Jesse Gottschalk Statement of Context Though I intend to ground the context of my lesson in my specific knowledge of the students with

whom I will be working and the environment I am teaching, the primary considerations I used when choosing my overall lesson topic were connected more to considerations specific to the classroom and school a kindergarten class at Penn Alexander. As a result, I ended up choosing a lesson topic life cycles, both in the natural world and in human creations that was connected to the subjects which the students would be learning at the point in the curriculum when I was planning to teach (life cycles in science, community helpers in social studies). The decision to select my overall subject according to my teachers planned curriculum outline was based on several considerations relating to my classroom and school, and my priorities for my own learning. First, the subjects are placed at that point in my teachers curriculum in part as components of a progression; for instance, life cycles comes after several units involving animals in different ways. By choosing to integrate my lesson with the teachers planned curriculum, I can ensure that I am able to connect my lessons directly to the work which my students will already have done. This is something which my cooperating teacher has placed a high priority upon in her own teaching, to great effect practically every lesson she teaches includes call-backs and connections to other lessons the students have had, and it has had evident impact on both student learning and student engagement and which I hope to incorporate into my own practices. I can already see easy and substantial connections that can be drawn between my curriculum subject and previous classroom lessons. For example, students have recently studied mammals, and know that mammals differ from other animals in certain stages of the life cycle (babies are born alive, not in eggs; mammal infants drink milk, unlike other animals); they have also studied specific animals, such as bears and owls, including details on growth that will be relevant. Furthermore, the four kindergarten teachers have a very strong practice of collaboration in addition to regular meetings, they informally discuss and coordinate frequently, sharing lesson ideas,

materials, and questions. I believe that it would be to my tremendous benefit to take part in this collaboration both in order to learn from these experienced teachers, and to gain experience working in a collaborative fashion and that will be far more possible for me if I am teaching lessons that run parallel to those happening in the teachers own classrooms. There are many other reasons for my choice to use a topic connected to the predetermined class curriculum; for instance, while inventing an entire curriculum would be a valuable practice, I believe that learning to draw upon and adapt existing materials as a large source of my curriculum development will be perhaps a more valuable preparation for my first year of independent teaching. Further, if I become a public school teacher (which is my priority), I will need to be effective at taking predetermined curricula as my starting point; adaptation and differentiation are both things I intend to make great use of as a teacher, but I will need to be practiced at applying them within the constraints provided by classroom and school curricular expectations. Using these preexisting curricula as a starting point, the most important challenge for me then becomes finding ways to adapt them to ensure that they contain the sorts of higher-level thinking, active engagement, contextual appropriateness, and differentiation I want from all of my lessons, while leading towards important enduring understandings. In this case, I didnt have substantial obstacles posed by the predetermined curriculum, as it consisted simply of overall concepts and possible activities; the challenge would be much greater if the curriculum were substantially more prescriptive and more distant from my overarching classroom objectives. The specific content of the lesson draws heavily on my knowledge of the students with whom I am working, and their local context. As mentioned above, this knowledge guides which particular life cycles we will study as examples and as specific lesson topics. My priorities in this responsiveness are allowing the students to connect with their prior experiences, and bring able to draw on local expertise and resources. The latter will be most useful for the product section of the unit; we will visit a local

composting organization to learn about waste and landfill alternatives, and I am trying to arrange a visit to or from a local bakery and/or the school cafeteria to learn about the origins of familiar food products. My classroom is fortunate to have a large number of parents who are available and eager to volunteer in the classroom I am going to begin asking around to determine if there is a parent with expertise on a potential example, or who has connections to someone else who can come in and share about a given topic. Finally, though no less importantly, is my own philosophical perspective on this lesson, and my intent in choosing a lesson that applies the scientific idea of life cycles to issues of community and everyday life. Students in my classroom at Penn Alexander come from a very diverse set of backgrounds, but they are privileged to be able to attend a school that has a tremendous amount of resources, one that is fairly unique within both its region and the city as a whole. For this reason, I feel strongly about wanting to teach a lesson that begins to introduce students to a variety of different perspectives within their communities. The community helpers lesson which would ordinarily fall around this time in the year is an important kindergarten approach to this concept, and I have chosen to adapt this into the life cycles lesson in order both to better integrate this with the science content of my curriculum, as well as to create a lesson that incorporates more critical inquiry. Ideally my topic will provide a segue into the full community helpers unit, which can build upon my unit and extend beyond my two week takeover. The students in my class have shown a very advanced level of engagement with even fairly challenging material, so I am enthusiastic about choosing a lesson that involves them engaging with things present in their own lives in a way that challenges and broadens their perspectives.