Category: Integrated Learning

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Developing integrated units from commercial curriculum

commercial curriculum

Walking through what it looks like to take commercial curriculum and develop a vibrant, personalized integrated unit.

One thing we hear all the time in our work as professional development coordinators is:

“How do you both personalize learning for students AND use the curriculum materials adopted by the district or school? Aren’t these things in opposition?”

The answer is no, they don’t have to be in opposition at all. Like anything worth doing, it takes time, creativity and collaboration.  But you can do it! You can create integrated units that use the Lucy Calkins writing or reading units as a basis, for example. You can turn them — viola! — into project-based learning units that engage and excite students.

Case in point:

Burke Town School in the Kingdom East School District wanted to tackle this problem head on. We helped them to take their leadership team, plus district coaches through an example of what it looks like to create an integrated unit using the Units of Study for Teaching Reading commercial curriculum by Lucy Calkins reading materials. We decided to use the grade four extreme weather unit as our basis for the exercise. Our goals were to:

  • Experience the hands-on process of integrated planning with a focus on personalized learning approaches and using the curriculum as a foundation. 
  • Develop capacity and understanding of the intersections between curricular programs/resources and personalization.

Our guiding question to explore together:

How can we create an integrated unit plan that addresses Teachers College Writing Units, the CCSS standards, NGSS, and other academic standards while personalizing learning?

Here we go. Consider it a creative process. 

Review engaging pedagogies

First, let’s review some engaging pedagogies.

When teachers begin creating a unit, we often choose a teaching pedagogy or approach. And some might say that you can create hybrids of blends of pedagogy in your unit plans. What approach will you use? What are the parts of these pedagogies?

These are all engaging because they feature student choice, voice, authentic audiences, relevance, purpose, and community partnership opportunities. Choose your pedagogical approach that best fits the needs of your students and your topic. 

Create a brainstorm web or map

First step is to think big. What core concept will be at the center of this unit?

In this case, it’s reading about extreme weather. Together create a web of ideas about all of the teaching and learning, possible integration points and parts of project-based learning they might contain. As in, what might be the driving question(s), the exciting launch event, the possible project creations, the community partners, and the culminating event? What concepts connect, extend, and support the learning?

Think big. Think about all of the connections and possible community activities and partnerships.

Here is our web within this theme:

                 EXTREME WEATHER

commercial curriculum

Dig into the unit materials

The unit orientation or overview is honestly something that busy teachers often skip in any curriculum. But really, when creating personalized learning units and approaches, it is critical to read how the unit theme fits together with a progression of lessons and activities. Also, we need to consider how to make sure those activities are as engaging and as personalized as possible.  So, saddle up, and do some reading. Sticky notes might help you label some of these important parts.

  • Look for:
    • Engagement, purpose, entry events, community partners, relevance. 
    • What do you notice? 
    • Possible spots for integration.

Fill in a planning template

commercial curriculum

There are many to pick from and you might have a favorite. We used our own PBL planning template. You can use one you prefer but make sure to address these items:

  • Identify the driving question 
  • Brainstorm the launch event 
  • Decide on the culminating event 
  • List and describe the learning experiences, lessons, and artifacts 
  • Uncover what scaffolds are needed
  • What will students create as an end product?
  • What knowledge, skills, proficiencies will students meet?
    • For literacy, these proficiencies have already been identified. What else?
  • How will students reflect on and show their learning?
  • What assessment will you use?

Plan nuts and bolts

Now consider your next steps. What are the nuts and bolts of this? Grab a colleague, and decide when, what and how will all of this happen:

    • Make sure you have the driving question, the template filled out.
    • Set the date for the culminating event and work backwards from there.
    • Take time to discuss: What are the learning experiences, lessons, and artifacts be?  What scaffolds are needed? How will students reflect on and show their learning?  What assessment will you use? 
    • How will intervention/strategy groups still occur, how will mini-lessons and workshop time be managed?
    • Set up your Project calendar
    • Discuss and decide, how will you monitor the project? (Regular common planning time is essential!)
    • Plan the lessons, create the learning scales, checklists and scaffolds needed

Reflect and Refine

commercial curriculum

All truly great learning emerges from reflection. During your teaching and after the unit is finished, spend some time considering what worked.

  • What did you notice in your students work?
  • What did you see about their connections to the real world?
  • How was student engagement?
  • How did YOU feel throughout the process of teaching the unit?
  • What might you change next time?

All of these reflective prompts will lead you to deepen your awareness of your teaching practices. And teachers need to look back on the learning experiences they create for their students. It’s what makes us all get better at our craft.

The Teacher’s College Units of Study are commercial curriculum ripe for personalization, project-based learning, and building relevance.  This workshop is used throughout many schools. There are endless possibilities for integration, and it just takes a bit of planning, curriculum design, and collaboration. Add this extra planning to the existing curriculum and you can create a rich, rigorous, deep and powerful unit for students.

