I am, by nature, a bit of a skeptic and even up through the last week or two I truly did not believe that the New Teacher plan would make sense by the end of the semester. All of a sudden, however, it clicked! I think that it was at the point when we did the 15 session layout when I finally said, "aha!"
Talking about the mission, the big ideas, essential questions, and assessments was all well and good, but at this point in our lives most of us are still teachers and possess that burning question...what are we going to do with the students? Finally, it all makes sense. This process has been a bit like learning to ride a bike. I was very shaky at the beginning but now that I have the hang of it I'm excited to go out and do it again.
One of the biggest things that my group, as New Teacher curriculum developers, has focused on is the importance of self reflection. During this process I think that we have really all done a lot of self-reflection ourselves. I know that I have questioned a lot of things that are going on in my district in terms of curriculum development and I have also contemplated a lot of the assessments and goals that I have in my own classroom. In my district, the teachers have a lot of freedom (not sure whether this is good or not!) in terms of what really goes on in the classroom. This is nice in the sense that I can try some new assessments and activities on my own without getting nabbed for it by my principal.
My NT group really worked together well and I was able to see how a curriculum committee in a school district could really create a very functional UBD curriculum for a given subject area. This would of course be assuming that all members are working towards the same goal. Creating curriculum is a big task and it's easy to miss things here and there, so having this group to collaborate with is a great way to submerge yourself in the process for the first time.
Hopefully the baby steps that we have taken to get through this NT process will now make it easier for each one of us to individually take this information back to our own districts so we can try to get teaching back on track as teachers and maybe one day as administrators.
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I think our group worked well together as well. And I also agree with you, I did a lot of self-reflection this semester. And now that I understand the Ubd model for designing curriculum, I am eager to implement it in my own classroom next year. It was easy for me to forget about valid assessments, formal or informal, summative or formative. I would always try so hard to create "games" that involved some of the content I was teaching. But after this course, it is evident that not all assessments have to be fun, although they can be. It is much mor engaging when the assessment values the students as individual thinkers. There is so much I think we can take back to our schools , both now and in the future.
I must admit I felt the same way. In the beginning of this project my group and I were very confused about how to go about this project from the beginning. I think it was because we were all coming from different directions starting with our mission. Yet, once we came agreed on our end result, our ideas for assessments just fell into place with our goals. Now we have a clear vision for what we are attempting to accomplish and are content with our program satisfying our goals and impacting new teacher success.
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