Designing teaching plans is an active, creative and time consuming process, yet it is one that is underrated by many teachers, and indeed taken for granted as well. Yet as long as you are a teacher you will be involved in the desgin of teaching plans, even if you use the most current textbook, or science curriculum project. Textbooks and curriculum projects need to be tailored to each group of students, and the person charged with this responsibility is you, the science teacher. Thus, it is advisable that you develop an approach to unit and course design that will enable you to modify existing teaching plans in textbooks and curriculum projects, as well as create original teaching units making use of the rich array of teaching materials available to science teachers.
Designing units and courses of study is a process that results in a product. The process of unit and course design is called instructional planning, and it will result in an instructional plan. The instructional plan that you will develop in this chapter will be a mini-unit. I am interested in having you experience the process of planning, and by scaling the product down, it will be more manageable, and you will also have a better opportunity to field test your instructional plan with secondary students if it is relatively short.
Another concept that emerges from this discussion is curriculum. Curriculum is to be distinguished from instruction in the following way. Curriculum is not a process. It is a set of intended learning outcomes or goals. It is what science teachers hope students will learn. It focuses on the nature and organization of what science teachers want students to learn. Curriculum development therefore is a process in which the science teacher engages in the process of selecting and organizing learning objectives for a unit or course of study.
In this chapter you will be involved in both curriculum development, as well as instructional planning. We might summarize this by saying that the curriculum you develop consists of what is to be learned, the goals indicate why it is to be learned, and the instructional plan indicates how to facilitate this. Learning will only occur when you implement the instructional plan.
Four questions will guide you through the process as you design a science mini-unit, as well as complete science units and courses of study in the future.
1. Why? You need to consider why you are teaching the science unit and this leads to consider values and general science education goals and purposes.2. What? Here you will consider the objectives of your unit, and design a conceptional map to show the relationships among the major ideas of your mini-unit.
3. How? The instructional plan for your mini-unit---consisting of at least three lessons---will describe how you will engage the students to achieve the stated learning objectives.
4. What did the students learn? Your evaluation plan will help you provide information about what the students learned, and how successful was the mini-unt.