Before I entered this program I had no idea how much planning was required of teachers, or how much I would enjoy hunting down interesting material to show my students. In November and December there were weeks of unit planning. In the early stages, a wall in my room was devoted to post-it notes. I moved the content around regularly trying to find the perfect flow of idea and material development. When I was finally ready to move onto a digital format I typed up my unit plan into a template. Then revisions began, I had second thoughts about several pieces of my units and re-worked them again and again.
When I had my FA meeting before long practicum began I saw things through my FA’s eyes and moved more content around and shifted the weight of projects. When all my planning made it into the classroom, things changed again. Obviously. The students drove the instruction in directions I hadn’t predicted and needed things stressed for them that I had to revise. Each day after class, I would take a few moments to write down the things that I wanted to change about what I had planned to deliver for the next day.
Throughout the process, I was continuing to pick up current events, more artists and art work from all around me and work them into my units until they started to feel lively and fresh. Now I can’t stop myself from seeing everything around me and evaluating whether or not it would be useful in one unit or another.