Beginnings of my Unit Plan

In Curriculum for Middle and High Schools, we began putting our initial ideas for the unit we will be creating down on paper within the last week and a half. Then, we were tasked with creating a visual map of our unit chart through an app on our iPad's; I chose to use the app Inspiration. Although I do not know exactly what History topic I am planning to design my unit around, I do have many general ideas of what I will be expecting my students to know and be able to do at the conclusion of the unit.

For this unit, I will design a performance assessment that will demonstrate the students mastery of the standards I am assessing. I have been contemplating designing a research project that would culminate in possibly journal entries where they would portray a character from a specific historical event or potentially a research project display. I would also be willing to entertain ideas that students may have for a final Performance Assessment that would also meet my designated criteria which would be based on the standards I have chosen to assess which can be found at the link above in my unit chart. 

Designing a unit around my content area is directly related to Performance Criterion 7.1: Knowledge of Content Area. I chose this Performance Criterion because in creating the unit I will have to use the knowledge I have obtained through my study of history to write a grade appropriate unit plan which will then get broken down into specific lessons and assessments. I will also constantly evaluate students to ensure that they are actively engaged and decide whether I need to increase the difficulty of future lessons or make them easier to understand depending on how students are progressing.

I believe I am beginning to grasp Performance Criterion 7.1, but am not quite demonstrating proficiency. I feel this way because I have not yet narrowed down my unit to a specific topic, but once I am able to make that decision I believe I will be capable of showing a much higher proficiency than I am at this point in time. In order to decide on my topic, I need to reflect on what I learned in middle school, since that is the age I am designing my unit for, as well as complete more research on the topics that I am considering.  

Literacy in the Digital Age and Curriculum Orientation

This past week in ED 343: Literacy in Middle and High Schools and ED 361: Curriculum in Middle and High Schools we were given the task to create two separate presentations utilizing the iPad applications Shadow Puppet and Explain Everything to detail our views on literacy and curriculum and how we will integrate them into our personal content areas. In Literacy we used Shadow Puppet, in pairs, to demonstrate our understanding of literacy and how we will integrate and prioritize literacy in our content areas. In Curriculum, we used Explain Everything to create individual presentations to give a detailed look into the Curriculum Orientation or Philosophy that we align with the most, including the ways in which we will design our curriculum in line with the orientation or philosophy.

Through both of these assignments I have developed a deeper understanding for both Literacy and Curriculum and am also beginning to see a clear connection between these two very important components of education. First and foremost, understanding literacy and being literate is the foundation for being a person in today's society, however, everybody is literate in different ways on different topics. Literacy directly relates to curriculum because it is essential that, as educators, we build in various ways of teaching literacy when we are designing our curriculum in order to ensure that we teach students how to be literate in a multitude of ways that may or may not specifically relate to each teachers individual content areas while also integrating a broader sense of literacy to be demonstrated in different real life scenarios.

These projects align with the majority of the Saint Michael's College Mission Statement because it required students to be creative in the way we designed our presentations, integrative in trying new technology, collaborative with our peers in our Shadow Puppet presentations, and knowledgable about literacy and our curriculum orientations. Through these assignments we were also able to dive deeper into our passions of education and we were able to begin to unfold many of the things we have been curious about during our previous two years of schooling, such as how in the world we are going to plan what we are supposed to teach! I am also able to draw connections with Performance Criterion 4.1, 5.1, and 5.2. Through the Shadow Puppet we intertwined the general definition of literacy with our own personal definitions and the ways in which we will teach literacy in our future classrooms. Also during the planning of the literacy Shadow Puppet, as pairs from different content areas, we discussed how we might intertwine different content areas into our teaching in order to better convey the concept of literacy. Both assignments also forced us to think critically about literacy and curriculum and the implications they will both have on our future teaching.

Throughout my time at Saint Michael's College I would like to continue to become more proficient in the Saint Michael's College Mission Statement and the Performance Criterion as well begin to understand them and apply them on the next level from where I am currently at. I plan to continue to collaborate with my peers and professors to further my learning and allow myself to grow as a future educator.