Successes
One of the things I have found to be the most empowering about this curriculum writing experience is that I actually have the time to do it in such detailed fashion! I have the time to be thoughtful and reflect, revise, attach documents, etc. that I don’t always have the time to do formally during the school year. Every teacher finds themselves one time or another in a situation where the lessons in a unit are getting planned one-by-one rather than as a cohesive unit. I’m reminded through this experience in writing a curriculum unit just how important that cohesive planning is! As I got to some of the culminating parts of the unit, I realized that it would be better if I tweaked something at the beginning. I also was constantly monitoring for alignment to the standards. Sometimes when we’re in the school year and we’re begin pulled in a million directions, something’s got to give. For me, it’s occasionally this cohesive large-scale unit planning that gets traded out for week-by-week or lesson-by-lesson planning. The success I’ve felt in taking the time writing this unit is exactly the reminder I needed for how important whole-unit planning is.
Given that my externship placement is in a mathematical sciences institute, the work I’m doing here is inherently relevant to what I teach my students. I love that I’m not struggling for a context for the math, or having to give students some contrived application. I tweeted a week or so ago that there was so much math in my project that the curriculum is practically writing itself, and that’s true! I can visualize what this is going to look like in my classroom, and I am really stoked!
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges for me in this curriculum writing is timing. It’s something I’ve always struggled with as a teacher. When I do something for the first time, I’m either right on or way off as far as how long it will actually take the kids to do. I think I’ve done a good job with this unit, but I worry that it will not go according to the plan because it will take much more or much less time than I thought. But then again, what ever really goes according to plan in education?!
The other challenging part of this is that I know the ultimate intention is for this curriculum unit to be published as a resource that any teacher could search, find, and implement. So often, I write plans with my specific students in mind. My students are typically AIG, accelerated by 1-2 grade levels in math, super nerds (I can say that, because I’m a super nerd too), excited to do cool math–not exactly the norm in every math class out there. I found it very challenging to write this for the generic classroom, without making assumptions about what they know or have access to. I wanted to tailor it to my specific situation, but had to remind myself frequently that I’m more of an exception than a norm, meaning no details or explanations were too simple or obvious. I am glad I had to shift my perspective in this way, because it will help me going forward as I work with other teachers in my building who are developing curriculum for classrooms and students different than my own.