Reflecting on the Process

I realize the difficulty of designing such a program for new teachers and the challenges a team faces when trying to change the way they write curriculum, plan lessons, and teach those lessons. In addition to this, time becomes a very important issue. I had a discussion with my principal about my new teacher project and she was surprised with the accomplishments made on this project considering that there is currently a team working on a similar project for the district that will take them all year to complete if they are lucky.

There must be a clear understanding of the UBD framework in order to productively and efficiently progress through the stages of backward design. I found that challenges were added when deciding on assessments, their sequence, and how these assessments relate back to the big ideas and essential questions that were developed months ago. I realized that we had to focus on fewer questions and come up with the most crucial essential questions necessary to make this program a success and a valuable professional development experience for new teachers. The other challenge was choosing the most essential assessments that could be completed in 10 meetings. We had compiled many different assessments and are faced with the challenge of deciding what are most important to our goals for the program. During the process of developing this new teacher curriculum program I realized the importance of determining the most critical big ideas to support the foundation of the UBD processes by focusing on the desired results. If the big ideas are not reflective to what must be accomplished, it is difficult to continue to design the assessments and learning experiences that will satisfy the crucial desired results.