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Essential Question
Essential Question
How can we fully make the shift to teaching that transforms learners' engagement, knowing, doing, thinking, and being - whether we are teaching in person or over distance?
How can we fully make the shift to teaching that transforms learners' engagement, knowing, doing, thinking, and being - whether we are teaching in person or over distance?
Introduction to the Course
Introduction to the Course
This course is an online workshop on planning units and lessons that teach for deep engagement, understanding, and expert performance, and for personal and cultural transformation. The course is designed to be asynchronous, so you can work at your own pace over time. We will provide opportunities for you to interact and engage with other participants and with mentors, including the authors of the assigned text.
We are offering this course in response to the COVID pandemic and the challenges it offers to teachers and learners. It is our hope that our current situation, and whatever follows, will provide an opportunity and an impetus for moving in the direction of teaching that is transformative and transcendent.
Transformative comes from the Latin trans which means beyond and form which means to take a new (and superior) shape. Transcendence comes from scandare meaning to climb, so transcendence is to climb beyond. So, it is our hope to help you plan and implement instruction that will move your teaching forward in liberating ways, whether that teaching is online, in blended environments or face to face.
Is this our time?
Is this our time?
Now is the time to commit to yourself and to your own learning and teaching in order to recreate a more equitable educational experience that is focused on deep learning. Now is the time to focus on integrating social emotional learning, to have a laser focus on the kinds of threshold knowledge that are transferable and most generative, to focus less on information and more on transformational understandings and capacities, to emphasize joyful engagement, and to developing deep and usable conceptual and procedural understandings.
We argue that there has never been a better time to re-imagine learning environments with a focus on deep engagement and learning that moves learners towards real world expertise and new ways of knowing, doing, thinking, and being that apply to real world disciplinary work, democratic work, and citizenship, and that will work towards equity, culturally responsive teaching, social-emotional learning, and personal as well as cultural transformation.
If you are thinking and rethinking: what could education become and be, how can it become more powerful, engaging and joyful, then this workshop will help you on your journey.
Objectives
Objectives
This workshop is designed to provide:
· insight and clarity about the theories and beliefs that are most liberating and powerful for teaching and learning.
· access to thinking partners and mentors who will support your journey and provide ongoing feedback.
· a community and network of peers who are facing the same challenges and undertaking the same work.
· examples of mental models and specific strategies for implementing guided inquiry through cognitive apprenticeship at the unit and lesson level
·support in planning and implementing these strategies in ways to apprentice learners into ever more expert capacities as readers, writers, scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, visual artists, democratic citizens and problem-solvers, et al.
·assistance in how to use technology as an amplifier for learning, creating, connecting, communicating, and problem solving, for knowing, thinking, doing and being, in ways that move away from information delivery and towards transformation - of our engagement, and of our participation in academic work and civic life.
Lesson & Unit Planning
Lesson & Unit Planning
The Unit/Lesson Planning will be organized around the principles of guided inquiry and cognitive apprenticeship captured in the mental model of EMPOWER (Envision, Map, Prime, Orient, Walkthrough, Extend/Explore, Reflect).
Central Text: The course reading will be Planning Powerful Instruction, grades 6-12, by Wilhelm, Bear, and Fachler from Corwin Press OR Planning Powerful Instruction, grades 2-5, by Wilhelm, Miller, Butts, and Fachler - depending on your grade level assignment and area of interest.
Culminating Project: At the end of the workshop you will have produced a unit outline (e.g. 4-8 weeks or so) for a substantive topic that is taught through the use of guided inquiry and cognitive apprenticeship. You will have developed a unit outline using the EMPOWER model and five fleshed out lessons from the unit that use EMPOWER to apprentice learners' into expertise in terms of attitude/mindset and conceptual and strategic capacity.
What Can I Expect?
What Can I Expect?
Online Modules
Online Modules
The course consists of 7 modules that mirror the process of planning using EMPOWER and guided inquiry/cognitive apprenticeship:
Introducing Ourselves and Building Community
Theories of Teaching and Learning - and Why They Matter
Envisioning
Mapping
Priming and Orienting
Walkthrough and Extending/Exploring
Reflecting
and then a final check in on our learning, course reflection, and setting new goals and a path forward based on our learning
All modules are organized according to this template:
Priming & Orienting Activity: An opportunity for you to engage in some kind of activity or thought experiment and to write a brief reflection.
Input: A slide deck (screencast or webinar) that provides an overview and highlights major points of the module
Reading Assignment: A reading assignment from the central text, Planning Powerful Instruction
Activities: Activities that will engage you in making specific moves necessary to planning your unit outline and its five fleshed out lessons.
Application and Transfer of Learning: A call to transfer your learning into your instruction via lesson and unit planning templates.
Reflective Writing: A reflection assignment about some kind of issue/question
Online Applications: An opportunity to explore digital tools to support the kind of teaching and learning moves highlighted in the module, whether in face-to-face, blended, or distance learning environments
Sharing: A chance to engage in thinking thinking partner/s from the course (including a mentor) and to share your work during the module. You will be asked to post your work on a padlet community sharing site and to respond to the work of at least three classmates.
Credits: The course can be taken for graduate credit, professional credit, or audit. Direct questions to Jeff Wilhelm at jwilhelm@boisestate.edu
Graduate credits are automatically reduced by 50% through teacher grants from the Boise State Writing Project ($594 plus an online fee - you must also apply for graduate status which is currently free and fairly simple). Professional credits and audit privileges also available with or without thinking partnership.
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