Writing Reflection: Unit Plans

Writing Reflection on Unit Plan Writing

This reflection is based upon my writing up my first unit plan on Ag Construction. The unit itself is to teach safety in the shop room, safety in the ag construction industry, get them acquainted with the tools in the shop room, and lastly create a small under $ 10.00 project that they could keep if desired. This blog is meant as a personal reflection on how I felt attempting to write a unit plan for the very first time.

 I understand why unit plans are important, I truly do. They help organize the thinking side of planning day to day activities. They help with the organization of thoughts. Especially for me and food science (where I think all of food science is important #DualMajorProbs).  So here I go trying to explain what I liked and what I now know I don't like.

For example I don't like trying to figure out how to make standards make sense.  I do enjoy how the AFNR standards are written.  I would love to during the spring talk with my cooperative teachers about how to really utilize those standards. I just find it difficult to explain standards in a way that make sense. My unit plan I wrote was all about Ag Construction and requires the students to do algebra but the high school algebra standards aren't written in a way that makes me comfortable to put them down. I now know I need to become more familiar with standards as a whole and how to approach them in a unit plan.








One aspect I liked writing about lesson plans was an emphasis on Safety. The one thing I liked about my internship was safety and I think that students should need to realize that safety is every single major companies priority. Hopefully they can learn more my focusing on safety a bit. The other way I look at it, this will be the first time for a lot of them to actually use a lot of the tools.






Another factor I had to reconsider is time. At first I was like oh these kids are going to need to take a full day on each piece of equipment. Then I thought about my engineering classes and how I was all about not standing there and watching. So I thought of a solution of that: a project at the end of the unit.  If the students fly through the safety training they do I'll have a single day overview of industry safety and then start on tool demonstrations. If they fly through tool demonstrations then I'll have them begin their first project.  More time on the project means they can spend time on it making it even better. 

I also learned something about myself writing this lesson plan: I really don't like the idea of failing kids.  I liked the idea of class participation counting because I look at it like this: in the real world you are expected to work for x amount of hours a day - so I should feel ok to have part of their grade reflective on their work.  Which is why I like that part of my unit plan. I like that students have to be involved in my unit in order to pass the unit. I figure it makes it harder for students to fail that way. Obviously if a student comes into my class late I would adjust their grade for the unit to be different.

I can't wait to get feedback and get more comfortable in writing unit plans.

To Be Continued . . .