Final Reflection for my Lesson Planning Class

Over the course of the semester, the difficulties and complexities of lesson planning and enactment have become much plainer to me. I feel as though I’ve learned a great deal about myself as a teacher-to-be through planning lessons for books on a variety of levels.

Mainly, this class revealed to me that being a good teacher and achieving learning goals is about more than just planning strong or thoughtful lessons. Although some of my lessons could have been more fully planned, I feel that planning is one of my strong suits. However, enacting a plan is much more challenging. It’s not like writing and then presenting a speech; lesson planning and enacting is so much more difficult, because a plan has to be detailed enough that every minute is used purposefully, but it must also be flexible because student engagement is critical to learning, and you can’t plan for what students are going to say, what questions they’re going to have, etc.

Even so, I feel that the most well-planned lesson I taught this semester was my Kite Runner lesson. I designed handouts and carefully selected graphic organizers that would focus on student thinking about the book. Perhaps the reason I planned this lesson so well was that I was so interested in the book and was fairly excited about the unit focus we’d selected, though most of my peers took it in a different direction than I had imagined. I saw the unit as an examination of the ways the personal and the political worked together in the lives of the characters in the book, but most of the “external conflicts” we talked about were just interpersonal conflicts. I don’t know if this discrepancy was due to my failure to understand exactly what the unit goal had been, or just my different way of interpreting it, or if the unit focus we selected wasn’t clear enough to guide the lessons. Regardless, I think if I were teaching the book/unit in a real classroom, I would do more to draw students’ attention to the political as well as the personal influences that shape each character’s behavior, and perhaps have students think about the ways personal and political conflicts drive their lives.

I think that my two weakest lessons were my Out of the Dust and my The Glory Field lessons. Again, this may be because I was less enthusiastic about the texts and unit foci, or because I was less knowledgeable about the cognitive abilities of the students who would be reading this book—namely junior high students. I never enacted my Glory Field lesson, but I think I would like to re-do my Out of the Dust lesson and perhaps provide a little bit more direction. I was trying to approach the unit focus, looking at place in writing, while being true to the content of my section, which focused more on people. I tried to draw students’ attention to the ways in which objects or symbols in the spaces in the book stood in for people, but I think I did a poor job of explaining this. If I were to go back, I think I would spend more time modeling what I was trying to get at, as several of my peers suggested after viewing the lesson.

I suppose these lessons exemplify what my weaknesses in planning were at the beginning of the semester, because I was really uncomfortable modeling or spending extended periods of time talking. I feel like students should be doing as much of the thinking and talking as possible in a lesson, but it’s hard for me to remember that students, especially middle school students, would need some guidance—they need me to direct their thinking in some ways, and to show them what the type of thinking I’m looking for might look like. I understand the importance of giving additional guidance now, but I still struggle with how much and how frequent that guidance should be. This is because what I see as my greatest weakness in lesson planning now is continual formative assessment. I always have students working on something—usually working in groups, completing worksheets that guide their thinking about the question at hand, or just responding to questions, but how do I collect data about student learning, as the teacher, throughout the lesson?

It was good for me to see how my peers worked out some of these problems themselves, too. As I mentioned, they often interpreted unit foci differently than I did, so it was worthwhile to see the range of possibilities available to me. But what was perhaps more helpful was the opportunity to see the ways some of my peers, who do work with younger student, took up the tasks of planning for the books aimed at younger students. One of my peers in particular seems to me like she will be really good at engaging her 9th graders in ways I would struggle with. Her bingo game, for example, was a great tool to use to motivate younger students, and to formatively assess their understanding of literary concepts. And although I think One of my peers’ visualization activity could have been better executed, the idea of a visual representation of a reading was a really interesting one, and one that could help me track students’ understandings of the passages they’re reading, while they thought about their understandings as well.

Also, reading Peter Smagorinsky was, of course, a really useful guide in unit planning. The type of conceptual units he describes, and the process for planning them, was really a challenging one to work with throughout the semester, but any time I was stuck trying to plan a lesson, I thought back to “okay, what’s their unit assessment going to be? And how can I prepare them for that? And what activities can I do to support that learning?” and while I wasn’t always successful, and it didn’t always make the lesson planning any easier, it did make it more purposeful and thoughtful.