Share your examples with us.

How have you found ways to bring personalized learning approaches into a commercial curriculum?

We’d love to hear your stories of what worked for you.

 

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What makes integrated curriculum work?

integrated curriculu

Middle level educators have long sung the praises of integrated curriculum. It’s been a foundational practice in some middle schools. But why isn’t it happening everywhere, all the time? Right now, our young adolescents are growing and developing in hybrid, remote and uncertain school models. And that means they need integrated and thematic curriculum more than ever.

What is an integrated and thematic curriculum?

This image by Mark Springer nicely shows a curriculum continuum.

At the left end of the continuum is our most traditional middle school curriculum model.

And that’s where subjects are separated. They’re taught separately and have separate curriculum. It’s a middle school where students spend their days moving through 4-6 different subjects that are very discrete and separate.

Next along the continuum, interdisciplinary and integrated curriculum bring some sort of connection between each class. They bring cohesion around what a student learns.

And then at the far right end of the continuum, students don’t experience separate classes. Instead, teachers and students together negotiate themes. That’s a high degree of integration. In a typical interdisciplinary or integrated scenario, the teachers on that team or house within the middle school choose to teach their subjects around a common topic or theme.

They might even design a set of guiding questions that will drive the student inquiry and learning.

What do themes look like?

An interdisciplinary or integrated unit theme usually names a topic that transcends discipline and content. This article by Nancy Doda and Mark Springer  goes into more detail about the power of thematic teaching and learning.

Unit themes should:

  • Be drawn from the real world and reflect issues and problems of social significance.
  • Serve as a lens through which to better understand the content being addressed from a multidisciplinary perspective.
  • Inspire young adolescents to invest in and be curious about the learning. They should spark imagination.

And how do guiding questions fit in?

Integrated units usually have 2-3 guiding questions that drive the teaching and learning. And these guiding questions can also be called focusing questions. This resource What Is a Good Guiding Question? Can help teachers learn how to hone questions.

Guiding questions:

  • Have no right answer
  • Frame content in a meaningful (real-world) context
  • Make sense and can be understood by students
  • Require a multi-disciplinary approach
  • Challenge students to examine & demonstrate connections between content & larger world issues

Here are some sample guiding questions:

  • How do human choices impact our environment and planet?
  • Why is what we eat important? What factors determine the foods we eat?
  • Why do people get sick? Why is it so hard for some people to get well?
  • How does the role of the government impact our lives?

Why is curriculum integration needed now?

When we integrate curriculum, teachers work together to design curriculum around a common theme or topic. As a result, students are most likely to make connections. It’s how they see the real-world relevance to their learning. Now, if the unit also provides students with clear and easy guiding questions that cross curriculum? Then the student is more likely to be clear about what they are learning.

In a nutshell, the theme and topic should ground the teaching and learning. It should provide that significance and meaning for the student. In this unusual time – when many of our “normal” practices are disruptive, students need continuity. More than ever, students need to see the connections between what they are learning in school and what they know about the world around them.

Integrated and interdisciplinary curriculum is not new. And there are many amazing examples around us.

In Randolph Union High School, in Randolph VT, the middle school team completely transformed their approach to curriculum. They decided to dip a toe into integrated curriculum, by having their whole middle school team design a unit on clean water. Science, Social Studies, English and Math. In every class, students took a new angle on the work they’d just done in the last class. Additionally, the team used Google Classroom and hyperdocs to track student work and make adjustments to upcoming lessons based on the outcome of the previous lessons — even in another content area.

That, my friends? That is truly responsive teaching.

integrated curriculum

Meanwhile, down in Londonderry, VT, Charlie Herzog, at the Flood Brook School, has been using integrated curriculum for years. He incorporates a powerful and direct student feedback loop, to make sure students enjoy the work. As a result of recent feedback, Charlie made project-based learning more central to his integrated curriculum, to see how students responded. Turns out: they LOVED IT. 

3 ways to get started with integrated curriculum… tomorrow!

Let’s say you want to start integrating curriculum right away. You can! Here are three ideas to make it do-able.

1.Create your own theme day.

Declare that Friday, for example, is Art Around the World Day. Then, go ahead and embed that theme into all of the learning for that day. Sounds simple, but can be deeply powerful in terms of student engagement. Think of it: an extended period of time to focus on one unifying area.

2. Design your advisory plans around a weekly theme.

Advisory has curriculum, too! For one week, try building plans for your advisory curriculum around a theme. Possible themes?

  • Make Healthy Choices
  • Know Your Neighbors
  • Sing Your Own Kind of Song
  • Masks Through the Ages (Hey look: present-day relevance! Bonus!)

