Maddie Edwards
Personal Reflection
Prof Casto
Health Backwards Design
Backward design is an important structural element to developing a lesson plan that really makes sure that the students are really learning what the teacher wants them to learn. Working through backwards design allows the teacher to really question what is important, and what students need to reach that understanding. As a group we used backward design to first identify the desired result of our health unit lessons, then we went out and looked for acceptable evidence that we were then going to design learning experiences, and instruction so that they would develop an understanding of the material that we believed was important. First, we looked at what we wanted to teach,…show more content… The standard we picked was standard 3 of resource management, saying “Students will understand the influence of culture, media, and technology in making decisions about personal and community health issues. They will know about and use valid health information, products, and services. Students will advocate for healthy families and communities.” (Elementary Health Education Standards). So having that standard as our desired result as a group we started thinking about our big ideas. We wanted students to encounter advertisements, looking at them critically, and be able to read and understand the health information that we have access to, like nutrition labels, and current TV food advertisements. We wanted out students to know the influence that advertisements have on their choices, and to show them skills to think critically about their choices rather than seeing an advertisement and being a blind consumer of what ever good they are selling. We wanted them to be masters of how food is portrayed and how they could portray healthy food in a similar manner. Overall, we really…show more content… Rochelle found an advertisement that she thought worked well to represent food in our media, and what is appealing to consumers, as well as how to read a nutrition label, and what each item on the label means, which she got from her exercise science class. I research what makes a good advertisement, finding a bunch of materials that were meant to be informational for businesses, but I feel that I could push students in conversation, and inquiry to come up with similar results about what really attracts people to certain advertisements. Lexi and Caitlin found more research on what makes a good advertisement, and ways healthy food could be advertised to make them more appealing. Using all the materials we gathered we questioned if we could lead the students through different methods of instruction to use the resources we gathered, to then answer our big question, and gain a better understanding of how media influences their choices. We are not looking for them to memorize each of the facts we found about what makes a good advertisement, but we want them to question the advertisements they bring in, and have conversations with each other to come up with a group understanding of what really attracts them to certain