Lesson Planning

Today was extremely exhausting and I wasn't even in the classroom! The entire day was spent working on creating the lesson plan and stations and activities for the lesson Emily and I will teach next week. All day was spent working on putting together the activities for the students to do at each station, for example listening to audio, watching news clips, reading news articles, and looking at pictures and newspaper headlines, and writing up questions for the students to answer at each station. It has been a lot of fun planning it all out, but it is also a lot of work.

For about an hour and half the other student teachers and I had a seminar with my co-op teacher, Ken, to work on lesson plans and backwards design. The strategy of backwards design is the idea of starting off your planning for a unit or lesson at the end- with your assessment or a question that you want the students to be able to answer at the end, and working backwards. He gave us a worksheet where we had to pick any topic to teach 7 lessons on. After coming up with a topic and title we had to write an essential question, an assessment, and a breakdown of the 7 lessons. I made a mini course called "Your Own Utopia" where students learned about what a Utopian society is, what makes a successful society, and then they had to make their own societies in groups with all the different aspects of a real one. As the assessment at the end of the class the societies (groups) would have to interact with each other realistically, dealing with conflicts, economy, culture, religious beliefs, etc. The essential question would be: Can there truly ever be a perfect, Utopian society? This was really difficult because there were no restrictions- we literally could do anything (Emily did her lesson on Tie-Dye, while Victoria did hers on cupcakes!) which is a lot like the IB curriculum. However, at the same time its very liberating to have no standards, no expectations; we can teach whatever we want. Ken explained that rather than history class being a mixture of boring facts and dates with some fun activities and stories- its only the fun and interesting part. Rather than teaching to a test, you can teach to student's interests and the important things in history.

It has been a really interesting day and the work Ive done has really helped me in understanding different strategies and skills that I will use in my own classroom.

On a fun, side note- we just booked our hotel for Paris!!!! We will be going next weekend and Im so excited!