Planning our year

The journey begins!  I was lucky enough to attend the ISTE conference in Philadelphia this year and I made a contact with an individual at a PBL school.  Through emails,  we were able to set up some supports and a mentor relationship with them which puts both my co-teacher and I at ease.  I have to say at this point we are nervous because our program is very different from what our school student population is used to.

Our planned program will look something like this:

• A combined 7th and 8th grade class (44 students) - this year we started with our advanced language arts population.
• Co-taught (two middle school language arts teachers)
• Students will analyze learning objectives based on the new national common core standards and clarify them as needed.  
• Based on pre-assessment data and qualitative data (student reflections), students will choose the learning objectives they will include in their unit.
• Students will pick a theme of interest and develop their unit based on the requirements we have developed as teachers.  Students will be asked to integrate their units with a combination of their choice using literature, social studies, math, science, art, and/or humanities Technology will be integrated in all units.  Students will be required to make current event connections,  use scholarly articles,  conduct research, write a formalized research paper, and present and defend not only their findings, but the mastery of their learning objectives as well.  They will also be required to solicit both peer reviews and expert reviews.
• Students will present a summary of their findings and mastery of their learning objectives using an electronic presentation format of their choice.
• Formative assessments will be conducted through teacher/student conferencing and unit progress monitoring.
• Summative assessments will be conducted through expert reviews and final presentations.

The class is a two hour and 15 minute block that meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (1 hour).  We will use the first 15 minutes as class meeting time and to deliver direct instruction for required grammar and word part vocabulary objectives.

We will then split the group in half.  One half will go to the computer lab for an hour, the other half will participate in teacher conferences, book discussions with their literature groups (placed through theme connections),  independent research in the library, process group meetings, writing, or independent reading. After the hour, the groups will switch.

Students will be required to keep a private blog that will help them reflect on their own learning.  They will also be encouraged to use symbaloo to keep track of their on-line resources and our class will be using edmodo to keep track of class information and resources.

I will post copies of the artifacts we have established up to this point.  Wish us luck!