P1 – Practice intentional inquiry and planning for instruction
Throughout EDU 6150, program standard P1 was highly prevalent. The standard revolves most around the idea of unit and lesson planning and using a variety of tools to create engaging and standard-aligned lessons. We investigated various aspects of effective unit and lesson planning as well as ways to provide accommodations for all students within our lessons.
The assignment that resonated with me the most and gave me a comprehensive look at what we were learning was the mid-quarter lesson plan assignment. I have attached my lesson below. Prior to writing the lesson, I felt overwhelmed at the idea of writing and teaching lesson plans. While teaching my lesson, I gained more confidence in my writing and delivering capabilities. This eased my nerves about writing future lessons as I was able to successfully implement the ideas of pre-assessment, inquiry based learning, informal assessment and incorporating student voice to steer future planning and instruction.
By increasing my experience in lesson planning, I will be able to write and teach effective and interesting lessons to my students as well as be able to conduct assessments for myself in order to gauge how well my lesson worked and how engaging it was for them. Working directly with math standards and creating my own learning targets was a fun way to apply the things we had learned in class so far. The application of learning assignments is the most effective for me, as I am sure they will be for my future students as well.
One aspect of planning that I struggled with was using student voice to assess student learning. After discussion with classmates though, I found new ways to incorporate this skill into my planning such as using exit tickets as a survey as well as to allow more practice of the material. With future lesson plans, I will also be more aware of addressing the importance of each learning target. An easy way to do this would be to include “real world” math problems that pertain to that day’s learning target. I can prepare problems ahead of time as well as have students come up with their own scenarios that we can solve.
Overall, this course was effective and highly applicable for what we will be doing during student teaching and our entire careers.
Online Teaching Portfolio 