STEP SIX -PLANNING LESSONS
1 meeting to review Standards for Teaching and Learning and to plan a joint activity, then individual time to work on lesson plans and unit charts, and 1 meeting to share lesson plans.
   
Introduction You may wonder why the task of finalizing lessons is left to the end.  You probably have your ideas fairly well in mind already.  Until the culminating task and its assessment were established, however, you could not make decisions about whether or not your activities would lead students toward the culminating task.  Now, it is time to finalize lessons.
Process
Step One
Step Two
Step Three  
Step Four First, remember the criteria for a high quality unit.  It is critical that you keep these in mind as you plan student activities.
Step Five
Step Six 1.  The unit is an investigation in which students gather, analyze, and present information.
Step Seven
Step Eight 2.  All content areas should tie in well to the unit topic.
3.  Student use of technology should be embedded throughout the unit.
4.  The unit should be relevant to students because it is current, local, and/or related to their world.
Second, as a group, before beginning the individual work, the team should consider the following Standards for Teaching and Learning:
a. Higher Order Thinking: The task involves students in manipulating information and ideas by synthesizing, generalizing, explaining,  hypothesizing, or arriving at conclusions that produce new meaning and  understanding for them.

b. Deep Knowledge:  The task addresses  central ideas of a topic or  discipline with enough thoroughness to explore connections and

relationships to produce relatively complex understandings.
c.  Substantive Conversation: Students engage in extended conversational exchanges with the teacher and/or their peers about subject matter in a way that builds an improved and shared understanding of ideas or topics.
d.  Connections to the World Beyond the Classroom:  Students make connections between substantive knowledge and either public problems or personal experience.
If standards for teaching and learning are new to you, take some time to practice with them.  Rate these student activities for incorporation of the Standards for Teaching and Learning.  You may have a slightly different set of standards established within your state.  The standards above were culled from nationally recognized documents.
Browse through these unit charts to get an idea for the scope of student activities.  Not all teachers assessed every activity. Each teacher should have ready the unit plan chart he/she started filling in during Step Three. Your chart should inlude the joint activity and the technology activity, both described below.
The third part of Step Six is to plan at least one joint activity.  For example, the Should Rivers be Dammed? team showed a video about the Three Gorges Dam on the same day, so students would have the same starting point.  They also organized a field trip to local hydroelectric dams.  The Ghost Town team went on a field trip to the ghost town part way through the unit.  The Winter team had a guest speaker and arranged for all of the students to attend the speaker’s presentation at the same time.  The Middle Ages team showed the movie, "A Knight’s Tale."  Brainstorm, make a list, make some phone calls - but think of a joint activity.
The fourth part of Step Six is to consider how to include student use of technology as they gather, analyze, and communicate information.  There are numerous possibilities, including Internet searches, software, e-mailing resource people, and electronic encyclopedias.  
Winter Unit: Students used digital cameras, scanners, and word processing to create a webpage about solutions to living in a cold climate.
Middle Ages Unit: Students used Internet websites for examples of illuminated manuscripts, then used a scanner and word processing to create the program for the Medieval Quest Concert.  Students also used timelline software.
Ghost Town Mathematics: Students used GIS units on a field trip to the ghost town to get bearings on various buildings, then created a map f the town.
Ghost Town Social Studies: Students researched a site using an informational CD, then took digital photographs of the site on a field trip.  These photos illustrated articles about the sites.
Rivers Language Arts: Students used the Internet and electronic encyclopedias to gather information pertinent to the focus questions.  Later, they created HyperStudio stacks to present various viewpoints.
The fifth part of Step Six may be done as a work session with team members working individually in content areas, or the team may prefer to just work individually and have a short meeting to report back.  As lessons are planned, teachers should continue to fill in the unit plan charts.  Although you may not be comfortable planning assessments for each activity at this point, at least jot down ideas for how to assess student work.  The book Creative Checklists has many ideas about checklists, though you may want to alter the examples to fit an activity. 
The sixth part of Step Six is to meet briefly to share lesson plans.  It is important that team members share lesson plans to get a whole picture of the unit because:
  • they will know what students are doing in other classes related to the topic,
  • the team will keep tabs on the amount of work being expected of the students, and
  • teachers will be able to clarify for students the connections across disciplines.
This is the end of Step Six.
You are nearly there.  Here are the details for the NEXT  MEETING.
You may need to pause and Reflect .