Because I was able to return to Smagorinsky when planning my lessons, I think that typically I was successful in planning lesson sequences that supported learning goals. Whether the ways the lessons actually played out actually supported the learning goals was a different story. Sometimes an activity that seemed so structured in my head—like having students compare groups in TKR and think about the conflicts between the groups—didn’t play out that way in the lesson, probably because, given the slightly different direction of my unit focus from my peers’, I didn’t adequately activate students’ prior knowledge—they weren’t primed to think in the way I was asking them to think. This is why I’ve come to think that the “thinking through a lesson” portion of the Pitt lesson plan can be useful, though I’m not always able to anticipate the difficulties that students would have (as in the case of TKR). But, to work on this, I need to work on formative assessment, so I’m always checking in to see if student learning is happening as planned and, if not, adjusting my instruction to ensure that it does.


1.) I think that my greatest strengths as far as lesson planning are, as I mentioned, coming up with activities that are meant to specifically support the learning goals I set for the lesson. In my TKR lesson, I directed student thinking to the conflicts at play in the novel. In my Out of the Dust lesson, having students look through the text for specific objects that related to characters worked well to direct their thinking about people and place early in the text. And in my Curious Incident lesson, guiding students to examine representations of normalcy in the media and then compare and contrast them with the text worked well to prepare students to think critically about representations of normalcy. Each of these lesson sequences could have been more perfectly executed, but the plan, I think, was well-suited to the goals I’d set.

2.) However, with regard to areas in which I still need to grow, two come to mind. The first is in my ability to come up with motivating activity. I almost always start students out with a quick write, which I think can sometimes be motivating, but when done over and over again, can probably become routine, thoughtless, and dull. So I need to work on motivating activities, which I really struggle with. The other area in which I can continue to grow is formative assessment. It’s not enough to collect exit tickets at the end of class to see if students “get it.” I need to have spaces in my lesson where I can reliably check for understanding and monitor student learning, and students can be made aware of their own learning, as well.

3.) If I had to select only two goals for my development in planning lessons for the Spring, they would be, I suppose, to come up with a greater variety of ways to get students situated in English class than just doing quick writes, and to create a space and a means for formative assessment to happen throughout my lessons rather than just at the end of class.

Arch-Frenemy for the 2011-2012 School Year: Unit and Lesson Planning

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!

Where're we Headed?

Today, and this week, I've been troubled by questions about curriculum. And this is another one of those now-familiar tales of the disparity between what I'm learning at Pitt and what I'm seeing at my placement. Trying to negotiate this disparity is beginning to seem like an unavoidable but quite challenging center to my preservice teacher training.

Let me start with a brief discussion of what I'm learning at Pitt. It all sounds really great and reasonable and smart and consistent, and I think I really like it so far. As far as planning/curriculum, we're learning how to plan unity using backward design. Basically, the unit (perhaps even the course) is guided by an investigative question like "What is a nation?" or "What is/are the American dream(s)?" Thinking about that guiding question, you plan your summative assessment for the course/unit, and you plan activities and texts for engagement that will help students to investigate the question guiding the unit/course. Each lesson, too, has learning goals of its own that help students work towards the unit question, and formative assessments that work towards the summative assessment. (broadly and simply: formative=assessment as you go, summative=assessment when you're done, though they're perhaps significantly more complex than these simple definitions can account for). So you might use three texts that describe three different versions of the American dream, ask students to articulate/critique/discuss the representations as you go, then ask them to describe their idea of the American dream, in comparison with the representations in the text.

(I think you can also work on particular skills through the unit, too, like crafting persuasive writing, so you would incorporate different elements of persuasive writing into the activities you use for each text, maybe you'd stage a debate between characters from one+ texts, and then as a unit assessment, you'd ask students to persuade you (or each other, or someone else) that their American dream is somehow best. We haven't explicitly worked on this aspect of unit planning yet, but I suspect it might be coming)

According to my mentor teacher, what I'm doing at Pitt and what my placement school tries to do is called understanding by design, or backward planning. However, what my placement is doing is somewhat different. Their units, instead of being focused on guiding questions, are built around state standards that are selected to go along w/ each unit. Each grade has a standard curriculum that the departments developed in conjunction with the textbook, and they go through each of the state standards and select texts/textbook activities that address those standards and structure their units in this way. My mentor teacher explained that this type of unit planning is, indeed, "teaching to the test," but that because the school I'm placed in has failed to make annual yearly progress for so many consecutive years, she says that they have little option but to teach to the test, because students need to pass the test, and if they're not passing, teachers need to be able to demonstrate that they taught from a standards-based, aligned curriculum so that they cannot be held accountable for students' failure on the tests.

