First Official Unit Plan for Student Teaching

 Over the last four weeks, #psuaged23 has been tasked with writing, peer reviewing, and editing our first unit plan for student teaching. I chose my public speaking unit for my leadership class because I was excited to get started with a class I am least experienced in: Leadership. In high school, my ag program did not offer a leadership class, so this was a class I was very excited to experience as a student teacher to learn what this class can include and get to better know the Shippensburg officer team. 



As I began writing my leadership public speaking unit I found it hard to decide what the lesson title and essential question should be each day. As I looked through resources, I had a sort of "Ah Ha" moment and thought back to our summer bootcamp. I found it easier to decide on essential questions when I began to use the backward design/backward planning/backward mapping strategy and coming up with daily objectives and my unit assessment first.


To prepare for the local Leadership Development Speaking Events, my unit assessment is having the students give their speech to the class as if it was the competition. Students will have the PA FFA rubrics in front of them and will be evaluating their peers. FFA integration and career opportunities tied exceptionally well into my course content because of how much we are focusing on this LDE. 

The first time around turning my unit plan in for peer review,  I needed to change my unit rationale. I used some words that did not make a lot of sense, and needed to include some statistics. I changed my wording from "the kids" to "students"and included some statistics that show how important public speaking is. 

For round two of peer reviewing, I didn't get any alarming missing comments on my unit plan which was a relief. I received feedback on the portions of my unit that my reviewer thought would be most effective. I also changed some formatting so my rubrics were bigger and easier to read. 


As I was peer reviewing my cohort's unit plans, it was exciting to see all of them showing their strengths for writing plans already. I look forward to growing with them continually as the semester goes on as we continue planning for student teaching. 


Here's to Part of the Whole Tree, 


Ms. Holtry

Comments

  1. Killiann GeorgeSeptember 16, 2022 at 7:04 AM

    Liz, once again a great read. I think you are an absolute planning machine and a rock star when it comes to planning. Keep up the hard work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousSeptember 17, 2022 at 3:26 PM

    I might seek your help on the backward design approach, because I have found it very difficult for me to plan a unit assessment before lesson planning and gathering more information myself. It seems like you are really doing well at this so I would love to get some advice from you! Great job Liz!
    -Grace

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nicolette CusateSeptember 17, 2022 at 6:53 PM

    Liz, I’m always impressed with your unwavering work ethic, especially when it comes to planning. I agree that as we started the unit planning process, backwards design started to make more sense to me too. Keep up the great work!

    ReplyDelete

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