Reflections on Unit Planning

One of my first large assignments of the semester in my AEE 412: Methods of Teaching Agriculture course was to write a unit plan for a unit I will teach during my student teaching internship. Before my final presentation in December, I will be required to write a unit plan for each of the units I will teach in the spring semester (I will have 17 in total). This first assignment allows each of us student teachers to spend a great deal of time focusing on writing and receiving feedback on one unit plan, which will ultimately help us refine our process as we move forward to write the rest. 

I chose to write a unit plan for the Animal Nutrition unit in the Animal Science course I will teach with Mrs. Sarabeth Alderfer. I selected this unit to focus on because it is one where I had some prior knowledge while still having a good bit of room to learn and receive feedback from others! I need to give a great deal of credit to Mr. Dale Olver, who taught me most everything I know about this unit in my ANSC 201 course several semesters ago. I have heard AEE students thank Dale repeatedly over the past three years for the knowledge he has equipped them with, and now I can say the same for myself as I speak from experience :).

The Penn State instructional team requires us to design our unit plans with 14 essential elements. These are as follows:

Name of Unit, Unit Rationale, Number of Class Sessions, Length of Each Class Session, Supplies Needed for Unit, PA Agriculture Standards, PA Academic Standards Addressed, Unit Goals, Names of Lesson Titles, Specific Daily Learning Objectives Addressed, Unit Assessment/Evaluation Strategy, SAE Integration, FFA Integration, and References in APA Format

The process was a bit daunting at first, starting right from the outset with designing the unit plan. There is no specific format for creating a unit plan, so I had to do some work to create a template of my own that contains all of the necessary information in an organized and reader-friendly way for both myself and any potential administrators who would want to review my instructional design. The final product ended up looking like this:

My favorite parts of the unit planning process involved identifying the standards I would address and outlining my unit goals. These elements are more "big picture" in nature and I found them easier to complete. The process of unit planning becomes more tricky when it comes to the day-to-day planning of each lesson and its specific objectives! I enjoyed this process too, but it definitely required a good bit of editing and refining to ensure I was planning instruction that will allow my students with the opportunity to learn what they need to learn in an organized way.

The most challenging part of this process for me was the materials section (by far). Because I wanted to do my unit planning as well as I possibly could from the start, I decided to outline my materials based on each day of instruction I had planned. This required me to think critically about what each day's lesson would look like before I wrote the full lesson plan for each day...which was a challenge! I quickly learned that planning units of instruction is not an easy task, and as I start out in this process it can be rather time consuming and frustrating. I had to remind myself many times to fix my attitude and let go of my need for the plans to be perfect - if you know me then you know this is not necessarily my strong suit :). 

This assignment allowed us to get feedback from our peers as we reviewed each other's unit plans to help one another strive for excellence. Thanks to Seanna and Celia for their valuable feedback on my plan! I made some changes to my unit assessment and lesson objectives thanks to their suggestions. I also got to review Paige and Noah's unit plans, which allowed me to see strengths they had that I incorporated in my own plan!

Lastly, I also gained some experience in finding and evaluating pre-existing instructional resources. For this topic, I was a fan of the curriculum I found from Sam Houston State University. Looking over what other educators had created helped me build a proper order in my lesson planning and shaped my unit assessment. I ended up building my assessment as a scenario in which the students are animal nutritionists consulting for a local dairy farmer - I think they will be ready for the job after our unit is done :). Be on the lookout in February for some cool lessons and hands-on lab experiences, including (hopefully) a digestive exploration lab using a real cattle digestive tract! 

I am grateful for each of you who read this - one foot in front of the other as we tackle this next week. We got this!