Holly Gustafson SPED 496M 4-7-14 Standard 3 Reflection

Standard 3: Curricular Content Knowledge The third CEC Standard states that Special Education teachers should understand general education concepts and be able to adapt and modify them, so that the special education students that they are working with can be successful and know the general education materials. Another key point of standard three is that beginning special education teachers should organize information to create meaningful progressions of information. The artifact that I have chosen to put in my portfolio is part of a unit that I taught in Computer Applications II. This unit was a Black History month project that took all of February for the students to complete. I started the started the project off by showing a video about the Tuskegee airmen. I then had the students use the Biography.com website to learn about different famous African Americans in history. I created a chart with blanks in it that followed along exactly with the website. The students needed to fill in the blanks to complete the chart. By doing this activity I wanted to give the students a quick introduction to important African Americans from history. The next step in the project, was that students needed to pick 7 famous African Americans from a chart that I had created in google docs. The students then chose one person from each category and had to research why they were famous. Next I had my students choose one of the seven people they researched to create a final essay and a PowerPoint. When the students started researching the person they chose, they each received a fact chart to fill in. The fact chart was formatted so the students could easily take their facts and turn

them into paragraphs. The students then followed an outline that I created for them to follow as they were writing their essay. The final part of the Black History month projects, was that the students had to take their facts and make a PowerPoint about the person they researched. What I have learned from this experience is that creating an entire unit before I teach it is a great way to go about planning. I created this entire unit before I taught it and it went great once I got started. I enjoyed the gradual progression of what I was teaching. I also feel that since everything tied together that the students understood what was expected of them better. I could have just had my students pick a person and start researching without knowing anything about the person that they were going to research. I didnt feel that this was a good way to go about teaching my unit, because the students didnt have much prior knowledge of what we were going to be doing. I liked giving the students two different opportunities to learn about famous African Americans in history. In my future teaching endeavors, I think that I will try my best to create entire unit lessons. If Im not able to get every detail planned at once, I want to be able to have an idea of where I am going, so that all of my assignments connect, and arent just random assignments thrown together.