Classroots.org

To help formalize a process for negotiating curriculum I am going to pitch project-based units to students.

Each pitch will have four pieces.

1. The Vision: The first part of the pitch will be a presentation of my vision for a unit, including its goals and an overview of the steps or activities involved in the unit. Each pitch will try to incorporate some audio-visual elements of the artistic and advertising techniques we’ll study through our art, language arts, and civics curricula.
2. The Essential Questions: The next piece will be some kind of flowchart or other textual visualization of the big questions that frame and scaffold the unit’s problem and learning.
3. The Contract: The next piece will be a contract built like a menu that lets students commit to different parts of the project at different levels of independence. For example, a student might indicate that she’s committed to researching independently, but wants help drafting a written response to what she’s learned, or that she’s committed to drafting independently, but wants help finding an outside expert, rather than a teacher, to help her revise her writing.
4. The Counter-proposal: The last, most amorphous part of the pitch solicits counter-proposals from students: counter-questions, alternative products, and petitions to do the work of the unit elsewhere – perhaps in another class or at home.

I don’t think any of this is new, but I hope it brings together design and differentiation for student-centered work in useful ways.

I don’t have a good handle yet on how to chunk the pieces, but I think the questions and products that students and I come up with will provide plenty of inquiry, process, and revision lessons. Also, this might be way too teacher-centered a way to introduce things, despite the amount of choice offered. We might wind up brainstorming a class pitch for each piece of curriculum we brainstorm, find, or negotiate through inquiry and discussion. I don’t want the pitch to be something that moves us backwards, but I do want to provide some scaffolding around excellent work and the work we’re asked to do that is also somehow relevant to us.

Up first: a unit on citizen-artists, through which I hope students will define excellence in artistry and citizenship, draft expository pieces about citizens and/or artists – familial, local, or otherwise – whom they consider to be excellent, create excellent portraits or political art in response to their learning, and find a community organization willing to host their work.

I’m excited to see how it goes, but also to hear what kids say when I ask what and/or how they’d rather learn to start our third year together.