So, you would think, based on my very idealistic, very powerfully stated, very passionate and certain-sounding proclamations about why English class is important, that I'd be a really excellent lesson and unit planner. Not so. I'm actually very bad at it. In fact, I feel pretty stupid for the first time in a very, very long time.
This Tuesday, I was in one of my University of Pittsburgh classes, and we were planning our lessons and coming up with unit foci for Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust. Now, this was challenging enough for me since I wasn't crazy about the book. But more so because I still don't get this backward planning thing. If you're not an education student, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. But conceptually focused units that focus around an inquiry-based question like "What counts as American Lit? What does it mean to be American? How does Pain lead to Growth?" or something like that--these are pretty weak examples, but I'm thinking on my feet here! Anyways, I totally understand the theory--you teach with end goals in mind. You know from the beginning generally what you want to accomplish and how you're going to determine whether you've accomplished it or not (summative assessment), and the lesson plans map out how you get there. Each lesson should have learning goals and a way to measure if students have met them, and the activities should facilitate their successful completion of the formative assessment, which should prepare them for the summative assessment, which should measure the depth of their inquiry into the unit's focus question. It all sounds fairly simple and straitforward. Really, it almost seems like common sense, right? Wrong.
Where does grammar fit into that? I know you could have a unit on literacy, something like "How can using language in different ways work differently," and you could talk about audience and grammar in relationship to one another. And in this unit, writing would fit in well, and close readings of other literary texts looking more for technique than for content. But what if you're teaching within a curriculum, and it doesn't allow you to plan your own units per se, so you have to fit grammar into a unit on a piece of literature. How on earth can you expect grammar learning goals (on the lesson level) to reflect the conceptual focus of the unit? I guess maybe they don't have to, because you could think of them as writing improvement strategies which will help students with their summative assessments. And what about IEP assessments and benchmarks? how do I make time for these in my tightly-structured inquiry-driven highly-cognitively-demanding backwardly-designed units? Do the IEP kids just have to figure out ways to make things up? Is there ever any space for downtime? Free writing? SSR (sustained silent reading)? These are things we're being directed against, but which I think are super valuable, if not essential, to students who are trying to learn, but also trying to survive adolescence.
It's hard to put out hypotheticals, and I don't want to alienate any non-educators who are reading this blog, because I need all the potential sources of feedback I can get. Suffice it to say, I still don't see how I'm supposed to balance everything I'm learning and turn it into a coherent unit plan with these dainty, structured, perfectly synthesized little lesson components. I sound like I'm being sarcastic, but that's totally how it feels--like unit and lesson planning with UBD is just way too structured and neat and tidy to allow space for everything I want students to get from my class--it's so narrow! And it really seems contrary to the inquiry-based learning idea. But any far-reaching planning seems contrary to inquiry-based learning. I honestly probably don't know what I'm talking about. And by now, my professors are probably rolling their eyes (mentally, of course) because I still don't get it, and I'm still asking the same questions over and over; my MT sure doesn't care, because to her, UBD is just some new educational trend, and is no better or worse than diary mapping for unit planning; and I don't know if my supervisor is really that concerned about the planning aspect of things--I think she's more there just to check in on my classroom presence, presentation, withitness, etc. So I don't know where to go for answers. And Smagorinsky (he's an educational theorist who we read quite a bit of in our program, and he talks A LOT about backward planning) just leers at me from the pages, scowling self-importantly, so pleased with himself that what he proposes makes no practical sense to me. So, here I sit, making myself feel more and more stupid with every stupid sentence I write to even try and explain how I'm struggling. Hopefully, things get better. And better still, hopefully it doesn't take until my second year in the field for everything to come together for me!
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