My teaching unit: an overview
The project consists of seven sessions planned to be applied in two different schools and two different grade levels (third grade and fourth grade). The importance of thinking of a driven question was primordial, and in my case, Maria (my partner) and I decided that it was going to be: How do we move and why?
This question was chosen to promote the learning of the different body systems that we use to move whilst providing our learners with an authentic context for communication in English (as a foreign language). With this in mind, the entire project has been specifically designed to be implemented shoulder to shoulder by two different group classes from two different schools that will work in parallel: School A and School B.
As with any educational project planning, our departure point has been to first decide on a final outcome that would push our students to answer the question of the teaching unit. The final output has been a video in which both schools were asked to put in common different knowledge that they had acquired during the different tasks outlined in the project to later upload it to YouTube and become part of the school blogs. Moreover, and also as part of the final result, a website has been created in which we have written everything we have been daily doing so as to make the community involved and take part in the building of students’ learning.
With this intention, we have followed a planning in which the learners of each school are missing part of the information related to the locomotor system and there is a need to talk to each other to discover it.
In this particular case, it was decided that the students in one school (in our case School A) would explore the skeletal system and the other school (School B) would become young ‘experts’ in the muscular system. This implied that the learners would have to exchange their information to obtain a complete image of the functions and components of the different body systems in order to be able to create the final video explaining how do we move and why. However, we still had to decide on how this exchange of information could take place given that these schools were at different locations. Finally, it was decided that the project would include asynchronous telecollaboration through which the students from both schools would communicate and work together. The main tasks to be carried out would be to create different videos to teach their online classmates informative content related either to the skeletal or the muscular system, depending on the school.
Specifically, in School B’s case, which is my group class, they just have 2 hours of English a week, but as the school follows a CLIL approach (Content Language Integrated Learning), they are in contact with this foreign language two extra hours (Science and Arts and Crafts).
This question was chosen to promote the learning of the different body systems that we use to move whilst providing our learners with an authentic context for communication in English (as a foreign language). With this in mind, the entire project has been specifically designed to be implemented shoulder to shoulder by two different group classes from two different schools that will work in parallel: School A and School B.
As with any educational project planning, our departure point has been to first decide on a final outcome that would push our students to answer the question of the teaching unit. The final output has been a video in which both schools were asked to put in common different knowledge that they had acquired during the different tasks outlined in the project to later upload it to YouTube and become part of the school blogs. Moreover, and also as part of the final result, a website has been created in which we have written everything we have been daily doing so as to make the community involved and take part in the building of students’ learning.
With this intention, we have followed a planning in which the learners of each school are missing part of the information related to the locomotor system and there is a need to talk to each other to discover it.
In this particular case, it was decided that the students in one school (in our case School A) would explore the skeletal system and the other school (School B) would become young ‘experts’ in the muscular system. This implied that the learners would have to exchange their information to obtain a complete image of the functions and components of the different body systems in order to be able to create the final video explaining how do we move and why. However, we still had to decide on how this exchange of information could take place given that these schools were at different locations. Finally, it was decided that the project would include asynchronous telecollaboration through which the students from both schools would communicate and work together. The main tasks to be carried out would be to create different videos to teach their online classmates informative content related either to the skeletal or the muscular system, depending on the school.
Specifically, in School B’s case, which is my group class, they just have 2 hours of English a week, but as the school follows a CLIL approach (Content Language Integrated Learning), they are in contact with this foreign language two extra hours (Science and Arts and Crafts).