What Changes Were Made to the Unit When You Taught the Lessons?

Please describe how you approached planning your unit. Highlight the UDL and differentiation components of the unit.

Since Science is not my strongest or my favorite subject, the first thing I did while planning for my unit plan was teach myself the content. My unit plan is on SOL PS.5, which focuses on investigating and understanding changes in matter, such as physical changes, chemical changes, and nuclear reactions, and understanding how such changes relate to the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy. So before planning, I reviewed the curriculum guide and noted the things that were helping me learn: such grasping the idea of a physical change before grasping chemical changes, then after learning chemical changes understanding where and how chemical equations are formulated, then going into nuclear reactions. Often I had to ask my CRC to explain certain things to me that I could not grasp based on what I was reading online. After going over the content, I began to look at UDL components such as visual, auditory, and tactical representation. So for my unit plan I incorporated videos, sorting activities, white board activities, group activities, graphic organizers such as foldable and venn diagrams, and manipulativeslike candy and S’mores.

What changes were made to the unit when you taught the lessons?

Quite a few changes had to be made to my unit plan; the biggest one was pushing my unit plan until later this month or perhaps the beginning of next year. While teaching the previous SOL, we encountered multiple unplanned events, such as benchmark testing. My CRC and I also had to do a lot of remediation and re-teaching our students concepts that they need to know to move forward. Lately, we have noticed that our students are not performing at a level that reflects understanding of the material, so we constantly find ourselves trying different strategies to reinforce a concept. We are trying activities such as Bingo, Kahoot!, graphic organizers, partner work, sorting activities, and tactical learning. As a result of this, I had to create another unit plan within PS.4 in order to complete my Unit Plan assignment requirement. For this unit plan, I did not have the time or ability to put as much thought as I did for my PS.5 unit plan but I still incorporated UDL components.

What did you learn from the experience?

From this experience I have learned that regardless how you plan for your student’s, they ultimately decide how the day’s, week’s or unit plan will go. I have learned that even if you have a plan set and ready, you cannot proceed until your students understand concepts they need to move forward. Remediation and re-teaching are an essential part of teaching if we want to prepare our students for success.