For the last two weeks I’ve been talking with colleagues and my student teacher about this workshop that I attended that is going to maximize UBD- and really help me get a better understanding of what my students know. I told my colleagues to think back to their science classes and remember when a teacher called something “elegant” because of its simplicity and effectiveness--that’s how I described GANAG and the record-keeping templates. For the last two weeks, I’ve been talking about how blending GANAG into my UBD units was going to change my practice, and this week, I set to the task of implementing it. 

            As with most things, I’d forgotten how difficult it is to change old habits. Changing my instruction planning and delivery and as well as my record keeping has caused me to confront two major issues w/ my teaching 1.) my lesson planning for the past 4-5 years has been more of lesson outlining and less of planning and 2) my record keeping hasn’t been providing me with useful data to understand what my students were learning. 

Regarding my planning, I’ve been shocked by how foreign it seems to sit down w/ any kind of lesson planning schema and really plan out what will be happening in my class. I consider myself a very reflective practitioner, and had bought into the idea that as you get more experience, lesson planning is more automatic, and you have to write less things down. Basically, that the really long Hunter schema is just for rookies. I thought I was doing a lot of things in my head- remembering to set the goals, do a hook, etc. 
     But as I interact with this GANAG schema, I’m reminded that my class deserves more careful planning on my part- and that some things aren’t as automatic as I thought there were…so I still need to write things down.