End of Quarter Reflection

I remember at the beginning of this course feeling lost, and without the vocabulary to assemble key teaching tools like lesson plans. Through this class, I have developed my emerging competence in the standard for this class - this is the course's main standard, as written in the course syllabus: "4. Content Knowledge - The teacher uses content area knowledge, learning standards, appropriate pedagogy and resources to design and deliver curricula and instruction to impact student learning: 4.4 Designing Coherent Instruction in the area of Lesson and Unit Structure." 4.4 is most key, because it directly addresses what I have learned best from this class - how to write a lesson plan that won't fall apart the minute I try to implement it. We began the course by analyzing other teachers' lesson plans that we found on the internet (See Fig. 1 below), and progressed to eventually being able to write our own lesson plan.

Fig. 1:

As you can see, my commentary in Fig. 1 is not without error, and is not as in-depth as it could be, and my lesson plan has served as an exercise in continual improvement - Figure 2 below is a screenshot of my teacher's initial review said lesson plan. 

Fig. 2:

It clearly is a leap from what I show in Figure 1 in that it's a complete lesson plan, and it's mine rather than someone else's. It shows that it's based in a standard, has a Central Focus, Learning Targets, student voice, academic language, and a detailed activity, videos, and questions to informally assess student learning, as well as a formal assessment to be handed out at the completion of the lesson.  

But it also could clearly use some work, especially based on all the red comment flags. It's been edited since then, for a final review which in theory will indicate significant improvement and greater emerging competence. My hope is that by improving my ability to write lesson plans, I will help my students learn more content more thoroughly, efficiently, and (most importantly) with more joy.

Further steps for improvement could include exploring new approaches to lesson planning, and asking other teachers, especially my mentor teacher, and perhaps some of my classmates to "proofread" and help me find the holes in my lesson plans.