Weekly Web Wonder #2: Planning it Out

When we are students in high school, very few of us realize the preparation required to teach. We take for granted that at our scheduled class time, we will walk through the door and our teacher will have materials ready. Now that we are on the other side of the desk, it is important that we know what to teach before we worry about how to teach. This is one of the big parts I've been waiting for. Even the world's greatest actors refer to scripts, so I am ready to prepare myself for the big production in the spring.

In Dr. Fink's "A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning", I truly got a grasp on how important preparation is. It points out that preparation is half of what it means to call yourself a teacher, with the second half being student engagement. I was also first introduced to the idea of the "backwards design" process. To help explain this, here was how I found myself designing lessons in the past:
-Here's the subject I need to teach. This would be a cool way to do it!
-So from what I am doing, what are the main points they should know?
-How will I assess that they learned these points.
This often frustrated me. I was caught up in the overload of information that was out there on the subject, and I didn't know how to go about pulling out main points, or "learning goals".

The next reading, "Understanding by Design Framework" by McTighe and Wiggins, helped me by supporting Fink's ideas and presenting a easier-to-digest 3 stages of backwards design. 1) Identify desired results 2) Determine assessment evidence 3) Plan learning experiences and instruction. My favorite takeaway from this is the fact that a good teacher views textbooks and other materials as tools, not the curriculum it's self. Also, in the past I have heard peers complain that the teacher "teaches to the test". In a way, I now see that this is necessary. I believe that when teachers fail in this aspect, they view the exam as the curriculum to teach. They teach the student to regurgitate the information they present on a written test, and that's it. In doing this, they rarely exceed the remember and understand levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. A good teacher is able to watch the student's zone of proximal development grow throughout these different stages, and assesses the learning goals at the student's highest level.

I am really looking forward to class this week to dive into these ideas deeper. (Hey, wait a minute, I want MY students to say that one day!) Here's to this critical step in #psuaged17's #teachag journey!