My Personal Reflection with my BD Unit Planning

My Personal Reflection with my BD Unit Planning:

One of the changes I have begun to feel while planning, is a much more consciousnesses effort to implement and focus my lessons around the essential questions and big ideas in my units. Before, my planning seemed to revolve only around the state and national objectives needed to be met. The objectives are part of the building process, but with BD, there are so many more avenues to link up multiple objectives. BD allows me to clearly push students to a broader understanding of how knowledge can mesh together in different areas. 

The Backwards Design planning process has allowed me the chance to broaden my scope and sequence while teaching as well. This process seems to allow the teacher or planner an opportunity to truly analyze on teaching the "whole" student through lessons that always come back to the essential understandings. To me, this can be compared to a less strategic way of planing where each lesson is interdependent and doesn't fluidly connect with past or present lessons. 

I continue to work at identifying and selecting what I feel to be "appropriate" essential questions and understandings, but I feel that with experience and exposure on this topic, I will grow in my planning.