BME- collaboration......

Teaching a colleague something that takes a great deal of personal time is a difficult task. Especially when you’re teaching a highly respect teacher who has taken a similar class and agrees that planning to the several facets of learning sometimes over does a unit that can be taught effectively in a shorter amount of time.

In any circumstance, I teach others best by providing detailed examples of what they will need to accomplish. I talk about the steps taken to complete the assignment, and show the links and paperwork that were presented to me before I made my first attempts. Being a k through two teacher, I am use to gently guiding “students” through the process before letting them go and try on their own.

Brenda B. and I met on the Monday before my assessment timeline was due. I had not received my stage 3 assignment back, but feeling like I was on the right track, showed her the work I put in to creating my six lessons. I also showed her the corresponding assessments and the assessment timeline that I was working on. After looking at these examples I decided to show her our class wiki and the links that helped me through this project. We looked over the WHERETO’s page, the “facets of learning” page, and the “Backward Design: Stage 3” sheet. I also showed her the design checklist for stage 3. Keeping these stage 3 goals in mind helped us begin mapping out each letter of her WHERETO’s.

Feeling a bit guilty about putting this much work onto a fellow teacher (who has already gotten her Master’s degree), I stayed to help her map out and complete two of the six lessons for our writing component. We talked a great deal about the superlative parts of the backward design, along with the parts that seem a bit far fetched.

These were our thoughts: Designing with the end goal established is an awesome idea. We love knowing exactly what the students will need to accomplish before establishing the “mini” lessons that lead up to it. We love the thought of integrating technology into parts of the seven lessons, and how easy it is to establish assessments when planning this way.

We agreed that fitting lessons strategically in to the specific facets of learning is not always productive. Pushing lessons in to fill a particular category, rather than teaching lessons that fit well with the final goal ,doesn’t really make sense. Being exposed to the facets and WHERETO’s help to remind us how important it is to teach to the many different learning styles, but after years of teaching, this happens quite naturally. Finding a genuine audience for every unit is a bit far fetched. It would be great, but how do we do this with such limited resources and money?

Although the backward design would be effective, elementary teachers are not given the time needed to plan in this manner. I, for instance, get 25 minutes a day to plan my lessons, and this is not a common planning time. Just meeting with Brenda was difficult as we both had duties before or after school, we both have children who play baseball, we both are involved in a PLC, attend PET’s, teach all day, and I have class every Wednesday. Unfortunately this leaves very little time for collaborating.