Blog 3. The Designer Teacher

Who are you designing for? 

You are designing a lot of things when you are a teacher. You are designing lesson plans that are relevant for the students and match the different learning levels that are in your classroom. You are putting into your lesson plan check points to make sure the students are able to follow your instruction. When designing your classroom or lesson plans you have to consider the students who are following your lessons, the parents who may have question and are curious where they can follow the material. As well as thinking of your common core standards who ask for different points to be implemented into your curriculum. 

What are you designing? 

I'm designing an atmosphere in my classroom. A place where students can be free to be inquisitive and not be ridiculed for it. I'm designing different lesson plans yearly and just using last years lesson plans as a guide line. The students change every year and I am not saying I will start from scratch every year, but I will add and tweak the lesson plans to the new crop of students I will be teaching. I do not want to over use technology in the class but I want to design lesson plans that evolves with the students and challenges them.  

What's the final product of your design?

The final product will be a building block for them to move forward. My area of concentration is English and I hope the children will walk away with the understanding that reading content is just as important as pictures. The students use visual aide so much now I fear that they will read for fun less and less. I hope that each year the students walk away with a healthy desire to want to be in school as much as I do. 

Reflection:

I liked the discussion of teachers being designers in both the traditional and none traditional sense. We model the mind of young adults and will touch a lot of lives. What I find is the new common core standards we will have to instruct will gives us a lot of freedom in how we present the material to the students and what we can use.  This allows for each of us to teach to our own abilities which will benefit the students. When you are allowed to design and present the lesson plan to your own strengths, the students benefit. I like how we are starting to think more outside the box and this will lead to richer classroom instruction I feel.