By Alyson Carpenter
ABPC Instructional Partner in Residence
This year, ABPC’s Powerful Conversations Network meetings have partnered teachers from districts across the state in the collaborative process of creating units of study aligned to Alabama’s College & Career Ready Standards (CCRS).
Teams were formed based upon choice of grade level / content focus, and they range from Kindergarten English/Language Arts teams to 6th grade Math teams. These teacher teams have collaborated as unit designers throughout the year to unwrap selected standards, create lessons and assessments aligned with their standards, and most recently to create engaging learning experiences for students aligned to their selected standards. Our guiding text for the year has been Rigorous Curriculum Design by Larry Ainsworth.
Our most recent meeting was a hit with elementary teachers. This month’s focus – “Creating Engaging Learning Scenarios” – sparked excitement across all of our design teams. Teams reviewed their previous work with a standard or standards and spent time looking closely at Chapter 13 of Rigorous Curriculum Design on planning engaging learning experiences.
Teams were given a design tool called the SCRAP as a guide for creating engaging classroom scenarios. It was immediately obvious the SCRAP lesson design tool would not be “scrapped” by the teachers who tried it! Our original plan was to end the session with two teams sharing with one another, but after urging from many of our team leaders, we changed our plan to one that allowed all of the design teams to hear about all of the work products.
The SCRAP design components:
| S: SITUATION | What is the context for the scenario? |
| C: CHALLENGE | What is the problem to be solved? |
| R: ROLE | What role will the student assume? |
| A: AUDIENCE | Who is the target audience? |
| P: PRODUCT or PERFORMANCE | What will the students create and/or demonstrate? |
“This helps me see how the standards are related.”So, how do we know the SCRAP collaboration was a hit? Camera flashes! Teachers were taking pictures of the work products from around the room, and their comments about the day included the following:
“I finally understand this unit planning!”
“I have a better understanding of how to implement standards in my class.”
As facilitators this year, we have been afforded a “balcony view” of the design teams at work. One thing is clear – there is great power in collaboration. We look forward to seeing more from the teacher leaders in the Powerful Conversations Network as they share what they’ve learned this year and begin partnering with collaborative design teams in their own schools across the state!
