Tag Archives: integrated unit

Integrated Learning, Project-Based Learning

Developing integrated units from commercial curriculum

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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.

 

Integrated Learning

The power of thematic and integrated learning at Randolph Middle School

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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?

Stories from VT Students

Who are the keepers of your town’s history?

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Reviving Manchester’s past through oral histories & 3D printing

place-based learningWith support from the local historical society, 7th graders in Manchester VT set about documenting the history of individual buildings during the town’s 1910 heyday. They went on walking tours, interviewed longtime residents, dug through old historical documents and photos, produced a documentary for each building and even created 3D-printed scale models of each building, for their ongoing town map. And community members, in return, appreciated the interest these students took in the town’s history.

All of which begs the questions: What does it really mean to know your town’s history? And who knows your town’s history?

 

 

When the seventh grade team at Manchester Elementary Middle School designed this powerful place-based learning experience, students were highly engaged and motivated by the authentic task. They learned to see town elders as storytellers, keepers of Vermont’s history. They learned cartography, math for 3D printing, interviewing and video production skills. Plus they leveled up on their transferable skills by having to set up the interviews, and manage their project timelines.

But then something unusual happened. Community members became intrigued by the project. They stopped and stared at the collection of young Vermonters busily measuring buildings and shooting video interviews. And they wanted more information about the project. The dialogue expanded, until Manchester’s whole community rallied round the project, and involved themselves in supporting it. Longtime residents and newcomers alike began to see the town — and its young Vermonters — with new eyes. Local legends received validation and recognition for sharing stories of their town’s past. And the two groups, the students and the townspeople, came together in actively documenting a dormant part of Manchester’s storied past.

“These are the people in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood, in your neigh-bor-hoooood”

MEMS educators Kraig Hannum and Scott Diedrich had run the project several years ago, focusing on a different area of Manchester. They began this round by again reaching out to several local historians, including the director of the Manchester Historical Society. The director, Shawn Harrington, recommended that students focus on Manchester’s “Depot district”. At the turn of the 19th century, this neighborhood was bustling due to the railroad and businesses associated with the region’s marble industry. The Historical Society then led students on a walking tour of the district, and provided them with access to photos, maps, blueprints and other documents that could help tell the story.

 

As students became acquainted with the town’s history, they got into groups and each focused on a particular building or structure.

One group, for example, focused on a still existing building that once housed the town’s steam laundry. It now contains a thirty year-old fixture in the town, Kilburn’s Convenience Store. Manchester resident Cynthia Kilburn opened her store and her stories to MEMS students. She showed them around the building and told them everything she knew about the steam laundry’s vivid past. Her recollections and memorabilia formed the heart of the students’ short documentary film. They combined information from her interviews with the historical society’s archive of documents to produce a heartfelt and compelling video. It was a gift to the town and its residents.

What started as inquiry using local resources became a true partnership between the people of Manchester and the seventh graders in the town. It created a connection and sense of pride between school and community. Teacher Kraig Hannum reflected,

“I’m hoping the community will see that we still value local history – that the kids are out there still learning these things. They are not just on their technology and focused on the here and now.”

Teachers on the team worked overtime to facilitate and coordinate this unit.

Scott Diedrich teaches math and science at MEMS; Kraig Hannum teaches social studies. But for the two of them, combining the disciplines for this authentic integrated unit made sense. After all, the real world doesn’t separate out your math from your history, so why would students’ schoolwork?

As students explored the buildings that made up this important historical period, they learned about scale and measurement. When students went out into the community to interview and research the history of buildings, they also used measurement tools to capture the approximate dimensions of the existing structures.  In their groups, they entered the measurements into free Tinkercad software to design a scale miniature replica. Once they had the scaling correct, students used school 3D printers to create physical models of their buildings. With all of the students working together, the team recreated a largescale map of the Manchester’s Depot as it existed back in 1910. The map currently resides on one wall of Hannum’s classroom, but will soon be on display at the Manchester Community Library.

 

 

When all is said and done, this is a project about belonging.

It’s about the sense of belonging that students can feel when they learn more about their town – from its people. That students can feel like a part of that history that matters. And that there’s a sense of mutual respect and honor when we allow young Vermonters to learn and tell its town’s precious stories.

  • How could you engage your students in learning about their local history?
  • In what ways could you collaborate with your historical society?
  • How could 3D printing bring something to life for your students?

Be sure to check out the rest of MEMS’ hyperlocal documentaries! We can’t wait for the next installment in this vivid look at Manchester’s past.

What other ways have you helped your students dig into Vermont’s rich and fascinating past?

Proficiency-Based Learning

Proficiency-based teaching and learning in Vermont: who, why and how

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Two examples of implementing proficiency-based scales of learning

proficiency-based teaching and learning in VermontVermont educators and their students are on a journey. Let’s look at how one school is implementing proficiency-based learning in a way that ensures all learners have the opportunity to thrive.

When we clearly articulate learning targets both for and with learners, the end is clear to all and learning can proceed along a progression with multiple opportunities for demonstrating growth and mastery. 

Continue reading Proficiency-based teaching and learning in Vermont: who, why and how →