3. Get your team on board

Propose to your teaching team that you choose a week to commit to a team-wide theme.

Let’s say you decide the week of November 9 is a thematic curriculum week. During that week, the team will all integrate Food Systems and Nutrition into the learning. Your math colleague designs some activities around meal planning and budgeting. Your language teacher crafts a vocabulary challenge involving ordering food or buying it in the grocery store, in multiple languages. English language colleague asks students to share their favorite food systems stories; the social studies instructor leans in to provide support for students researching where their favorite foods fit into existing local food systems.

Food for thought! (ha!)

 

 

Please note: the photo that accompanies this post was taken before the current pandemic, when social distancing was not necessary.

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The power of thematic and integrated learning at Randolph Middle School

thematic and integrated learning

Middle level educators at Randolph Union Middle School believe integrated and thematic learning help students see their place and role in the world. And a shift to remote learning meant they’d simply have to be more creative and coordinated to make it work!

Given the challenge to provide instruction remotely, the team agreed they needed to make learning expectations manageable and meaningful. A thematic unit became the focal point to end this year well for their students. And the collaborative effort was worth it in more ways than one.

Why implement thematic/integrated units?

Here’s what the 7th grade teacher team believes:

“When curriculum is integrated, it is no longer a list of skills and information that must just be learned for a test. When learning is tied to a specific theme, issue, problem, etc., students are able to naturally see the interconnected way information and skills from the different subjects work together. The study of themes and world problems relevant to the lives of students increases their motivation and engagement with the material.”

In addition, developmentally appropriate, relevant integrated curriculum:

  • fosters collaboration
  • deepens students’ critical thinking abilities
  • highlights transferable skills

 

thematic and integrated learning

 

Launching remote learning through a thematic unit: Is access to water a basic human right?

Once all agreed on the commitment to keep the thematic integration going, they all selected the essential question. Their students would end their 7th grade year learning enough about water from the different discipline lenses to answer the question: Is access to water a basic human right?

Each week, the team shared an overview calendar of assignments with students and families. Students recognized that, although they were doing school work from each subject area, they were working on the Water unit as a unifying force.

thematic and integrated learning

 

Transforming teaming routines

Each member of the team used Google Classroom to deliver instructional materials and receive student work. Yet, they recognized, an efficient workflow through Google Classroom wasn’t enough to help students and their families navigate assignments remotely. Each crafted hyperdocs containing the week’s worth of work. That way, learners could see the scope of required work and plan accordingly. Here is an example of a math assignment hyperdoc:

thematic and integrated learning

 

In addition, the team created a website for easy access to all assignments and supporting resources.

thematic and integrated learning

 

The best benefit to the teachers on the team in this thematic alignment work?  It incentivized them to streamline delivery for students, and to plan instruction and assessment practices in a way they’d never done before.

The power of teacher collaboration

Weekly they carved out time as a team to share drafts of the remote lesson plans they were getting ready to launch this thematic and integrated learning unit. Tuning together meant that each was able to hear feedback from their colleagues about content, work load, and clarity of delivery.

  • Who might need to scale back?
  • Who might need to add more details, more diagrams, visuals and scaffolds to support self-direction?

thematic and integrated learning

Example of science activity improved to include diagrams & time-lapse video 

Teaming at its best

Since they saw the workload for the week assembled in one place, they could make group decisions about the reasonableness of the student workload.

Example from group feedback:

  • hyperdoc formatting ideas included adding icons to slides to indicate if students would need to listen, read, or do.
  • include time recommendations for assignments so students could plan effectively
  • shorten instructional videos into chunks and clarify instruction

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Other benefits of taking the time to tune together

Weekly tuning helped them be better advisors. During office hours each team member could support their students’ struggles and answer questions from other classes. Why? Because they were familiar with their colleague’s instructional plans and expectations in a way they’d never experienced before.

Tuning work can be intimidating. It takes time out of incredibly packed days. Yet, because of its impact, they value it above almost every other meeting at this point in this tumultuous year. Never again, Alyssa Matz the social studies teacher on the team shared, will she go back into a planning silo. She’s recognized the immense value in collaboratively sharing and critiquing lesson planning around a thematic topic for her growth and for the benefit of her students. The team agreed with her to never go back to individualized, discipline specific instruction!  How cool is that.

Reflecting on thematic remote instruction

Looking back, the team saw students making connections, voluntarily without prompting, between content areas. Helping student make connections is a primary goal of the humanities curriculum. The intentional alignment of content clearly affected learners’ ability to synthesize. And the intentional integration gave students a framework to build the new learning upon. They recognized how key ideas in the shared reading of A Long Walk to Water, the science experiments on the water cycle, and the study of border disputes all played a role in their assignments. Even in math!

All agreed the power of teaming in this way was a game changer.

How might you incorporate thematic instruction in your work with students?