First Unit Plan... Check!

As part of our teacher preparation we have to make sure we can effectively create lesson and unit plans. Planning ahead of time is the recipe for success - the more you plan, the less you have to worry about! Over the last few weeks I developed my very first unit plan. Although it has not yet been reviewed by professors (or my cooperating teacher!) my peers made the time to read it over and give feedback. Their comments and review of my own unit plan a week after finishing it has given me some insight to my planning process.

During the process I learned just how difficult unit planning is. In my head I was thinking: Oh it's just a basic skeleton of about 2-3 weeks, how hard can that be?!" Well, I was in for a surprise! The process of preparing it took me longer than I expected and I realized how important that "skeleton" of a unit plan is. Without proper thought into that unit plan, the lessons will fall apart. Preparing a unit plan requires careful consideration of the lessons you will be delivering during those class sessions to write the materials and objectives. I'll admit I didn't delegate enough time for myself to prepare my lesson plan and was not completely satisfied with it. It is only my first one though and I think I at least have a good starting point (and my peer reviewers agreed: good start but room for improvement).

While looking over my feedback I quickly realized there were some simple things I could fix like organization, adding tables, or adding more standards. I, personally, like the layout and organization of my plan so I haven't changed that, but that doesn't mean my peers didn't provide helpful feedback! Their feedback has caused me to provide my more standards that are evidenced throughout the unit and add more goals for the unit. With only two goals I could see how that was definitely a weak point: with 3 weeks of classes I am able to come up with more than two goals to work toward.

My biggest change for my updated unit plan (thanks to my peer reviewers and my own reflection after the process) is the objectives. I wrote the unit plan prior to too much research into proper objective writing. We have learned that an objective must contain a performance, condition, and criterion and I realized that many of the objectives in my original unit plan were lacking one or even two (Yikes!) of the required parts. I also need to put more thought into how accommodations and adaptations will be used throughout the unit to assist all students in the learning process.

This process was eye-opening and has really helped me understand my strong and weak points while unit planning. Shout out to my wonderful peers, Samantha Sessamen and Mason Tate, for giving me honest and constructive feedback on my unit, thank you!!