My learning experiences during the course, Designing Curriculum to Integrate Technology, were many. I was challenged and learned the Teaching for Understanding process of designing a lesson plan to incorporate technology. When I look back to the beginning of the course, I am reminded of how anxious I was to transform my lesson plan topic (Is Seeing Believing?) into a Teaching For Understanding lesson. Since I have always been a fan of Backward Design but never had the opportunity to use it to design a complete lesson, I was eager to learn the ins and outs of the Teaching For Understanding model. I can proudly say that this class lead me down the road to becoming profecient in designing lessons through backward design and incorporating technology to enhance student learning. The book, The Teaching For Understanding Guide, was an invaluable resource, but the actual application of the steps and help with each of them from the instructor in class was most beneficial.
To begin the backward design process, it was helpful to brainstorm several essential questions that I wanted the students to be able to answer at the end of the lesson. At first I was not sure how to narrow the list of essential questions down to one or two. With the instructor's help and looking at examples of essential questions, I realized that one (How do we know what to believe in science?) encompassed all the other questions. Perhaps the most valuable exercise that prepared me for choosing unit goals for my students was assignment 2.1, What is understanding? I was asked to examine a skill in which I felt profecient, explain how I got good at the skill, illustrate how I developed an understanding of the skill, explain how I knew I was good at it, and show evidence that proves I was good at it. This activity really made me think and relate my understanding of a skill to my students' understanding of a topic. I realized that there are many steps toward developing an understanding of a topic and that application of the understanding is imperative. Most importantly, the asssignments in class in which I created a master Word document to record my thoughts on understanding, generative topics and essential questions, unit goals, learning targets, and integrating technology into lessons, helped me learn the Teaching for Understanding framework more than I realized. Having to reason through each step and then write about each step was what made me truly understand the framework. In addition, an underlying benefit to keeping my thoughts and curriculum unit in a master document was that I learned about organizing a master document with a title page and a table of contents.
Once I selected the unit goals, I examined the various learning targets and levels of skills my students would be asked to perform. This step in the design process proved to be an eye-opening experience. I was familiar with the levels of Bloom's, yet I did not realize how important it was to make sure the student use a variety of levels, especially the upper levels that promote critical thinking skills and deep understanding of a topic. I learned to eliminate goals that only targeted the knowledge and comprehension level. Instead, I chose goals which encorporated knowledge and comprehension as well as reasoning, disposition, and product or performance.
The technology software tool that helped me the most in the design process was creating an Inspiration mind map of the topic, essential questions, goals, learning targets, and activities. Inspiration was the perfect software tool to use to layout the lesson. I am a visual person so being able to see the entire map with the goals was a tremendous help. With Inspiration I could see where to place activities and incorporate technology into the activities so that they reinforced the goals.
The Inspiration mind map also made it easier to plan to incorporate technology that enhanced student learning. Planning the acitivities and adding technology to the activities was my favorite part of the Teaching for Understanding model. Since I was so enthusiastic about incorporating technology into my lesson to enhance student learning, I knew I could transfer that enthusiasm to my students and they would enjoy using the technology as well as develop a deeper understanding of the topic because of it. I made sure the students became critical thinkers when analyzing Internet and various multimedia sources by teaching them how to evaluate a written document. After researching and analying resources it was essential that the students were able to question and argue the science topics they researched, so I incorporated an informal debate before the students were asked to use Word and write a point/counterpoint paper and a persuasive paper. Finally, the students would use Word to design a Cryptid Hunter Kit and then plan a Power Point slide show to explain the validity of the kit in a presentation to fellow Cryptozoologists at a convention.
Because I was asked to use the state standards to find goals for my students, I am now very familiar with the standards and can see their value. I have printed the state standards in science, language arts, and reading and I plan to use these standards as a guide for each of my lessons. In the future I plan to evaluate each lesson I teach and make sure that the lesson goals are planned around the state standards. Choosing goals from the state standards is the largely the utmost way to ensure the students are prepared for the state tests in the spring and will assure that valuable class time is used wisely.
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