Eng 345 Post # 10

Brown's readings that were assigned this past week talked about curriculum and unit plans. Curriculum can be very overwhelming in the idea that not everything goes to plan. You may have planned out numerous activities for a day that dealt with the topic matter you were teaching and were not able to get to all of them due to the students not grasping the idea of the concept immediately. It was a relief to see that Brown talked of this because things never always go to plan and it is a crazy to believe that in a classroom of diverse students a teacher will be able to follow the curriculum or their unit plan word for word or step of step. Brown discusses the needs of the students as objective and subjective. The objectives are what we have all been used to preparing and planning, "The students will be able to demonstrate...etc" in our lesson plans. Of course these are important and essential because students attend school in order to learn. However, because things change from year to year, day to day, and especially from student to student, we need to keep in mind the subjective needs of the students when teaching in order to accommodate to their needs.The question that arouses for me, is how exactly do you incorporate all of these subjective needs in a lesson plan? Do they necessarily have to be written out, or can we simply imply that things are not going to go as planned and give our plans and curriculum flexibility?

Kumar took a different approach in what was discussed in the readings and focused on M&M/ macro-strategies / mismatch observational scheme. In this observational scheme, the teacher observes themselves in how they approach a lesson, teach it, meet the students needs, and how they can improve themselves in doing so. The three main points of observation include pre-observation, observation, and post observation. I feel that all three of these observation points are important in the idea that this gives ourselves as teachers so observe ourselves before, during, and after in order to compare what we had to planned, to actually what happened, and then focus on the improvements we can make in future lessons to better them. The quote that my C&I 212 teacher would always say is "There is no other profession like teaching where each day you have a fresh start". I completely believe and agree with that. By analyzing and observing ourselves we can definitely continue to improve in order to become the best teachers we can be.