Johanna Busch
Unit Planning
Unit plans allow me to plan out how I will utilize my curriculum and standards over several weeks in my classroom. Unit plans ensure that every lesson, assessment, and activity builds towards a long term goal. All of my units are summarized in my long term plan. This ensures that each unit builds on the last and that the appropriate amount of time is spent on each skill. My math unit plans are based on my school's math curriculum, Pearson's Investigations. Basing my unit plans on this curriculum ensures vertical alignment across grades at my school. Though I use the scope, sequence, and objectives from Investigations, I often supplement with other materials that I think will be more engaging or better fit my students' needs. Furthermore, my unit plans are living documents. I plan a tentative schedule for objectives and assessments. This schedule is almost always adjusted based on formative assessment data.
Collaborative Planning
I create unit and long term plans in collaboration with the other teachers on my team and our school's math instructional coach. As an early career teacher, collaborative planning allows me to utilize the expertise of more experienced teachers. During collaborative planning, my instructional coach often challenges me to make sure I am effectively backward planning. We look at each unit assessment together and then map out quizzes, formative assessments, and lesson objectives from it. Talking through my plans with an experienced math teacher, who is deeply familiar with the curriculum I am using, allows me to better utilize my curriculum to support each individual student.
This is an image of a planning meeting with our school's instructional coach. We meet every Tuesday morning to create unit plans, adjust plans based on formative assessment. During this meeting, we decided to reteach finding the sum of multiple addends by finding doubles, near-doubles, and combinations that make ten based on an exit ticket that showed many students were still struggling with this skill. Examples of the exit ticket are shown below. Ms. Albright helped me identify common misconceptions and plan a reteach lesson to address them.
Above is an example exit ticket that I reviewed with Ms. Albright. This student correctly identified combinations that make ten. However, he struggled to clearly organize and show his work and correctly add the remaining numbers.
Above is an example exit ticket that I reviewed with Ms. Albright. This student understood that he was supposed to make a ten. However, he struggled to correctly identify which numbers made 10 and to add the remaining numbers.
Examining these exit tickets helped me to plan to support each individual student. During this meeting, we examined the exit tickets of individual students. Ms. Albright suggested multiple strategies I could put into place to support students at varying levels of mastery of this skill. Based on these suggestions, I planned to support students who were deeply struggling with this skill by pulling them to work in a small group using manipulatives during the reteach lesson. I planned to support students who were approaching mastery by reteaching strategies and providing practice time. I planned to support students who had already mastered this skill by creating an extension game. This extension game involved rolling dice to add a two-digit and one-digit number. Collaborative planning allows me to plan based on the needs of all of my students.
After each meeting, Ms. Albright sends out notes to all the second grade teachers. These notes hold me accountable to backwards planning. I am constantly being reminded of the end goals for my students to ensure that I am effectively planning to meet these goals. These notes ensure that I am staying on track of the planning of upcoming units and am making necessary adjustments for the current unit.
Unit Planning
After meeting with the instructional coach and the rest of my team and referencing our long term plan, I create a unit plan. Unit plans include the goals for the unit, summative, and formative assessments. Unit plans also include a calendar which maps out daily standard, objective, warm ups, and activities. This calendar ensures that I am backwards planning form the unit assessment to make sure my students meet rigorous goals. Furthermore, unit plans often include interdisciplinary projects. These are opportunities for students to develop cross-disciplinary skills and relate what they are learning in math class to their real lives. Connecting math class to the community context engages students and encourages them to use their skills and knowledge from outside the classroom to succeed.
Below is a unit plan for second grade math unit 2 about geometry and fractions. This unit plan discusses the skills that students need to master to succeed on the unit test and then breaks them into two quizzes and a variety of formative assessments (observations, exit tickets, a fraction flag assignment). A Geometry Dream House interdisciplinary project is also planned. In this project, students use art, writing, and geometry skills to describe what their dream house would look like. This project connects to the community context because it ties into a year long project about housing in the neighborhood around our school. Students discuss housing issues effecting their neighborhood and address them through their geometry dream houses.
Fraction Flags
This unit plan includes multiple opportunities for cross disciplinary learning. Students applied their content knowledge about fractions to a cross-disciplinary project about flags. Students used fraction terms to analyze existing flags. This gave students an opportunity to connect what they are learning in math to social studies concepts about different countries and communities. Next, students used their visual art skills to create draft fraction flags. Students designed their flags and labeled them using fraction vocabulary. Finally, students created their own final fraction flags and briefly described what kind of imagined community they might represent.
This project connected math to students' communities. Some students chose to create flags of countries where there parents or grandparents come from. This gave my class a chance to discuss the different countries that influence their communities and families.
This quick cross disciplinary project allowed students to connect knowledge from math, visual arts, and social studies to better understand a real world application of skills learned in all three content areas. Below are two examples of the draft fraction flags.
These are the draft fraction flags of a high performing student. This student was able to use fraction vocabulary to label and describe her fraction flags. Participating in a cross disciplinary project allows students who have mastered math content to apply this content to a real world application in a different content area.
These are the draft fraction flags of a low performing student. This student was able to correctly label one part of their draft flags but did not label the halves or fourths. Participating in a cross disciplinary project will hopefully help this student become more comfortable describing fractions.
Unit 2 Summative Assessment
Below are examples of the Unit 2 summative assessment. Most students scored above 80% on this unit assessment. I have included a high, medium, and low work sample to demonstrate different levels of mastery achieved by my students. Backwards planning for this assessment allowed most of my students to achieve mastery on this unit assessment. Clear learning objectives, aligned formative assessments, and engaging applications to the real-world context pushed students to achieve in this unit. Planning pushed my students to achieve rigorous learning goals.
This is the Unit 2 assessment of a student who scored very high on the test. Students who scored very high on this assessment achieved mastery of the second grade geometry standards. These students were ready to move on to more complicated concepts, such as repeated addition with arrays or comparing fractions.
This is the Unit 2 assessment of a student who received a score in the medium range. Most students who received average scores on the test mastered identifying shape names and fractions. Most of these students still struggled to identify the number of faces on three dimensional shapes and the number of columns and rows in an array.
This is a Unit 2 assessment of a student who received a low score, compared with the class average. Students who received low scores on the summative assessment were still struggling to identify halves, thirds and fourths. These students are still learning to identify two dimensional shapes.
Unit Planning Conclusion
In conclusion, I utilize long term and unit plans to ensure that I am backwards planning to support each individual student in achieving rigorous learning goals. My long term plan maps out a year long plan for second grade math based on my school’s curriculum. Based on this long term plan and student assessment, I create unit plans collaboratively with other teachers on my team and our school’s instructional coach. This section highlights a geometry unit plan. During this unit, students participated in cross-disciplinary learning which connect to their community context through the creation of fraction flags. Unit tests show that students met rigorous learning goals by the end of this unit. Long term and unit planning sets me up for effective lesson planning by helping me backwards plan for student success.