Collaboration with
Civics Teacher Courtney Waldrop & Leigh Stovall
I work with two other great 7th grade civics
teachers. We are very big into collaboration and how our collaboration works is
that we all meet twice a week for about an hour to discuss what we are doing in
class, how it is working, what we think we could do in order to make it better,
and what we plan to do for future Units. Throughout the length of this unit we
meet about 4 times and where able to really sit down and brainstorm together
and come up with what we think as one pretty good unit. A lot of the time we
take turns taking lead on different units or lessons, so I took lead on this
unit.
In this unit I really
wanted to create the most diverse group of lessons that I could think of to
insure that I reach all of the different learning styles and levels of my
students. I also have been really interested in problem based learning so I
wanted to implement some type of problem based learning lesson as well. Through discussing with my colleagues about
my desire to have a very diverse unit as well as some form of problem based
learning we came up with many different ideas.
The best part about collaborating with other teachers is that we are all
so different and have different learning styles of our own it is easy to come
up with new and different ideas.
Our first task was to figure out how we could implement a
problem based learning lesson into the unit. Through researching PBL I found
that the best way to create a PBL lesson was to start with the problem. The
problem that we created was to have the students create their own government. Then we had to figure out how get the
students on board and how to actually implement the lesson in class. This is
how we came up with the idea for Shipwrecked.
My other goal for this unit was to reach all of the different learning styles
of my students. I have come to see how many of my students excel in different
types of lessons and do not do as well in other types of lessons; for example,
some of my students are great at working on their own to learn the material,
while other students are more hands on type learners and need so form of
activity to help them grasp the concepts, and some students need to have the
material told to them. Because of this I
did not just want to create the Shipwrecked
activity I also wanted to implement a more traditional lecture type of lesson
as well as a more independent learning activity. As a result we created a three part unit for
our unit “Types of Government”, a more traditional lecture type lesson (Who Rules?), a problem based learning
activity (Shipwrecked), and an
independent learning type of lesson (Be a
Rebel).
Once we developed our lesson plans we had another issue to
address. We had created very diverse lessons to reach all of the different
learning styles but we still needed to scaffold the content in order to
challenge all of the different learning levels that we taught. Not only do all
of our students have different learning styles they all are learning at
different levels. To help us accomplish this task of meeting all learning
levels we divided our students into three different categories based on their
learning levels. Our categories were Advanced, General, and Inclusion. Using these categories we developed 3 sets
of notes, graphic organizers, and requirements to fit the level of rigor needed
to challenge each group.
Pacing Guide
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