Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Standard 1 and Conceptualization: Knowing the subject matter is an essential role for
the teacher. Having the ability to make that knowledge meaningful for students is equally
as important. Before I created this unit plan, I had taken a Shakespeare class and felt
comfortable with the content. The next step was to make the content relevant for students.
To do this I went through the play and mapped out essential themes and concepts to be
addressed. Next, I broke them down and created an anticipation guide to assess students
prior knowledge. I considered this to be important because it would help students form
connections to content that can be challenging to relate to.
When it came time for me to begin teaching lessons in my field placement, I was
able to use parts of my unit sketch. For example, my lesson plan focused on rhetoric in
the funeral speeches in the play. I then went back to the themes from my unit sketch and
used them to help form questions to guide student thinking (yellow highlighted areas are
the sections I pulled from my unit sketch for my lesson). Due to the content knowledge I
had, I was able to ask students to not only identify and analyze rhetoric in the speeches;
but I was also able to push them to make broader, more substantial connections to the
play. In addition to this, I was able to touch on the anticipation guide from the beginning
of the unit that focused on key themes in the play (where students were asked to connect
Shakespearean themes to modern day scenarios). This helped solidify content knowledge
for students because they were able to connect themes within the play to the new lesson
on rhetoric and they were also able to refer back to the relevant, personal connections
they made to the themes in the beginning of the unit. The depth of my content knowledge
in this situation allowed for me to bring the lesson full circle and made for an engaging
classroom discussion on the relevance of Shakespeare in modern day society.
Standard 2: Teachers need to be aware of and have the ability to effectively teach to the
vast array of ability levels that exist in each class. Throughout my unit sketch I had many
formative assessments and one summative narrative assessment. The objective was for
students to demonstrate their knowledge of the themes and character traits addressed in
the play, and to write their own narrative piece using one theme and one character that
exhibited similar traits of a character in the play. This strategy pushed students to not only
explain the themes and characters they read about in Julius Caesar, but to also employ
their creative writing skills to create a story using the same concepts. Students would also
be required to write a brief self-assessment to outline connections to the play as well as
their progress from the rough draft to the final piece (standard 8). To help students assess
their own progress, I arranged for one-on-one mini conferences where individual goals
were decided upon by the teacher and student based on the individual ability level of each
student.
When creating my lesson plan for my field placement (Artifact 2) I referred back to the
unit sketch and the teaching tools (anticipation guide, worksheets, ESL support materials,
etc.) I created for it. I then thought about the range of abilities that existed in my field
placement with specific attention to ESL learners; as I knew the Shakespearean language
would prove to be a challenge. To assist students in need of additional support, I printed
out a PowerPoint presentation on rhetoric I did the previous day and included additional
notes. I also had papers with Shakespearean terminology and modern day definitions
available for the class (specific strategies are highlighted in blue within my lesson plan
below).
Standard 4: The use of multiple teaching strategies is necessary to best serve the diverse
learning needs of all students. In my unit sketch, I used a variety of mediums to expose
students to the content paired a mixture of activities to teach the lessons. For example, the
students explored the play through an audio recording, reading from the textbook, select
video clips of live performances, and BBCs made for television version. Which appealed
to auditory and visual learners (standard 3). I also included questions asking students to
compare each portrayal of the play.
My unit sketch outlined the use of multiple instructional strategies throughout the plan