Unit plan reflection
Upon reflecting on my growth as a teacher, it is clear that TAL 541 has been a significant factor. This semester has been very informative. I have been able to use a multitude of the strategies and best practices learned in my daily instruction. Not only is my planning more purposeful, my lessons are more student centered, and my students are more engaged. Creating a unit plan and receiving literature to support me in doing so, as well as the immediate feedback was what really helped me grow.
Early in the semester we began the task of backwards planning a unit. While this is a concept I am familiar with through my affiliation with TFA, this course helped me understand how to effectively backwards plan. Teaching in a failing school for the past three years has stifled my creativity as a teacher. My teacher training program through Teach For America consisted of backwards planning from the statewide assessment, the FCAT. We were taught to be standards based. Everything we did aligned to the standards, so I spent a lot of time teaching kids the benchmarks in isolation. For the most part, I used very simple FCAT like passages that were not very rigorous or interesting. My students were very disengaged, and when I did try to implement rigorous passages and spark creative thinking, I was not sure how to scaffold my students to that point. There was a lot of trial and error, with no real feedback. This changed after reading Peter Smagorinsky's Teaching English Through Principled Practice. Through Smagorinsky's book I was able to learn about backwards planning a theme for the year, as well as for each unit. I learned the culminating assessment can be a wide variety of activities as opposed to a multiple choice test with a few short answer responses. I chose a portfolio assessment for my unit on "Black Boy". This would allow my students the freedom to choose the work they were most proud of at the end of the unit and be able to display it. This also pushed me to be creative in choosing my activities each week. I wanted to give my students a plethora of assignments to choose from. Professor Perez was also instrumental in providing feedback and suggestions that helped shape my vision.
After creating the culminating assessment I began lesson planning. I used Warner and Lovell's book, Teaching Writing Grades 7-12, and Smagorinsky's Teaching English Through Principled Practice to find student centered activities to incorporate in to my lessons. One strategy that worked well for my students was the response logs, also known as double journal entries.These entries were used as a response to the novel my students were reading. At the end of each selection of text, students could choose how they wanted to respond to the text. They always had to write a summary, but the second part could be an analysis of mood, tone, or the students could create questions that would be shared in class. Upon completing the response logs, students would share their response with their group members, generating student led discussions around the text. This is just one of the strategies I incorporated. I really enjoyed learning new ways to unit plan and engage my students.
Another thing that was extremely beneficial was the group lesson plan incorporating elements of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This was used to help students improve their comprehension of text as well as their writing. In learning about Systemic Functional Linguistics, it became extremely clear why my students are struggling to comprehend grade level text. The text is very complex, meaning the sentences are lengthier, embedding multiple clauses, and descriptions, making it harder for students to comprehend. The sentences no longer just contain an easily identifiable subject and predicate in which students are use to. I never really knew how to aid students in comprehending the text until we learned more about SFL. Previously, I was providing a lot of background knowledge and leading children to my understanding of the text. SFL is a tool to aid students in breaking down the text in to meaningful chunks of information. Additionally, analyzing the breakdown in text and the language features of each genre can help transform their writing, by giving them tools to add more details. While we just scratched the surface with SFL, I hope to learn more over the summer so I can begin implementing it with fidelity next year.
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