That's not to say that my Pitt classes don't ask us to incorporate PA state standards. Every lesson plan we do addresses at least one, usually more, state standards, but we don't plan "to the standards," we more like plan with the standards "in mind," addressing them as we address the strategies and the investigative questions we're trying to cover.

To be honest, attempting to negotiate these two perhaps-similar-but-significantly-different approaches to unit planning is fairly exhausting and stressful. I totally understand my mentor teacher's and my placement school's attitude, even though I really don't agree with it. In our accountability-obsessed educational climate, it's really easy to become focused on covering the broad range of topics on the test--teachers and administrators understand that their schools and their jobs depend on test scores, so naturally that's what ends up being emphasized. Even if a noble, self-sacrificing teacher were to say, "Forget the tests, I'm going to educate my students the best way I know how, and if I'm successful, they will be able to do well on the tests." She's not doing her students any favors if her lack of an "aligned" curriculum gets her fired when the school fails to make AYP, and she's not around to self-sacrifice for pedagogical ideals any more, anyways. So I see this in part as a real problem with standards-based assessment. My mentor teacher told me it comes down to a choice; "You either dig an inch deep and a mile wide and try and cover as many texts as possible and use all the strategies and standards, or you dig a mile deep and an inch wide and really deeply and richly investigate a few texts/standards." The suggestion was not only that the former was preferable, but that it was the school's only option in this educational climate.

My classes and professors at Pitt, I'm sure, would not want me to be discouraged in this way. They would ask me--I think--to construct curricular units that are inquiry-driven and student- (or learning-) centered, but that also addressed state standards as I went. And I know there are ways in which this is possible--we've seen them done, in the examples our theorists lay out for us. But many of the preservice teachers in my program, as well as the teachers I've interacted with at my placement, are stuck with pre-fabricated one-size-fits-all curricula that prescribe texts to use and skills to use with those texts and activities/resources that work to achieve those standards/skills. I know that even within the tightest curricula, there's room for modifying activities, texts, etc to account for unique groups of students etc, but I think that requires even more creativity than planning one's own unit does, because it requires a lot of delicate work and tremendous insight and knowledge. I don't know that I even feel prepared to create my own units--I'm not even half-way through the program, so I'm sure the skills will come, but the fact remains that, at this point, I can't imagine planning units that are effective and inquiry based and not prescriptive and restrictive--much less to preform the exponentially more challenging task of trying to fit a pre-fabricated unit to fit my needs and, most importantly, the needs of my very different students.

This challenge, which I'll certainly have to face in the future as an entry-level teacher, says nothing of the challenge I currently face. How do I fit my lessons into my mentor teacher's curriculum? She simply doesn't use a lot of the strategies Pitt is asking me to use; can I ask her to when we're co-planning lessons? Or would that be totally an imposition on the unit she's designing with a very particular and calculated goal in mind? Will the shape of the class totally change when I "take over" in the Spring? Is that fair to the students, who will suffer from whip lash, being jostled from a class structured based on one pedagogical approach to one with a seemingly totally different approach? Will it adversely affect the school, or my mentor teacher, by robbing them of their overtly and explicitly "aligned curriculum?" I'm already running into issues, because the couple of small activities that I've conducted that, in my classroom, would be the foundation for building a unity, have been basically treated as tangents, footnotes, asides from the class, which is taught totally differently. Already, after only a couple of lessons, there's a disconnect between "her" classroom and "my" classroom (which, obviously, is still her classroom, but is also, in a way, Pitt's classroom, because Pitt is the institution telling me what to do/implement at my placement). Are the students already suffering? How much will they suffer over the course of the year?

I'm really at a loss about this. Even planning a unit based on a guiding question seems potentially overly-limiting to me, so planning within a prescribed curriculum seems that much more limiting and frustrating, and being asked to modify that prescribed curriculum to meet the standards Pitt is setting for a high-leverage-practice-based classroom is even that much more challenging. What do I do? I feel like I have no authority over ANY of these competing forces, so how do I work them all together for my good as a developing teacher and for her/my students' good?

Super challenging stuff that I am REALLY struggling with! Would LOVE feedback on these issues!