Planning in teaching is KEY

If you are like me, planning may not come easy to you. I used to struggle with thinking ahead, making sure everything is ready, and sometimes as bad as this sounds, I used to just “wing it” when it came to planning for anything. But boy has that changed since I have been a senior this year preparing for my student teaching in the spring. I have had to prepare and make sure that all of the little details are ready so that when I go into student teaching I can make the classroom the best it can be for me, but more importantly, my students!

So how did my first unit plan go? I will be listing out some “Gems” for the great things in my lesson and then some “Opps” for some opportunities that I want to focus on for the next time I create the unit plan!

Class: Small Animal Science

Year: 10^th Grade

Unit: Small Animals as Pets

Unit Length: January 25^th through February 4^th (10 classes each 103 minutes)

Unit Goals:

1) Students will plan and execute a budget plan and resources list for people interested on owning animals

2) Students will identify skills and procedures to own a service animal

3) Students will identify the importance of organized committee work with others

Gems:

-         I FINALLY found a font and style that I liked for my unit plans that is easy for         me to follow and teach from.

-         I created interesting lessons for my students that each grab their attention           different ways and will hopefully spark interest in all of my students

-         I created lesson objectives that can help guide my discussion in the classroom

Opps:

-         Finding more standards to fit into my unit plan

-         Creating a more unique unit rationale defining why this unit is important!

-         Rewording some of my objectives to fit the standards here at Penn State

Where do I go from here? That is easy!

I want to focus on making my lesson plans unique and interesting to make sure that my students are able to focus on the lesson. By doing that, I hope to keep all of my students wanting more in the classroom! That is not all though! I want to get more peer checks to make sure that I am getting more peer feedback for each of my units and even some of my lessons because they may be able to point out things that I can’t see.

Overall, this exercise of creating unit plans helped me look back over the small details and push myself as a teacher to make those lessons clear and understandable for all parties! I am also so grateful that I have a cohort that is willing to help me improve myself and my lessons!