Reflection

Victoria Guaragno Khrystie-Ann Clark March 18, 2012 We never realized how difficult piecing together a unit plan truly is. It involved many steps and the process was challenging. The first thing we had to do was read our fulcrum text, //A Separate Peace// by John Knowles, to figure out which lens we wanted to us. After reading and annotating the text, we settled on a New Historicism lens because it would show students the time period and help them develop a context for the text. The first obstacle we faced was realizing how meticulous we had to be for every day. It was difficult to come up with a new and intriguing activity and lesson for each day. We also struggled with making clear objectives that related back to the lens we wanted to teach. We really had to understand the lens ourselves before we could make unit plan based around it. Another struggle we faced was finding texts to coincide with what we planned to teach. It helped that we had already read two our texture texts in another class. This really helped us to find books that we really had a connection to our fulcrum text. Furthermore, our texts varied including novels, videos, pictures, short stories, articles, poems, and a timeline. This would help give the students a broader view of the historical lens we wanted to use. Also, brainstorming all our ideas was the most productive aspect of our process. We were able to get all of our ideas down on paper and then organize them day by day in a calendar. From there, since we had all our ideas down on the calendar, it was easy to choose which day to make lesson plans for. Because we knew the activity and the correlating texts that would be used for that day, we were able to efficiently create a lesson plan for one day of each week. Creating this sequence gave us a realistic view of all the meticulous steps that go into creating a unit plan as well as lesson plans for every day. The UBD template helped us to organize our ideas, but no initially create them. It was helpful what we wanted to students to know and understand, but it didn’t help us in creating any new information. The struggles that we experienced opened our eyes to the research and planning it take to create a successful unit plan.