Michael Vander Wal

Self-Reflection
In creating my unit plan, I had a unique challenge that I was mostly unprepared for. I had

to find tough and engaging subject material that was considered to be advanced, but not so

advanced that the material would fly over the heads of all of the City High 10th graders I was

teaching. City High-Middle is a school that is filled with (supposedly) the most gifted students

in all of Grand Rapids Public Schools. This being the case, I was supposed to treat all of the

students as if they were on the same intellectual level. Even though, Classes designed for

specific ability, disability, and language levels are actually filled with students who display

noteworthy differences (Oakes, Lipton, Anderson, and Stillman 2013). As such, I tried to

make the content tough, but I also did my best to mitigate the toughness through various means.
The first lesson in my unit plan was on Marxism, and specifically, Marxs critique of

capitalism. The students had just completed a lesson on classical liberalism, so this lesson was

going to be a direct response to the ideas conveyed in the previous lesson. The reading I chose

for the class was from The Communist Manifesto. This was a very tough reading, but I chose it

because I like the idea of enrichment. Anita Woolfolk (2013) describes enrichment as, giving

the (gifted) students additional, more sophisticated, and more thought-provoking work... I also

recognized, however, that a lot of students would trouble understanding Marxs ideas. To

mitigate the risk of students simply giving up on the reading, I implemented a few strategies to

make it easier for them. First, I divided the reading up into my personally made subsections, so

students would know when Marx moved to a different topic. Second, I periodically wrote

questions in the text as a formative assessment to help students see for themselves if they were

understanding the reading. It turned out that many of the students still found Marx to be a

difficult subject to try and tackle, but I mostly got a good discussion out of them during our day

of discussion.
 The next lesson I actually taught was on the proximate origins of World War I. And even

though this subject was just was just covered in a simple lecture, I found myself still facing

challenges I wasnt prepared for. I knew, for a future lesson, that I wanted to give the students

readings about how pointless and absurd World War I was, but I also knew they had no baseline

knowledge of the war (or any war) itself. In the current Blooms Taxonomy, it describes the

lower levels of the cognitive taxonomy as remembering and understanding (Woolfolk 2013).

I felt that in order to give the students the ability to think in a higher order way about World War

I, that I had to just convey some of this knowledge onto them myself. I think this strategy mostly

turned out well, but I do wish I had worked in some type of assessment for directly after I gave

my lecture.
The final lesson taught by me was about the soldiers experience during World War I.

This lesson was my weakest, and thats because the readings I assigned were too short. They

also were a lot easier reads than the Marx reading, so there wasnt actually much to go over. I

wish I had assigned a harder reading, or maybe even another piece they could read through as

well. But, while I do think the lesson is flawed, I at least know for sure that the vast majority of

students got what I was trying to convey in the lesson. The results of my ticket out the door

were very good, and I could see real results from my lesson. In that particular assessment I tried

my best to use the principles described in Teaching to Change the World. As Oakes et al. (2013)

described, I tried to make my assessment fair to all students. I told them the question they

needed to be thinking about throughout the entire lesson, and I made them write the answer only

after we had discussed its meaning in class. I just wish the students who got the lesson in a

relatively short period of time werent bored after just a few minutes of teaching the readings.
Overall, I think the lessons I taught went fairly well. The students were mostly responsive

and participatory, and I think I planned things that engaged most of them in a meaningful way. I
definitely have a lot to work on still, but Im happy about the way it all turned out. The real

thing Im worried about is what will happen when Im around regular high school kids,

because the kids in Kristin Knakes World History class were always attentive and respectful.

Students in other schools in the area might not be so easy to teach.

Bibliography
Oakes, J., Lipton, M., Anderson, L., & Stillman, J. (2013). Teaching to Change the World (4th

ed., pp. 215-303).

Woolfolk, A. (2013). Educational Psychology (12th ed., p. 158). Upper Saddle River, NJ:

Pearson Education Inc.