Your unit planning assignment!

   

 

A unit of work in secondary school mathematics (on a linear timetable) generally lasts 4 to 5 weeks, and includes about 10 to 12 lessons. In most courses, there are 9 or 10 units of work per year -- approximately one per month, speaking linearly. Your unit planning assignment should get you started planning for one of the units of work that you will actually be teaching for your long practicum!

Note that each of your sponsoring teachers will have slightly different requirements for unit planning, and for your practicum, you will need to work with those individual requirements.

For this course, I am most interested in seeing your background thinking and planning for designing the unit. I want to see that you can:

•answer the question "why are we learning this?";
•make connections for yourself and your students with the history, social/environmental/Indigenous connections, artistic connections, fascination and beauty of this topic;
•think deeply about the pedagogy of this topic and the possibilities for teaching it;
•work out formal and informal ways of assessing students' progress in learning this topic;
•design a large or small student mathematics project that will be part of the unit.

You will also need to think out the sequencing of your 10-12 lessons and outline this in a chart.

In planning a complete unit for your practicum, you will need to write a lesson plan for each of the lessons. But for our class purposes, I am only asking you for three lesson plans. However, these should be for especially inspiring, creative and actively engaging lessons that do not follow the traditional pattern of lecture/exercises/homework. (I expect that some but not all of your lessons in the unit will follow that traditional pattern -- but I would like to see your plans for ones that do not!)

Please download the template linked here to write up your unit plan, and stick closely to the suggested word counts for each section. You will see that you are asked to produce short paragraphs for each section, but I will expect them to be well-researched and well thought out.

Your first draft of your unit plan is due on your blog on  Nov. 27 at 9 AM. Then we will go through a process of peer editing and revision, with the revised version due for marking on Dec. 11 at 9 PM. 

Please talk with your SA about a unit you will actually be teaching in your long practicum — then post the grade, course and unit topic in the comments here by this Wednesday November 13!

Hope you enjoy the process, and then the teaching!