Planning lesson sequences effectively is essentially, to me, the backbone to successful teaching practice. One thing that I learned quite quickly during my teaching practicum was that in order to achieve an effective unit of work, with an effective sequence of lessons and learning objectives, one must prepare and plan their approach extensively. Throughout the course of my education degree I have been given the opportunity to research and trial various lesson sequence designs allowing me to develop my own approach to unit planning. Being of a HPE and English curriculum background a large variety of approaches is essential to my teaching as I strongly believe there is no universal method of lesson sequencing to cover all curriculum areas. Below is examples of some of the more effective forms of unit planning that I have implemented during my time as a pre-service teacher.
To the right is an example of an Understanding by Design or UbD unit plan developed for a year 10 English class during my first practicum in third year. First introduced by Wiggins, McTighe, & Kiernan (1998) a UbD, sometimes referred to as a backward design model, as the name suggests, is a template that allows for the educator to identify learning objectives and content aims and work backward from the completion stage to create a lesson sequence plan that can be easily implemented within most curriculum areas. This particular example was a highly effective tool for planning some of my earlier units.
Note that the learning that takes place throughout the unit progresses toward a final summative task. |
The example shown below is another unit template that I use when developing lesson sequences, this template however I designed myself. This particular unit was developed for one of my two year 9 HPE classes during my second teaching practicum in which both classes were learning Sofcrosse. I quickly discovered that both classes were not progressing at the same rate and because of this it was not appropriate to use the same lesson sequence for both groups of students. In order to best cater for each group I implemented a fluid system of lesson structuring into my unit, or non-linear pedagogy (Davids, 2010), that allowed for me to manipulate the order in which certain learning objectives and content aims were targeted. Both pre, and ongoing assessments were essential for this form of unit planning to operate successfully, however I found in my own experience that by preparing extensively before each lesson and taking specific interest in the development of my students throughout the unit, a non-linear pedagogical approach was incredibly successful in reaching curriculum outcomes. I continue to use this approach to lesson sequencing, particularly in HPE practical sessions as it allows for me to better implement a Game Sense (Pill, 2013) approach and further develop necessary skills essential for successful involvement in game scenarios.
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