Working with Colleague

Blog Entry – Completing Stage 1 with Colleague:
My colleague, Wanda Heath, and I discussed the Stage 1 template that I had completed for the desired results. I will be teaching the Science content area while Wanda will be teaching the Language Arts curriculum. In order to design the template for Stage1 for the Language Arts content area, we cross-referenced our District’s Language Arts Curriculum with the Maine Learning Results. The students’ understanding statements were matched to our school curriculum. My leadership role came into play when we worked on the knowledge and skills that students will acquire through this unit on butterflies. The skills were to include the performance verbs based on the six facets of understanding. My colleague was not aware of these performance verbs. Once I introduced them, we were able to create three skills and four knowledge statements. The backward design was difficult to work through, but with discussion, we were successful in being able to complete a Stage 1 template for the Language Arts area.