After 3 months of hard work, we finally finished the first term of our Teachers Education program! The last class of the term was PED 3141 (Curriculum Planning, Implementation & Assessment). Throughout this course, we worked on developing unit and lesson plans.
Using the backwards design principle, we started by researching the overall and specific expectations of a unit from the curriculum website and created a summative task that assesses students' learning of these expectations. The summative task would incorporate elements (written, performance, oral) that allow students to demonstrate their learning in various ways to cater to various learning styles. We also learned to create a rubric that helps us evaluate students' understanding. After the end-goal (assessment) is set, we create a course of action to achieve it by planning a set of lessons.
The Curriculum & Assessment Plan (C&A Plan) I designed was for the Electricity unit in the grade 9 science course. The unit required students relate science to the everyday world, such as examining the impacts that energy production and consumption has on the society and the environment. I thought that concepts about electricity and energy can abstract for grade 9 students to understand, because we don’t see power stations and plants everyday. However, it is important to understand how energy is produced and consumed so that students know how energy impacts our everyday lives. For the summative task, my idea was for students to start with themselves to understand how they use electricity by monitoring their own energy consumption at home. During in-class lessons, they would branch out to investigate the concepts of energy production and generation. Students can then see the connection between themselves and the scientific knowledge they are learning. At the end, they return back to themselves to see what they can do to help minimize the impacts of energy consumption.
Details of my C&A Plan can be found here.
Thank you to Linda Radford, our instructor, who created the template and guided us every step of the way to develop the unit plan. I would also like to thank my Learning Group members: Gareth, Jim, Chelsea and Greg. We learned about developing lesson plans and had great discussions together. We also supported each other in creating our own unit plans throughout this term.
Comments