Teaching Strategies
A balance of direct instruction, investigations, independent and group research, field trips and hands-on practice will be utilized through this unit.
Students will be introduced to the topic and provided a student facing unit guide that clearly lays out an overview of what we will cover, and the requirements for portfolio completion for this unit. During the month this is our primary unit, there will be a related lesson or activity planned during each class block.
The unit guide includes links and hard copies of guided lab notes, other required and “choice” assignments and assessment rubrics, and a schedule of when activities are planned. This one-stop document serves as curated resources, templates for completion, and includes vocabulary lists, and career connections options. Some of the tasks build on each other – and must be completed in sequence, but others can be done (or may have been done in another unit that a student completed over the summer, or in a workshop off-site). Students are each responsible to maintain their unit portfolio, and time during several class periods each week will be directed towards artifact creation/logging/captioning etc. The completed portfolio will have a due date.
Students will begin this unit by reviewing their foundational knowledge with an anticipation guide intro and google form on food web, energy transfer and photosynthesis basics. This quiz-like set of questions will help establish what review is required for all, and what might be tailored to specific students on an individualized basis. They will also have a “learning tracking” KWL (what I (already) know, I (still) wonder, what I learned)- guided notes doc to complete weekly.
There will be 4-5 hands-on renewable energy labs/demonstrations where students will work in cooperative groups, a formalized way to ensure that students share responsibilities and learn from and with each other. Team roles include Principal Investigator (PI) who will read and annotate the directions, ask questions on team’s behalf and checks the final work; the Maintenance director: tracks safety and organization of the space, handles cleanup; the Documenter/Reporter records data and observations and shares the results with group; and the Materials Manager who gathers supplies, sets up materials and returns the equipment and supplies. These jobs are rotated for each different activity.
Students will be expected to update their learning tracking KWL chart, and various guided lab and/or field trip notes for weekly review.
Weekly seasonal garden lab time is always focused on regenerative climate farming techniques – which are a balanced combination of short lesson/demonstration/direct instruction on a particular topic, such as cover crops, followed by hands-on field work such as weeding, planting, sign making and documenting the activity.
Each student will be responsible for a research question or direct action and presentation to the group as their contribution to the tool kit. This might take the form of a policy paper about urban agriculture’s impact on climate change, or an infographic about compost or bio digestion, or a stop motion video directions for making biodiesel.
Some aspects of the competency model at the U School are worth noting. It is the expectation that: students will be working at different places on a competency’s learning progression; instructional decisions are based on student needs in real time; learning assets – i.e. teacher support – are available “just in time” so students can self-pace; units are designed to be student-facing; assessment “as learning” – i.e. revision cycles are part of the learning process. There are multiple opportunities to explore, engage and practice specific competencies. Authentic performance-based assessments for some of these skills related to practice and repetition, and many of the teaching strategies and assessments are therefore individualized and not formulaic. Because each student is completing an overall portfolio that may vary from her classmates, the expectations for each student throughout this unit will also vary.
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