Reflection on the STEM Strategies Lesson Plan

The planning process this week was not really different from the constructivist approach I normally use when planning my units or lessons. However, at the school where I work, we have unit planners we must have complete prior to any unit that we teach.  We complete the planners by Backwards Design and know what the students need to know by the end of the unit, so this was similar to this lesson plan format.  At the International School where I work,  we only need to use the International Baccalaureate curriculum for Middle Years Sciences and there are only concepts of science there to choose from which are basically the unifying themes that the National Standards and Benchmarks Online describe.  We do not use state or national standards for designing the curriculum.  I knew what I wanted my students to learn by the end of the unit according to the IB program, but trying to find one set of standards which would support the lesson was much harder.  So, I used two. It was really hard to decide on which standards I could realistically cover in a lesson.  So, I used the Maine Learning Results for my lesson because I am familiar with them and a few of the National Standards. The Maine Learning Results for Science were revised in 2007 to reflect the STEM approach to teaching science and so I thought it was much better to focus on them.  My lesson was quite complex and would need more than a week with the students if I am to carry out the 5 E's Strategy for planning.  It seemed to me that I was planning more for a unit rather than a lesson.  So, it took a really long time.  In my prior course, the 5 E's were not included on it, but it seemed that I was just repeating myself in that section anyway.  I normally plan with the 5 E's in mind anyway because the professor I had at my old university insisted that we use it and the IB Program also requires the 5 E's strategies for planning a lesson.  Since this is a new component to me on the Lesson Plan Template, I think it would have been really helpful to use it first to make a smaller lesson and then it would have been easier to incorporate into the lesson plan template.  It seemed that there were a lot of things to think about on this assignment, with Historical Perspectives, Unifying Themes, STEM Strategies, and the 5 E's.  If I were to implement this lesson, I would need to be able to collect all the materials and have enough class time for students to complete their personal inquiry investigations regarding speed and the roller coaster they will design and build to express Newton's Laws of Motion and potential and kinetic energy.