Meet the Teams

Ghost Town      This team consists of four teachers:  Deb Lehto (Social Studies), Lisa Marenger (Mathematics), Michelle Geyer (English Language Arts), and Gina Furmanski (Science).  They teach eighth grade at Escanaba Junior High School. 

    In the spring of 2001, this team put together a quick interdisciplinary unit about Fayette, an iron smelting ghost town that is a Michigan Historic State Park in the county.  They followed basic guidelines to produce a quality unit that the students enjoyed, but wanted to strengthen the unit during the next school year.  To refine their unit, they followed the steps of this process.

Middle Ages   This team consists of four teachers on the Related Arts team at Escanaba Junior High School.  The teachers are Diane Duval (Life Skills), Christine Groleau (Art), Jim Jankowski (Industrial Arts), and Laura Robinson-Spaulding (Band).  

    In the spring of 2001, this team began talking about a Middle Ages unit to coincide with a Shakespeare production (because, though he worked during Renaissance times, his plays are often set in the Middle Ages) and related events in the community.  When they began brainstorming ideas, they had too many!  They used the process to help narrow the focus of the unit and to find ways to include more technology. The display case presented an overview of the unit.
War Experiences  Jim DeGrand (World History) and Ted Derouin (Applying Technology) are teachers at Escanaba High School.  During a summer curriculum workshop, they came up with the idea of combining World History and Applying Technology in an interdisciplinary unit.  They spent time mapping out a technology course in which students would learn to produce videos; one of the student projects would be a video of interviews about war experiences.  As part of their study of 20th century wars, the history students would use local veterans as a resource for understanding how war experiences shape people's perspectives about their country. Using the process of unit development helped Jim and Ted strengthen the unit from a social studies standpoint by defining focus questions and turning the project into a history investigation about war experiences.  In large high schools, interdisciplinary units are tough because of the constant mixing of students in different classes.  Jim and Ted find that interdisciplinary units can work at the high school level.
Making Winter Positive for Escanabans      Only two members of this team are still teaming at Escanaba Junior High:  Nancy Denman (Social Studies) and Brian Robinette (English Language Arts).  In the winter of 1999, this team created a unit that helped students examine winter by considering why winter occurs, energy conservation, solutions in other regions, and possible solutions for their city.  The process helped them use focus questions to tie together concepts and benchmarks that seemed, at first, quite disparate.
Should Rivers be Dammed?   This team of seventh grade teachers at Escanaba Junior High School consists of Jean King (Science), Gary Salo (Mathematics), Scott Hansen (Social Studies), and Carol Destrampe (English Language Arts).  The process helped them move from a vague idea to do “something about rivers” to a very focused unit that had students studying the Three Gorges Dam in China, the positive and negative impacts of dams on rivers, and the variety of viewpoints people have about this issue. Jean King gives an overview of their unit.