In the last year and a half, I learned how difficult it is to cover all curricular outcomes. In fact, my cooperating teacher in my pre-internship has shared with me that it is impossible to cover all outcomes within a school year. However, I have learned to plan lessons in creative ways to meet cross-curricular outcomes – increasing the potential of more outcomes being covered in a single lesson. By following a cross-curricular approach, students will also learn how to apply their knowledge from one class to another. This demonstrates to the students that what they are learning is not limited to a single subject area and can be applied into several other subject areas and real life itself. I believe that by fostering this, students will learn how to think critically in future classes in order to identify how what they are learning will benefit them in their lives.
I also believe that lessons should be engaging and meaningful. With that, in order to plan for successful lessons, it is important to know and have strong relationships with my students. When these relationships are established early on, it allows for us to have a good understanding of who our learners are, their interests, and what kinds of teaching and learning styles and techniques works best for them. With this information, we will be able to incorporate them into our planning to create lessons that are interesting, and therefore engaging and meaningful. In addition, knowing our learners also allows for us to find ways to adapt our lessons or even plan for the unexpected.
Finally, in my understanding, a successful lesson means that the students are learning growing and I believe in order for teachers and students to see their growth, they must be provided helpful feedback. With that, another important component of planning is planning for assessment. Similar to lessons, forms of assessment should be suitable and tailored to fit how our students learn best. However, regardless of what form of assessment is used, feedback should always be given and should always be meaningful and helpful; meaning that students can use this feedback to help them enhance their skills, build on strengths, and work in the areas in need of improvement.