Week 3: Collaborative Unit Pre-Planning Stage

One of the assignments that I will be working on throughout the semester is a collaborative unit project with another classmate in which one student takes on the role of teacher and another student takes on the role of a teacher librarian.  The students then work together to create a unit that utilizes the skills and knowledge of both the classroom teacher and the school librarian.  For my project, my partner, Nichole, will be taking on the teacher role since she is currently a high school social studies teacher and I will be taking on the teacher librarian role.

In this pre-planning stage of our collaboration, Nichole and I have discussed creating a unit that she could actually use with her high school students.  This discussion led us to select Nichole's law class as the focus of our unit plan since this is her first time teaching the class and she could use new unit plans.  In particular, Nichole suggested focusing the unit on court cases relating to the Bill of Rights.  For example, the students could research a particular court case, analyze different points of view related to the case, and then present their position to the class.

I thought this sounded like a great idea and responded with questions about how I, the teacher librarian, might assist with the lesson.  For example, I imagine I might be able to help students locate resources on their particular court case, cite their resources, and create presentations using Prezi or presentation zen techniques.  I also mentioned that we should try to look at what standards, in particular, we wanted to cover in the lesson.

At the moment, I think Nichole and I are off to a good start.  We have identified email and Facebook (we both use this site frequently) as our main means of communication and I have begun scouting out possible resources that I would use with the students.  I'm a little worried because I'm not too familiar with law resources, but I think if I spend some time reviewing the legal resources available on the Michigan Electronic Library (MeL) website it will help me get a better understanding of what information is readily available.

In terms of past collaboration experiences, one mistake that I want to avoid is not clarifying exactly what the lesson objectives are at the beginning of the collaborative process.  I think it is very easy to get distracted by other factors such as technology and forget the true focus of the lesson.  To make sure I don't repeat this mistake, I will try to work with Nichole to nail down our lesson objectives early on and to refer back to those objectives frequently as we decide on other elements of the unit.

Finally, the next step in our project, I think, will be to gather our resources (standards, textbook, list of possible databases/websites) and chat online to flesh out our ideas of what exactly we want the students to do.  From there, I think we will be ready to start dividing up responsibilities and preparing materials to put on the class wiki.