Unit Plan Wrap-Up

My biggest takeaways from planning this unit are around main ideas and essential questions, specifically their origin. I feel that through this planning experience I was truly able to grasp the way in which I am to refer to state standards when it comes to planning out a unit of study. By nature, it allows me to plan via a backwards design lens as skills and outcomes are at the forefront. In addition to knowing how to interpret standards to support my planning, I feel that I have learned the importance of knowing what I want students to be able to understand, analyze, and do during/after learning. This has helped me approach what I want my practice to be in a different way. The essential questions and big ideas directly tie into my assessments because they ground the learning that I want students to employ throughout and walk away with.

The next time that I build a unit, I hope that I am able to make learning tasks meaningful and purposeful thanks to clear guidance and literacy from and of the standards. For students completing their capstone in the future, I would recommend they really give standards a chance. Earlier on, I would somewhat wave them off as something I would never fully understand. There were a couple projects and explorations early on where I pretended to know what standards were used for and how they applied to daily teaching practices. In hindsight, things did not "click" for a while, but I feel that if I opened my mind up to them more, I could have made use of them earlier. This project is a step in the right direction, and I feel that it is good practice for the capstone project. It let me try things out and really get a feel for what I am supposed to do with these things and why they matter.