a lesson plan format that I use to create a well-rounded lesson. My lesson plan template lesson-plan-template1
I start with a scope and sequence of the year. This year the 7th grade math team created a new scope and sequence that will take affect during the 2007-2008 school year. This new scope and sequence has all of the components of the 7th grade standards as well as creates a continuous flow of content from 6th through 8th grades. Power Standards
Next I look at the day-to-day activities. I have the basic concepts that I teach on this Excel Spreadsheet. I start every new unit with a pretest. This pretest is short ‘test’ that allows the student to show me what they already know about the topics that we are going to go over. I take this information and I determine the level of the students in my classroom. After I figure out the level(s) of the students in the classroom I can then go over my unit to ensure that I have the activities, homework, class work, and so on that match the level(s) determined. This sounds like a lot of work but it really does not take long to make the generalizations needed to complete this task. There are times that the work is to advanced or not advanced enough so I make changes to the lessons as needed. Pretest unit 4 Posttest unit 5
As I stated in the classroom climate section of this portfolio, I ask an attendance question while I am taking role. By doing this I am able to get to know what my students interests are and apply them to the lessons. I have the standard skateboarding, horses, sports and anything agriculture so I just include these topics as much as possible. Getting to know the students is a key if you want them to actually enjoy class time.
