Stuff that I'm comfortable with:
I found myself making similar notes on a lot of the videos, and to a large extent the videos mirrored what I wrote down in class, especially the emphasis on backward planning. By my count, five of the teachers in the videos used that phrase in their descriptions. While I didn't use that particular phrase in my writing, I described essentially the same process of first picking the standards and writing the assessments then continuing to build the daily lesson plans up to the assessment. This makes the most sense to me, because a maintained focus on the end goal seems most likely to promote the completion of that goal. It's also very comforting to me that I wasn't way off the mark in my first response. I think I'll be happily in the middle of the spectrum of planning from Mary who plans every day before the year starts to Frank who just makes broad, open-ended plans.
I also found comfort in the repeated mention of collaborative planning or Professional Learning Communities. The task of planning a school year's worth of lessons for the first time is still incredibly daunting, but the repeated mention of a professional support system helps to keep my nerves in check. I'm still not entirely sure what the focus of these groups would be, but the focus appears to be on the bigger picture. That is to say, the PLCs mostly help with unit planning and assessment making rather than the day-to-day operation of a classroom. I could be misinterpreting the information with regards to collaboration, but that was what I gleaned from the most from Beth and David.
Stuff that Worries me:
Most of the things I still worry about will be addressed over the course of the next two years, so I'm not unreasonably on edge about them. Having said that, though, I still feel the need to express the worries. First of all, I'm still unsure how to decide what should go into a unit. How do I decide what is developmentally appropriate for the students in my class and begin planning before having met any of the students? Once I know my students levels, the planning will go much more smoothly, but the front end of the planning process is still largely a mystery to me. How do you decide what units to teach? What do the state, district, and school provide to teachers that helps get the planning process started?
Second, there was a good bit of variation between the different schools and school districts in terms of planning. Some of the teachers described situations with very little flexibility with their schedules, because their schools or school districts had such rigid requirements. As a teacher who passionately cares about the students learning, how would I tread the line between ensuring my students actually learn and meeting the requirements of the school and district and state? If I needed to adjust the pace of my lessons to account for the fluidity and unpredictability of students' learning and abilities, how would I navigate the rigidity of those required structures?
Finally, the video with Mary brought up something that I hadn't crossed my mind before. Planning to account for fire drills and other built in class disruptions. The thing about this that worries me isn't the idea of class occasionally being disrupted. I knew that would happen. What worries me is the idea that I haven't thought of all the different ways in which class could be disrupted. How difficult is it to adjust planning to mesh with all the different types of outside disruptions that might affect the flow of a class?
