Below, I have documented three artifacts that show my growth in lesson design. While I did not have the opportunity to design curriculum at Gilman or in my subject methods course, these lessons each reflect elements of backwards design in my lessons that would translate to curriculum design. The first artifact here is from my first year, when I was trying to design a more engaging way to talk about a text. It contains a written out lesson plan.  The second, a video, shows the implementation of a lesson designed to improve writing, one focusing on specific details that I added to the curriculum after noticing challenges on the previous essay. The final artifact, another written lesson plan that also includes a worksheet of sorts, is from a pivotal moment in my Inquiry project. 

             In the first artifact, the written lesson, I tried to focus on differentiation within the backwards design framework. While I have three stated goals, I note that these goals are perhaps too broad as to direct any learning. Looking especially at the second goal, I feel I might have been more effective had I built a better goal, one that sought to identify why my students should consider morality. You can see in these non-specific lesson goals the difference between building a lesson for curriculum and building a lesson for student differentiation, a gap Tomlinson and McTighe (2006) argue must be bridged. Teachers who do both effectively "focus on clarity of goal and flexibility in arriving at that goal" (p. 144). Here, I believe is where I erred. While there is differentiation in the lesson, I do not identify the ways the groups of students can get to the goal through that differentiation. I seem to have gone in blind. Since this lesson, I have been conscious of addressing differentiation more explicitly in my lesson plans, forcing myself to consider it as I put together the enduring understandings from which everything else will stem. 

             This specific details lesson was one of the first lessons that I built from scratch, rather than adapting from curricular materials. In teaching writing, I felt we had not been as specific as we could have been in the department, and students were having a hard time translating feedback to their written word, not knowing how to connect thoughts. We graded "flow" for instance, but never really said how to create it. In this lesson, I wanted everyone to consider the intricacies of sentence building. What I like about this lesson is that I am letting the students construct these lists of words, rather than simply leaning on a Powerpoint. "To learn something deeply, students need to internalize it and make it their own," Eric Toshalis and Michael Nakkula argue (2012, p. 31). By allowing them to work together to build these lists, they could come to see these words as more familiar when they began writing. What I wish I had done is cede the whiteboard to a student or students, especially as we were putting together a paragraph. Where I did not want to sacrifice efficiency, I then compromised the student voice, and centered the room around myself unnecessarily. Despite that, as the weeks and months that followed, I was shocked by the effectiveness of this lesson, as many of these students began using words like "moreover" and "furthermore" in their paragraphs to great effect. "Moreover they know how to read and write," Andreas wrote in his journal that week, "so they already have the upper hand in the society." Scores for flow shot up, and stayed up. It made me wonder what else I could do in ten-minute segments that could target writing. 

             In the final artifact, I built a lesson for my inquiry project that involved the creation of an activity to replace doing mindless worksheets with something more engaging. What the students did not notice was that the worksheet element largely stayed the same. By adding an element of competition at the end, however, rather than a typical review, they were significantly more focused in its completion. Additionally, as per my inquiry, I wanted to test the efficacy of popular culture in the classroom. Relying on Mary Helen Immordino-Yang & Antonio Damasio's socioemotional work as I did through a lot of my project, I sought to bring positive emotions into my classroom through their inclinations towards nostalgic films and lyrics. As I mention in my inquiry analysis, this lesson became an instant sensation, with students coming up to me all week asking to do it again and again. However, the ideas that endured were not what I targeted, as the balance of grammar and popular culture knowledge in the competition did not prioritize understanding of the more important material. From here, I used this information to make sure all future competitions were still based in skill-building. Popular culture could can an agent to improve that, but could not be such a focus as to make grammar learning subliminal. 

             One element of lesson planning I am actively trying to do more of in general is building in opportunities for feedback within lessons, something not seen to great end in any of these three artifacts. John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007) reinforce the value of giving students frequent, process level and self-regulation level feedback.. They write that "such feedback can have major influences on self-efficacy, self-regulatory proficiencies, and self beliefs about students as learners, such that the students are encouraged or informed how to better and more effortlessly continue on the task" (p. 90). While I think I do a good job of providing opportunities for task-level feedback and process-level feedback as we review grammar exercises, I need to build in times where I can provide self-regulation-level feedback during class discussions. Students frequently need assurance in those times, and choose to remain silent. I have tried using exit tickets for this effect, but want to develop a more immediate way of building feedback opportunities into discussions. While across the three lessons, I achieved varying success in achieving my goals, there is more creativity in the construction as I moved through the fellowship. I am going out of my comfort zone to be an innovator, to get to deeper learning for my students. And as long as I push to do that while considering the important elements of backwards design and differentiated instruction, I am moving in the right direction in my growth.