My Unit Plan Reflection

    We all know that the favorite pastime of a teacher, is writing unit and lesson plans. Well....maybe not, but that is what I have been up to the past 2 weeks at the beginning of the semester! In order to have good classroom instruction, teachers need to have good unit and lesson plans to guide the class. Since these are a necessity for good teaching, it is important to be able to write a quality plan! We have been given the opportunity to write Unit Plans, and then have peers revise them!

We were tasked with writing one Unit plan, that was our best work, in order to get good feedback on it. I think that this was an interesting time to do it, since this was our first time writing a unit plan! While at Bootcamp, Mr Haussener and I laid out a general outline for an Integrated Pest Management, so I decided that this would be the Unit that I submit for this assignment. 

After writing my Unit plan, I felt very good about what I had just completed. There were some things that I felt were difficult and that I could use work on. One of those things was finding standards that fit my unit. It was pretty easy to align to the PA CIP codes and the National AFNR Standards. The section that I struggled with was finding PA Academic Standards. I was trying to use the SAS website, but I think these could be improved. One thing that I think I did well on, was the FFA and SAE Integration. I felt that I didn't just list them, I was able to describe exactly how it aligned. 

After getting my first peer review back at 87/100, I was pretty proud of my work. I think that it aligned to how I felt, that I did some things very well and needed some assistance on other things. The suggestions that my reviewer said were writing out IPM to Integrated Pest Management, so that anyone else who would look at my plan, would know exactly what I am talking about. Also, including some statistics into my rationale to improve the strength of why I should teach this to students. 

One thing that I know I did not do well was the supplies list. My reviewer suggested including worksheets and power points into my supplies list, along with stating which lessons that these supplies were needed for. I really like this suggestion and really prompted me to think about how can I easily look at this unit plan and know exactly what I needed. 

It was also noted by my reviewer to include more AFNR standards. Personally, I feel like writing an entire book of agriculture standards can be cumbersome. If we can align our unit to some standards in agriculture, then I feel like we could align them to a lot of standards, in which would take extra time to copy over. One of the suggestions that they had were to include more Math/ Reading standards on my PA academic Standards. I will look into more standards that align to those topics that have standardized assessments. 

The final suggestion that was made to me, was to include higher order thinking Bloom's Verbs to promote higher student learning. I completely agree with this and so I adjusted some of my lesson objectives and unit goals. I think pushing my students beyond identifying and listing the content is important.

After receiving the 2nd round of peer review, I felt really good about my Unit Plan. The main suggestion that they had, was how to make my objectives more measurable. I think this is important, and something that I need to pay more attention to!

I thought it was very fun to review some other people's unit plans. Some of the things that I think stood out to me as things that we can all work on are, the Unit Rationale, Supplies list, and measuring unit objectives. To fix the Rationale issue, I think we need to put ourselves in the students shoes and where they live, how will this impact their lives. For the supplies list, I keep thinking to make it easy to read and quickly look back to in the spring and beyond. Create a bulleted list, identifying how much and when you need supplies. I think depending on the classroom setup, we need to specify exactly how much water or how much soil, so that we do not need to think about these things later. Measuring unit objectives, is something that I struggled with, but my suggestion is to include numbers or percentages, so that you can clearly state when you have achieved this objective. 

Overall, I think that this was a very good experience, reviewing my unit plan and also looking at other people's unit plans to get other ideas. 

Until Next time!

Paige