I really liked reviewing the 1st UTA Lesson Plans because it gave me a chance to read and respond to their writing, which is something that I don’t often get to do as a returning UTA. I feel like in general, there aren't a lot of opportunities to interact with them. I wish that there were more chances to give them advice and feedback. I think that second UTAs could learn a lot from first UTAs because they are so fresh with the pedagogy frameworks. I thought it was interesting to see what topics they wanted to cover in their lesson plans. They had such a wide variety amongst the four of the of ones that I reviewed. For example, I have never thought much about the visual aspect of papers apart from advising my students to add more paragraph breaks or to restructure their digital forums. I have never even considered adding visual aids to my writing, apart from doing the digital forum website my freshmen year (which I didn’t feel was very successful visually anyway.) I think teaching about visual design in English is definitely an opportunity for students to get more creative in their academic writing, so I found it very interesting to read a lesson plan about it by one of the first year UTAs.
One thing that was challenging about reviewing them was thinking about the timing of their lesson plans. I remember having a hard time with this when I did mine, and again when I was thinking about my learning artifact. I also struggled with giving meaningful feedback on the activities that several of them chose to do with their lesson plans. It is very hard to predict how students will react to activities in the classroom, especially because I do not know what their students are like. For example, when I did my lesson plan on structure last year, I thought my activity would be very well received by my students, but I think it just ended up confusing them more. I learned a lot from editing these lesson plans because they gave me a good model for how to form my own. Even though at this point I have created and given multiple lesson plans, there is always another approach that I could take, and reading these lesson plans gave me some very good ideas on how to shake things up with my own.
One thing that was challenging about reviewing them was thinking about the timing of their lesson plans. I remember having a hard time with this when I did mine, and again when I was thinking about my learning artifact. I also struggled with giving meaningful feedback on the activities that several of them chose to do with their lesson plans. It is very hard to predict how students will react to activities in the classroom, especially because I do not know what their students are like. For example, when I did my lesson plan on structure last year, I thought my activity would be very well received by my students, but I think it just ended up confusing them more. I learned a lot from editing these lesson plans because they gave me a good model for how to form my own. Even though at this point I have created and given multiple lesson plans, there is always another approach that I could take, and reading these lesson plans gave me some very good ideas on how to shake things up with my own.