Reflections on Collaboration - The Early Stages

This semester, I am working on a collaborative planning project for one of my two final MLIS classes.  Planning with my teacher partner has, so far, been an easy process.  I am currently working on a school-wide reading plan with a group of teachers, and I approached a sixth grade social studies teacher on that team about collaborating.  She was excited to partner and suggested that I work with the full sixth grade social studies team, given the collaborative nature of planning in our school.  Our teachers plan as teams in several ways:  vertically within the content among grades, horizontally across the grade and contents, horizontally within the content within a grade, and as a full school team. 

I met with the four-teacher sixth grade social studies teachers via Google Meet during one of their weekly planning sessions.  Prior to our meeting, I reviewed the outline of their year-long curriculum plan (essentially a curriculum map (Howard, 2010; Sullivan, 2015)) and noted a couple of units that seemed to have the potential for an inquiry-based collaboration.  When we met, they answered my questions, offered some great ideas about how to approach the unit we identified as good for collaboration, and gave me full access to their planning folder in Google Drive.  They also gave me guidance on pacing and on the appropriate level of instruction for sixth graders.  In particular, they suggested not focusing on the research process itself – which students learn more about in seventh and eighth grades – but on the process of analyzing sources that I select.  One teacher also explicitly reiterated McTighe and Thomas’s (2003) advice to start with identifying my desired outcome then work backwards.

Thankfully, identifying content curriculum standards has not been challenging.  The grade-level content teams choose the critical standards to cover and jointly plan common assessments, then individual teachers lesson plan within those parameters.  As a result, within the folder for the unit, the standards were clearly identified in materials and linked to the various documents used in the past for the unit. 

For my own edification, I also reviewed the full grade-level standards online at https://www.georgiastandards.org/Georgia-Standards/Pages/Social-Studies.aspx.  Georgia makes its standards easily accessible on the state Department of Education website, which I have accessed before.  The social studies standards actually include a detailed curriculum map as discussed by Howard (2010).  I have chosen to add a few standards that focus on reading and writing within history/social studies.  In addition, I was really pleased to find some instructional videos that helped me get in the mindset of thinking in terms of history/social studies literacies – including using key primary and secondary source documents for instruction and leading students through an analysis of those documents.  I am currently working through the parallels between the history/social studies inquiry process and Big 6 information literacy process as well as the parallels between the social studies standards and the AASL standards.

 

References

Howard, J. K. (2010). Information specialist and leader – Taking on collection and curriculum mapping. School Library Monthly, 27(1), 35-37.

McTighe, J., & Thomas, R. S. (2003). Backward design for forward action. Educational Leadership, 60(5), 52-55.

Sullivan, C. (2015, March 13). How to use curriculum mapping. TeachHub.com. https://www.teachhub.com/professional-development/2015/03/how-to-create-a-curriculum-map/