Unit Reflection

Overall, my biggest struggle with creating a Unit was not diving in too deep right away. There were times when I felt that I needed to plan an individual lesson to understand what I needed or where I was going. But that is the complete opposite of backward design. It did help to see the last goal, and then pick major lessons to focus on, then little/basic lessons to help build up to those.

My unit was about Careers and Elements of Space. A lot of my essential questions worked together to reach the overall goal. All of the lessons could include aspects of careers in space, tools they use to figure things out, or even how it has affected society. I did struggle with finding specific CCSS to work with the goal near the grade levels I am teaching. However, since my dream is to connect all subjects to each other, finding goals from different subjects helped me see the bigger vision.

Next time I build a unit, which will be soon, I would love more time to collaborate with people. I am going to talk to my mentor about the Unit I am teaching, or partly teaching, to see the big idea. At times I felt crazy for thinking that things were connected, but once I talked to people they eased my mind.

For those who are working on this in the future, I would suggest looking into the Overall Goal/Big Idea FIRST, then working your way down from there. Thinking of questions that have to do with it and then objectives. And this isn't a final product, so you can move things around and take things out if they don't fit the vision later on.