I wrote my very first lesson plan about two weeks ago. It crashed and burned. Thank goodness my professor lets us rework and edit our plans until we get it 'right.' I've really struggled with a couple of things - the first being the fact that I am creating a lesson plan for a group of imaginary students. This makes it difficult to answer the questions that could give me direction when planning for the lesson's activities. Questions like: What are they interested in? How quickly do they read? Does working in groups work for this class? How many transitions are too many? How many new things can I teach in a day? How much review do I need to do?
I decided I wanted to approach my lesson plan using backwards design because we have been reading Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design and Teach Like a Champion. Both of these books advocate using this method when planning units and lesson. In theory this is great. Start by thinking about your end product to be and go from there. I was able to use the ISBE (Illinois State Board of Education) learning goals and my assigned text to come up with reasonable objectives and essential questions, but found it very difficult to figure out exactly what I would do to make this happen. This is what I'm sure will be the first of many drafts of this lesson plan to this post. I'd love any feedback or suggestions about how to make this better. Click here to view my lesson plan.
This lesson plan uses "A Rice Sandwich" from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. You can click on the word rubric to see the what my professor used to evaluate this lesson plan. I used a UbD lesson plan template that I got from the following link:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CCwQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newbedford.k12.ma.us%2Fnormandin%2Finstructionsforlessonplantemplate.doc&rct=j&q=understanding%20by%20design%20lesson%20plan%20template&ei=S4zETMzADYywnge58JHhCQ&usg=AFQjCNHCB4pDVbj_YQn09g1s7vrVMu0cBw&sig2=CrwMOmYuB3BfjeToeXCXiA&cad=rja.
