Term IV was a strange beast. Basically covering the first two months of the spring semester, the Term IV assignment was about creating a multidisciplinary two-week lesson plan. The assignment was due in early March, not long before members of my class began taking over their classes for two weeks at a time. Not a coincidence, to be sure, and a great opportunity to really put a lot of focused effort into planning for our takeovers.
So why did I end up setting aside my Term IV curriculum from the moment I turned it in, and writing an entirely new plan?
Some honest talk, pros and cons, about Term IV below.
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The term IV assignment is pretty different from any of the projects before it. Unlike Terms II and III, which were really integrated assignments (meaning they included individual sections due for all of our methods classes as well as seminar), Term IV was much more unified: a series of smaller assignments building to the creation of a two-week multidisciplinary curriculum.
The phrase "series of smaller assignments" is critical here, and to me is both the biggest strength and the biggest weakness of the assignment.
The way Term IV works is that your curriculum is gradually built (over about two months), from essential understandings and to learning goals to general plans to specific details. This process is mirrored in the specific assignment tasks, which begin with general brainstorming and overarching construction, and build into eventually writing timelines and sample plans.
So, for example, we make lots of charts, webs, and analyses...
...before we get to figuring out the timelines and tasks.
By the time we reach the deadline for the final project (like Term III, this one is in the form of a website), we've already done most of the work -- it's mostly a matter of compiling and revising, plus fleshing out some of our statements and justifications.
There's a pretty strong argument for doing this way: because it mimics the mindset our faculty want us to apply to lesson planning as teachers. Sure, the timeline is wildly unrealistic to the real world, where of course you won't have months to plan curricula -- sometimes it seems like you need to be lucky or extremely well-organized to even have weeks. However, the progression of assignments - beginning with your context and essential understandings, and only later constructing the tasks and assessments you'll use - is pretty a pretty sound simulation of backward design, which I find to be a convincingly strong model for curriculum planning. The Term IV assignment was definitely about building in me strong habits of backward design, and in that regard I think it was valuable.
At the same time...there's a good reason (aside from lack of time, which is a huge issue for teachers) that teachers often don't do their lesson planning months in advance. After all, my program has done a lot of good work to train me to be aware of context, and to be actively responsive throughout my teaching practice. And yet, here we are, asked to begin in January to plan for a lesson that we'll turn in in March and (for most of us) teach in April. That makes responsiveness difficult, to say the least.
In my case, for a LOT of reasons (including snow days, collaborative planning with other teachers, and the individual students in my classroom), it became clear by the time I turned in my Term IV assignment that my curriculum was no longer remotely relevant to the curriculum that would be surrounding it -- in terms of what my classroom teacher would be teaching before and after it, and in terms of what the other kindergarten teachers would be teaching at the time. Rather than be extremely disruptive in this way -- and miss out on the opportunity to practice peer collaboration -- I chose to set aside my Term IV curriculum and develop an entirely new one for my takeover weeks (which had to be rescheduled due to snow-delayed testing days anyway), with about two weeks to prepare.
Was this a huge problem for me? No -- while it added stress and work, it also gave me a much more realistic and collaborative opportunity to plan for my takeover. I also was really excited about the new units I got to teach - weather and poetry, which I'll write more about before this blog is up.
But, it still was frustrating to have done all that Term IV work not knowing whether it might just be for the sake of an assignment rather than for use in my classroom.
Oh well. It's done now, both Term IV and the actual takeover, which went well. In fact, just about everything TEP-related is done now. But more on that soon!
So why did I end up setting aside my Term IV curriculum from the moment I turned it in, and writing an entirely new plan?
Some honest talk, pros and cons, about Term IV below.
--
The term IV assignment is pretty different from any of the projects before it. Unlike Terms II and III, which were really integrated assignments (meaning they included individual sections due for all of our methods classes as well as seminar), Term IV was much more unified: a series of smaller assignments building to the creation of a two-week multidisciplinary curriculum.
The phrase "series of smaller assignments" is critical here, and to me is both the biggest strength and the biggest weakness of the assignment.
The way Term IV works is that your curriculum is gradually built (over about two months), from essential understandings and to learning goals to general plans to specific details. This process is mirrored in the specific assignment tasks, which begin with general brainstorming and overarching construction, and build into eventually writing timelines and sample plans.
So, for example, we make lots of charts, webs, and analyses...
There's a pretty strong argument for doing this way: because it mimics the mindset our faculty want us to apply to lesson planning as teachers. Sure, the timeline is wildly unrealistic to the real world, where of course you won't have months to plan curricula -- sometimes it seems like you need to be lucky or extremely well-organized to even have weeks. However, the progression of assignments - beginning with your context and essential understandings, and only later constructing the tasks and assessments you'll use - is pretty a pretty sound simulation of backward design, which I find to be a convincingly strong model for curriculum planning. The Term IV assignment was definitely about building in me strong habits of backward design, and in that regard I think it was valuable.
At the same time...there's a good reason (aside from lack of time, which is a huge issue for teachers) that teachers often don't do their lesson planning months in advance. After all, my program has done a lot of good work to train me to be aware of context, and to be actively responsive throughout my teaching practice. And yet, here we are, asked to begin in January to plan for a lesson that we'll turn in in March and (for most of us) teach in April. That makes responsiveness difficult, to say the least.
In my case, for a LOT of reasons (including snow days, collaborative planning with other teachers, and the individual students in my classroom), it became clear by the time I turned in my Term IV assignment that my curriculum was no longer remotely relevant to the curriculum that would be surrounding it -- in terms of what my classroom teacher would be teaching before and after it, and in terms of what the other kindergarten teachers would be teaching at the time. Rather than be extremely disruptive in this way -- and miss out on the opportunity to practice peer collaboration -- I chose to set aside my Term IV curriculum and develop an entirely new one for my takeover weeks (which had to be rescheduled due to snow-delayed testing days anyway), with about two weeks to prepare.
Was this a huge problem for me? No -- while it added stress and work, it also gave me a much more realistic and collaborative opportunity to plan for my takeover. I also was really excited about the new units I got to teach - weather and poetry, which I'll write more about before this blog is up.
But, it still was frustrating to have done all that Term IV work not knowing whether it might just be for the sake of an assignment rather than for use in my classroom.
Oh well. It's done now, both Term IV and the actual takeover, which went well. In fact, just about everything TEP-related is done now. But more on that soon!
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