Unit Implementation Reflection

Of course all plans are subject to change and this unit required flexibility and a willingness to change to meet the needs of a new class of students. The integration that was planned with Kim Jacques, the Art teacher, did not happen...for several reasons.
Kim had written an Arts grant that needed to be implemented in the Fall Semester. This gave her a full plate. Additionally she was starting a Graduate program herself and that took what little time she had for meeting and coordinating this unit with me.
My 2009-10 classroom membership made integration, outside of the classroom, difficult. One quarter of my students changed from the starting date of school. The unit needed major revision to accommodate the academic and social needs of these children. Trying to integrate with a partner, as I was constantly changing activities and assessment goals, was impractical.
As I reflect on the implementation of this unit I would make the following recommendations:

• Teach this unit as a Spring unit when students have better Reading and Writing skills.
• Choose fewer books to share with the class. Use a variety of versions to share and compare and contrast with Reading groups. The smaller setting can better enable all to share, become involved, and target teaching.
  
• Keep the planned assessments and activities. They served both the boys and the girls and a variety of learning styles as well. The perception survey results indicated that the children enjoyed the unit and plan to read this gendre on their own.

I hope to share the unit and assessments with the other Second Grade teachers in my PLC. They will be teaching a Fairy Tale Unit in the Spring and are looking for ways to integrate technology into the classroom. My student samples can serve as exemplars for their students as the proceed through the unit. Additionally, the Backwards Planning model will provide food for conversation for the group. I will be happy to provide leadership by sharing resources and providing support for further reading, exploration and lesson/unit design.
I have not given up on integrating Art and the Fairy Tale Unit with Kim. Hopefully her schedule and my class composition, next year, will enable this to happen and I will make more adjustments to this unit.

Collaboration with Colleague

Cindy, Stacey, and Kim met together as one group for scheduling and convenience reasons as well as to collaborate and share ideas with each other. The time to collaborate with other professionals was very interesting. Having the time and new learning to apply is exciting and purposeful, while there is some nervousness to implement all the stages and integrate technology within all content areas.

We began by showing Kim our art integration sections of our blog with the embedded links and resources. We really wanted to show her our understanding and empathy towards the value of arts in the classroom. We felt this was a great way to start the meeting, as we showed our appreciation for her as a fellow professional and gave her some resources that might be useful as well.

At this time, Kim did express the concern that she is going to be involved in a masters program and that she truly wanted to help us, but does have some hesitancy towards the amount of work and time needed to implement the lessons (length of time, limited time with children, assessments, technology).

Before sharing stage 3, we thought it was important to share our stage 2 templates with Kim. This could give her a view of the type acceptable assessment evidence that would be expected during the units. Additionally, we had not previously shared our end of the unit authentic performance tasks, sharing these was important so that she would know the products and performances that would demonstrate student understanding. We also shared our product and presentation criteria. Kim expressed that she saw great value in these artifacts and was interested in knowing more about this stage and the backward planning model. Her experience has been to design activities before looking at assessment products and performances. This lead naturally into a discussion about the six facets. These lenses were the most difficult to share and explain. By using our completed stage 3 products we assisted Kim in beginning to organize her planning through the use of this design. We gave copies of our work for her to use as examples. We recognize that next fall, she may only be able to support us in implementation on a limited basis. She was however, interested in this backwards design model as this learning may be useful as she furthers her education.

The rest of our conversation focused around the perspective lens that we both chose for our units. We recognize that further conversations need to be held. She needed some thinking time to formulate ideas and suggestions about how we could integrated perspective into our units from a art educators point of view.

We understand the value of teaching what we have been learning and practicing, not only for our individual learning, but to spread new methods and learning to others. The difficulty we've faced, and we think others have faced this as well, is the lack of commitment on the part of our collaboration partner. Kim wants to be supportive, but at this point, her level of commitment is
not very deep. We're sure in the Fall that she will give us some ideas for arts integration in our classrooms. We don't believe she will pursue this planning method on her own. As planning is occurring for another cohort, perhaps arrangements can be made for collaborating partners to receive some type of continuing ed. credits, or a small stipend, etc.

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.