EDU6150 Course Reflection

4.4 Designing Coherent Instruction in the area of Lesson and Unit Structure. In this course, General Inquiry, Teaching and Assessment Methods, I was given the opportunity to learn, practice and demonstrate my understanding of 4.4. Ultimately, allowing for me to develop a lesson plan based on aspects of 4.4, such as learning standards, pre-assessment, informal and formal assessment, learning targets, student voice, and academic language.

Within 4.4, I believe that one of my main takeaways was on the importance of assessment. Figure 1 explains how assessments can be used to determine students’ zone of proximal development. This is a post I made for my EDU 6132 Learners in Context course. In this passage, both Pressley et al. (2007) and myself, imply that an educator is more effective when a student’s zone of proximal development is determined. Through the use of assessments (e.g. pre-assessments, informal and formal assessments), an educator can determine what a student is prepared to learn with assistance (i.e. from what they couldn’t answer) and independently (i.e. from what they could answer). Based on the results of students’ assessments, an educator can prioritize content, provide necessary assistance, and manage time. Most importantly, an educator can differentiate the lesson in order to meet the needs of each and every student. This not only decreases the amount of students that fall behind, but also decreases the amount of students that are held back from excelling forward. In order to determine students’ zone of proximal development and guide student learning, I plan on utilizing my content area’s learning standards to develop a series of assessments across a lesson plan.