Unit Planning

I think our unit planning went very well. Since we had already planned on teaching our unit right after spring break, Alison and I were able to work on it a lot over spring break, both together and independently. We had everything done before we started teaching our unit at all except for our last lesson and to type out our final draft of our summative assessment. Since our schedules and the schedule of our class conflict a lot, we worked it out so that we would both teach two lessons independently and the last lesson together. I taught the first and second lessons while Alison taught the third and fourth lessons. Although we would have liked to be able to teach together, or at least to be able to observe each other's lessons, we decided that it would be best to split things up this way for the benefit of our students. We did not think it would make a lot of sense to have to carry the unit over three weeks just so that we could both be in the classroom at the same time. I was also excited, though a bit nervous too, about teaching a lesson on my own because I had never done that before. I thought now was a perfect opportunity to get some practice with this since we would still have our classroom teacher to give us feedback on our teaching.

Even though we taught separately, we planned the general outline of our unit and all of the activities and assessments we would do during our unit together. This was a good thing to do so that we were both on the same page with the unit as a whole and knew what each other was going to cover. We both created the lesson plans for the lessons we taught individually by oursevles regarding the specific content covered and details of how the lesson was going to run. We still shared all of our materials for our lessons though so that we could both see what was going to be covered in each lesson. We created the last lesson together since we team-taught it. We also did not create this lesson plan until the other four lessons were already taught so that we could see how everything went in the unit beforehand. That way, if we needed to reteach something, we would have time in our last lesson to do so. I think this was a good idea, especially because we had a whole week between the fourth lesson and the last lesson in which to create the final lesson plan. It was beneficial for us to be able make sure we covered everything we wanted to.