Nana Reyes

EDUC463

Ricki Ginsberg

May 8th, 2022

Reflection

Over the course of this semester, we have had the chance to work on many skills that will

be useful not only to student teaching, but to our future as educators. For my unit plan, I decided

to expand on a unit from a semester plan I made in the beginning of the course because the

subject felt personal to me. Making lessons based off of Afro-Latinx and Afro-Caribbean

literature felt important to me as a future teacher because it was not something that was talked

about a lot in my personal education, and would have been beneficial to have during my

schooling experience. This I feel is my biggest strength with my unit plan.

With this lesson, I believe my passion for the subject can be revealed with the

organization and content of the lesson. I wanted to use this passion to help ignite that same

feeling in the students as well, and be as inclusive as possible in regards to how their culture

affects their education. However, my biggest weakness lied within the conventional practices

that I had to teach within the content. I am not a person who likes to do things without purpose,

so I tried to make sure every lesson on conventions was useful to what we were doing in the unit,

but they felt a bit lacking in engagement towards the end. In the future, I want to grow in the area

of teaching subjects that would be considered “boring” and learn to make learning things like
conventions more fun and engaging for the students, instead of only making the content I find

most interesting engaging.

Overall, throughout the creation of this unit plan as well as the course I have learned a lot

about what I prioritize as a teacher, and what I lack in the practice. I have found that to me,

students feeling heard and seen is something I prioritize over a lot of other teaching practices. So,

I hope to grow as a teacher in terms of professionalism, and continue to show my passions and

connect with students as best as I can.