Module 5 Unit 1 Activity 4
Blog Post Summary
This
unit was very useful and really taught me a lot about working with
standards. I never had to unpack a standard or do any backwards mapping
with a standard, as in South Korea teachers are just usually given a
book and then asked to teach certain chapters until for a certain time
frame.
In
unit one, learning about backwards mapping was very important. It was
an eye-opener for me. For example, making a lesson by having an end goal
in mind and then preparing what the teacher is going to teach the
students was a new way for me to view lesson planning that is also
connected to the standard. It really opened up another avenue for me as
an educator to think about the goals first. Often times I may be stuck
coming up with a lesson plan by just looking at a topic but by backwards
mapping it can open up so many useful possibilities.
Standards
are used to ensure that students are getting equal education in
different schools and cities. This allows teachers to hit a certain
benchmarks for their students and make sure that they do not fall behind
students from other schools, cities, and states. Because of this,
teachers have to really be able to understand and break apart these
standards, make lesson plans around these standards and reach these
standards’ goals. Standards set clear objectives for education and give
direction when building a curriculum.
Unit
2 was one of my favorites from this week’s work as unpacking a standard
is a way to organize oneself step by step and meeting objectives of the
standard. The video in the Required Study
was very helpful as it showed how to unpack a standard in a very
simplistic way by breaking down the actual sentence into smaller and
specific sentences. Making lesson plans after unpacking the standard was
made so much easier than looking at the standard and just coming up
with a lesson that one might think meets the goals. This exercise was
very useful and meaningful to me and I have no doubt that I will be
using it regularly in the near future.
Unit
3 was coming up with lesson plans using what we have learned in
activity 1 and 2. This helped us put what we learned into practice.
Doing this made me practice and gave me more confidence about unpacking
and backwards mapping standards in the future. At first it was a bit
challenging to come up with an objective by not making the standard seem
like the an objective. It had to be more specific, precise, and a
concrete goal. I realized that more than one lesson could come out of
one specific part of a standard. For example one of the them stated to
demonstrate command of English punctuation when writing and to do this
in activity three I came up with more than one way to reach this goal. I
could either concentrate on just what periods, question marks and
exclamation marks are, or also teach the four different type of
sentences and the ending punctuations that they come with.
In
sum, this was one of the lessons where I have learned the most in this
program. Standards are put in place to regulate education for our
students and make sure that goals are even throughout different schools.
These provide a structure for educators but don’t tell them exactly
what or how they have to conduct their classes. By breaking the
standards and backwards mapping teachers can have a more organized way
to implement standards in their classes. Overall the standards will make
sure that our young learners have a benchmark they have to reach
ensuring their education is of quality.
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