The Big Picture Among Many Big Pictures

We started EDT 610 with that ever ubiquitous, mysterious and confounding thing called "Unit Plan". And, yes, I was mystified, confounded, and filled with ubiquity. As I progressed through the semester, in a seemingly desperate race to complete one technologically intense project after another, I felt as though I had lost sight of that island called "The Unit Plan". But it was always there, always in sight - I just did not know it until now.

I am not a certified school teacher. I can only claim twenty years experience teaching expertise in the service and retail sectors of the horticultural field. But I do know this - you must feel absolutely comfortable and confident in the content you propose to teach. Just as you can not face greenhouse customers at the height of Spring, ignorant of the culture of available plant material, so you can not face a classroom of eighth graders poised to learn about Alexander the Great and the diffusion of Hellenistic culture and not know what and how you will impart knowledge.

This is where the Unit Plan comes into play. It is, with its essential question, unit and content questions, and related procedures, a blueprint for that big picture a teacher strives to teach. The amazing thing is, the creative process that generates teaching blueprints is an ongoing endeavor. This is the soul of teaching because, within every discipline, there exists infinite tangents. A teacher must focus on established national, state, and/or local learning standards and teach to those standards. A well-developed Unit Plan is insurance that, at minimum, these standards will be met.

The Unit Plan is not so scary now. I look at it as a to-do list. Fortunate for me, lists and I are old friends.