How does your understanding of young adolescents and middle-level philosophy (interdisciplinary curriculum) affect curriculum planning?

  How does your understanding of young adolescents and middle-level philosophy (interdisciplinary curriculum) affect curriculum planning?

My understanding of young adolescents and middle-level philosophy affects curriculum planning by determining how I want the students to process the information and develop the knowledge. The middle level philosophy is for us teachers to meet the intellectual and developmental characteristic needs of young adolescents. In my future classroom, I think that my understand of young adolescents and middle-level philosophy can affect my curriculum planning by relating my content to things that students understand my information. My goal of being a teacher is to have students understand the information and learn how to connect these things to stuff they already know. At Phoenix, Mr. Estice connects many of their lessons to things they already know. Last week on Wednesday, the students got to choose what they were talking about. During the second block class, the students called out many logical fallacies they heard during the debates. They connected the information they knew to the conversation they were having. It was very interesting to hear students connecting the dots in real life. In the readings and videos we had to watch, we learned about understanding by design, Unit design,  and UbD. We are going to be using this information for the rest of our teaching careers. 

UbD

    What is Ubd? UbD is understanding by design. To me. UbD is when teachers are looking at the outcomes at the end of a lesson before creating the unit itself. There are 3 stages of UbD. Stage I is identify desired results. Stage II is determine evidence. And stage III is plan learning experiences. So far in class we have been walking through UbD with our Unit project. We want students to able to understand what the future holds with climate change, environmental changes, etc. We then planned to have them create a diorama in order to present the information they have learned. This "project" would force students to have a depth of processing on what the future holds for our environment. UbD is a good thing for us to learn so that we can ensure our students have a meaningful learning experience. 

 Reflection from seeing my CT planning

    During spring break, I asked Mr. Estice to show me how he planned his lessons. We spent well over an over talking about how he plans different things. He gave me many different beneficial pieces of advice that I will use throughout my teaching career. One that I will have to remember and embed in my brain is that your lesson plan doesn't always go as planned and you have to either take something out or substitute  the lesson. Many of his lessons include student voice. He teaches a class that forces students to learn how to properly debate. He lets them chose their own topics to debate in class, therefore this class in more student voice based.