Class 10 – Colonial America, Bias in Children’s Literature, Lesson Planning Practice

This week I enjoyed the opportunity to practice lesson planning and discuss lesson planning with peers. It is very valuable for me to have time to discuss with others how they approach their teacher-in-training lesson planning (Ex: how long does it take, where do they begin, which portions of the lesson plan do they struggle with the most, what are some “go-to” activities they like to use in their lesson plans, what types of formative assessments do they like to use). We didn’t have sufficient time to get to all of these questions during the class, but it was really nice to share ideas with one another. For me, I have trouble quickly rewriting an example lesson plan on the spot into the UR lesson plan format as though I was making it my own. For me, it would be helpful to be able to do this type of exercise as a homework assignment and then come back to class prepared to discuss my results in small groups. I liked the opportunity to work on the assessment project independently, and I would love to see how my results compared with others. I think this “make this lesson your own” activity could work very well in the same manner – if we each think about it individually and then come back together to discuss.

I am not sure that I communicated it very well in our last class, but what I was trying to say with my closing comment is that I think the reason that you don’t provide us with “ideal” lesson plans is that we need to figure out how to create a lesson plan on our own first and then compare what we have done to a model lesson plan. Although it would be great to have some sample lesson plans, I think that it wouldn’t fully teach us how to make the additional lesson plans that we need to create. For example, if we have a great sample lesson plan on the Civil Rights Movement, it is not going to help us to create a lesson for photosynthesis, for biomes, or even for another social studies topic because we will need to know a variety of ways to teach the material and assess students’ progress. It’s not just a copy and paste exercise. I really struggle with lesson planning and it takes me way longer than it should, but I do find value in the productive struggle, and I think this practice will help me once I need to write real lesson plans for my future teaching job. I would, however, love to hear helpful tips about how teachers learn to do this process more efficiently.

Finally, I enjoyed the review of children’s literature and the helpful resources that were shared. I think it will take practice to make sure that we are providing our students with materials that are free of bias, but I think I learned some great strategies that will be helpful as I begin to establish a classroom library.