Sunday, November 22, 2015

Collaborative Unit Design Revisited


University students and teacher candidates will use this website template to collaborative design a geometry unit of study.
In today's era of bountiful resources and information, good learning design profits from collaboration. Getting together with a professional group of invested educators in your learning/teaching context to design, or redesign, a unit of study is a beneficial activity for both student and teacher learning. Soon I will engage the teacher candidates I teach at a local university in a learning unit design endeavor.

Where do you start with such an endeavor?

I suggest that you begin with the following components:
  1. Topic
  2. Standards
  3. Essential Questions
  4. Success Criteria and Goals
  5. Elements of Learning Design
  6. Learning Attributes and Skill Focus
  7. Vocabulary
  8. Blended Resources and Activities: hands-on activities, online/offline games, video, books, paper/pencil practice, coding, project/problem base learning, presentation, and more. 
  9. Assessments
  10. Expert Visitors
  11. Field Studies
  12. Specific learning experiences and lesson plans
  13. Professional Learning
Together the team can look over this list and create a website template to guide their work. Then they can discuss how they are going to complete the endeavor including where they will work on their own and where they will work together. 

As the team rolls out the unit, they can troubleshoot, revise, and enrich. As they do this, they can update their unit plan so that it's accurate and available for future use.

How often do you and your colleagues collaborate with regard to unit design that benefits student learning with dynamic study and experiences? What else would you add to this unit design shortlist?

When we have the chance to design learning together in our learning contexts, the learning for all becomes rich, memorable, and impactful. Every learning organization should make time for this important work.

Note:
This is an example of a unit design that colleagues and I worked on: Endangered Species Study