For my first action, I facilitated the creation of the first three parts of the Learning Experience Outline - learning context, assessment and procedures. Click on the link above to view the LEO-in-progress.
I opened a new Google Document and gave it the title "LTG K323 & COGCA LEO". Then I published it to the web, which caused Google to assign it a public link, and sent this link to all the teachers via email. Next, we collaborated on the different aspects of the outline one by one, with me as the typist adding to the document as decisions were made. Teachers were able to refresh their screens to see ongoing real-time updates, as well as to make changes themselves. This also allowed different members of the group to adopt the role of typist if I needed a break or in the future if I were absent.
For this unit, the teachers wanted to integrate several content areas with their literacy instruction. The LEO follows a backward design model, so the first step in determining how these different content areas would be integrated was to plan the learning context (standards) and assessments. The primary goal of the web tutorial that students were to create was for them to learn informational writing and speaking (standard ELA1).
However, the teachers also wanted to integrate mathematical communication and reasoning (standard MST3), technological skills (standard MST5) and the arts through response to music (standard ARTS3). Since we were made up of an interdisciplinary team, several teachers in the group had experience teaching technology and math. Several researchers have found a sound basis for interdisciplinary collaboration (Richardson, 2000; Buly, Coskie, Robinson & Egawa, 2006; Foster, Lewis & Onafowora, 2005), including the common institutional context that can increase understanding of student needs.
We accessed the standard through NYLearns.org and used these standards to then develop our own performance indicators as relevant to this project. Fisher, Lapp & Flood (2005) have found that state standards are often too broad to apply directly to classroom teaching and learning and therefore need to be unpacked by teachers at the local level. To facilitate the process, I planned to use Johnston, Knight & Miller's (2007) guiding questions for collaborative planning. These questions would help to ensure that the teams were staying focused on the goal of student learning through backward design. The first question that we needed to address was, what do we want students to learn? The performance indicators represent these teachers' vision of exactly what we want students to know, understand and be able to do by the end of the unit.
Next, we needed to develop some assessment tools to evaluate the next guiding question (Johnston et al, 2007): how will we know the students are learning? We discussed possible ways of evaluating their learning - checklists, presentations, written products, tests. Through discussion, we determined that we wanted to assess three artifacts from their project: the overall wiki design, the informational writing on the wiki and their in-class presentation of the wiki. To do this, the teachers indicated that they would like to customize some rubrics so that the standards would be clear to both teams of teachers as well as their students, since this was a multi-school partnership. We used several rubric generating web sites to fine tune our assessment tools, then created one rubric for each of the ELA performance indicators (both speaking and writing). We also created a rubric to evaluate the overall web design.
Because of the technological aspect of our collaboration, we were able to simultaneously view web content and the newest version of our LEO on our own individual laptops. The laptops were teacher units provided by their individual schools at no cost to the teachers; the web applications we used (Google Docs and an internet database of standards) were free of cost.
