Unit+Planning+Project

=Unit Planning=

This assignment is a large portion of the grade for TE 801, common among all sections of the course. The unit plan asks the students to describe the big ideas that they desire to cover, the standards they attempt to cover through the course of the unit, the projected sequence of the lessons, two in-depth lessons that ask them to share a high level task as well as a mathematical discussion with their students, and how the students plan to connect with the parent(s) of the student. Finally, the interns are asked to reflect on the unit.

In my attempts to understand unit planning, I have found that articles have been around since the 1970s suggesting that teachers should focus on teaching units instead of focusing on the individual lesson. Yet, so often in elementary mathematics teachers view the lessons of the text as a march through time – taking each lesson in the order it is presented in the text. Texts are presented using a two-page spread, providing the perfect constraints of what occurs from day to day. It is in following what the author of the text has outlined that the students in the elementary classroom will learn and understand mathematics. As such, we, the elementary mathematics team, hope to expand the preservice teachers’ understanding to where they can work through the big ideas and concepts of a unit and prepare the unit beyond what is just written in the text. This may ultimately take the shape of rearranging some of the lessons, combining lessons in the text, omitting lessons, or following the order prescribed in the text. In this process, it is the hope that the preservice teachers will be encouraged to think about their individual context and allow for the individual students to learn.

I find this assignment to be pragmatic in its approaches. The reading from Wiggins and McTighe (mentioned in seminar 3 of this syllabus) mentions that the students should determine (1) a desired set of outcomes, (2) what the teacher will count as evidence of understanding, and finally (3) the set-up of the lessons that will accomplish these goals. I do not belittle the benefits that come from unit planning, and I feel that students should look beyond the day-to-day lessons and look instead at the themes of mathematics, but it has been my experience that students often just follow the outline of the curriculum. Many of the interns are in positions where they are not able to fully implement the ideas of the unit plan. Some are in positions where the school’s adopted curriculum “requires” certain lesson to be taught in certain orders to maintain the integrity of the research supporting the lessons. I also see many students that are in positions where the cooperating teaching does not want to let the students move beyond what the text or school district suggests. It is my intent to have the students take a deeper glimpse into the standards and into the mathematics instead of just teaching as is.

A part of providing the opportunities to look deeper in the mathematical standards, the unit planning process also suggests that formulaic structures that teachers might follow. I find that to challenge this thought process slightly, I engage in a discussion about how the students would construct a two-week unit if the school had no adopted curriculum. This activity asks the students to look beyond the text and look at the general themes of mathematics. This task is often met with resistance in the seminars because the interns do not think that schools would not have a mathematics curriculum. I do this in an attempt to help them verbalize/write what they would consider the big ideas of the unit and how they intend to structure those ideas into the mathematics lessons.

[|TE801_Thorpe_UnitPlanning.doc]