Before joining this MAT program, I had experienced four years of teaching the English language while living abroad in Japan.  That experience gave me a good sense of what it is like to teach a class in the general sense of being in charge of the learning of a group of students, but the nature of the job, splitting my time between a number of schools and classrooms throughout the workweek, left me with an incomplete understanding of the process of concentrating on building towards a specific learning goal with a particular group of students.  With this work sample, I was able to gain a detailed understanding of all of the facets of the teaching process that go into building and implementing a single unit of study.  Throughout the initial planning phase, the construction of the pre-assessment, the recursive process of teaching and revising lesson plans, the use of both formal and informal assessment to track student growth, and finally the post-assessment and analysis of data, I have had many successes and many challenges that have helped me to grow immensely as an educator. 

During the planning phase, I used the social studies state standards that I would be teaching towards to construct a series of learning goals and objectives for my students and then designed a curriculum that would lead them on a path to accomplish those aims.  Because my subject, ancient Egypt, was something that most of the students had little prior experience with, there was a lot of ground to cover in a short one month period, and I struggled to fit all of the many topics I held to be important into that short time.  Looking back now I can see that I may even have tried to focus on too many different areas within my unit where it would have been a better use of the students' time to delve deeper rather than wider into the subjects we studied. 

I also encountered difficulties with the fact that November was a time of chaotic scheduling at my host school thanks to conferences, grading days, Thanksgiving Break, and shortened class periods due to the necessity of extra practice time for an all-school theatre performance that was coming in early December.  The many changes that these events forced upon my unit gave me many opportunities to practice flexibility within my unit. I was forced to cancel an entire lesson at one point and any number of in-class activities throughout the unit.  Still, I often felt that I rushed through a few highly engaging activities due to a personal feeling that we needed to accomplish all of the other goals I had in mind for that class period.  In the future I will try to give more consideration and flexibility to areas where student interest levels seem to be high so that the students will have a higher sense of ownership in their learning.

Within the teaching of each class period, I also realized that I need to spend more time focusing on the smaller details of teaching a class in addition to the meatier activity portion, which I think I handled quite well.  Specifically, I think that I can do a better job of making sure to write and go over each day's objectives with the students so that they know what they should be focusing on during the lesson.  Often, my class period was right after lunch and so in the chaos of students entering the room and trying to get things started in a timely manner I would skip over this essential detail.  Then, again at the end of the period, I would often be rushed to close out whatever activity we were completing, or finishing an explanation of the day's homework, and I would either rush through the day's exit slip to the point where I was left with an unhelpful entry, or towards the end of the unit I would forget it entirely.  I partially think that this forgetfulness will get better as I become more comfortable in the classroom setting, but I will still need to place an emphasis on this concluding period.  By forgetting to have students complete the exit slip, I am missing out on an important formative assessment that can help both to cement the learning in students' minds and to inform me about how well they are taking on the information we have been covering.

There were also a few issues with the larger research projects that I assigned to my students that led me to an understanding of new ways I can construct those types of assignments to increase the focus on critical thinking rather than fact regurgitation.  Overall, I was quite pleased with the gods slide-show, pharaoh biography, and tomb building projects that students completed over the course of the unit, but I also felt that there were some areas that could have been improved by having them take more of a critical look at the information they gathered rather than just having them repeat it to a new audience.  While my original intent was to have the questions I posed in my instructions sheet serve more as a jumping off point for student exploration, most groups took them as the focus of the project to the point that they answered them one after another in their project rather than focus on a more fluid synthesis of the information.  With future research projects I will require more of an emphasis on student engagement with the information, asking for conclusions and impressions that they can draw from the information they uncover about their subject.  With the pharaoh biography specifically, I feel that I missed a great opportunity to tie it together further with the tomb building project by making it merely a staid biographical essay.  When I have a chance to teach this unit again I will try to connect the two projects together by having the students write the biography as if they were scribes from the period of their pharaoh's life recording a biography of their pharaoh to cover the walls of the tomb they are creating.  This exercise would give the students a chance to experiment with the concept of voice as well as force them to focus on the important events of the pharaoh's life and how they will be remembered. 

In the end, I believe that I created an interesting, engaging unit of study for my students, and that they enjoyed the classes and retained much of the information that we covered.  The final post-assessment showed a 54% gain in student learning over the course of the unit, which means that they both understood and were able to share a majority of the knowledge that they gained during our studies.  I was also very pleased with the creativity and dedication that they showed during the completion of the final projects of the course.  I asked a lot out of my students, to complete both a written biographical essay and an artistically designed and labeled tomb, during the pharaoh project and I really only gave them about two weeks to do it all.  From everything that we accomplished as a class, I was able to see both the detailed areas of instruction that I will need to work on in the future, and the great successes that can be had when students are given creative, interactive projects as opportunities to explore a subject in a meaningful way.  I know that with these valuable insights I will be able to better challenge myself to grow as an educator for the benefit of my future students.