Stage 1 Planning with Partner

Stacey Augustine and I are both partnering with the Elementary Art specialist. We decided that we’d meet with her as a team to introduce the Understanding By Design planning process. The experience of working with our colleague was both interesting and somewhat frustrating. Finding time to meet was difficult. Our partner teaches Art in several elementary schools in the district and is not at Mallett School everyday. When she is she is usually playing catchup. Then we had to coordinate Stacey’s and my schedule as well. We finally found a time that all of us could free up to get together.

We had a good conversation. Our partner really wanted to support our work and integrate art into classroom content. The paperwork aspect of the unit design felt overwhelming to her and she felt that she was there was a high expectation of work for her when she was not involved in taking a course and receiving credit. We reassured her that we would do our best to limit the time and workload expected of her. As she is considering beginning a Master’s Program we offered to serve as a support and offered her our classrooms to tap into, if needed, during her program of study.

We began by sharing my completed Stage One template for the Language Arts part of the Unit. I walked Kim through the process and the basic organization. We discussed the lack of activities at this point and discussed focusing on the learning that will come from the unit. This was difficult for her. She continually referred to projects and lessons that she was used to teaching. I decided that the best place to start filling in a blank template, for her part of the collaborated unit, was to begin with the standards. This proved to be a little more difficult than I anticipated. Kim explained to us that MSAD9s Art standards are currently being revised and that she feels there will be significant change. With this in mind I suggested we use MLR for our planning. I showed her how to access the MLRs online. When viewing these I realized how broad they were. We chose PREK-2 A1 Artist's Purpose: Students recognize a variety of purposes for making art, including telling a story, communicating emotion, or beautifying functional objects. These standards were appropriate for Stacey’s unit as well. We discussed the conceptual lens of perspective that both Kim and I would be using in our unit. We then reviewed my essential questions and agreed that one of them “ Why do people see things differently?” could also be used for her part of the unit as well. The process was then repeated with Stacey’s template.

Our next step was to tackle the understandings followed by the key knowledge and skills. Again we began with my Fairy Tale unit. This was a little more challenging to support as I am not familiar with some of the Art concepts and processes needed to teach perspective. My job became to prompt, question, encourage and guide the conversation. The six facets section was definitely difficult and we both still have more work to do in this section with Kim. We were nearing the end of the time she was able to devote to the process and we felt it was best not to hurry but to reflect and regroup.

Before we ended our conversation Stacey and I both share shared the performance tasks we had created with Kim.We showed her the type two technology grid and explained the rationale for the technologies chosen. This excited her the most. I think she saw how she could “fit” into the assessments and better understood the knowledge and skills that were needed for successful completion of the tasks.

We have more conversations to come but I felt that together, we had made a good beginning.