PME 810: Module 5 Journal and Reflection

Here is the schedule that I mentioned previously that I would like to cover with my Grade 8 science
team. Below the schedule you can find a summary of our conversations.

Meeting #1

Plan for the meeting

1) Share mind map created in PME 810

a. Highlight conceptions of curriculum
b. Highlight philosophies that guide curriculum
c. Highlight curricular designs
2) Have the group look at the new BC curriculum and try to identify conceptions, philosophies and
designs
a. How might this new knowledge impact our teaching next year?

Meeting Summary

I started the meeting as I had hoped and shared my mind map that I created with Taylor Ryan for this
course. Although my colleagues were overwhelmed to start, once I hid some of the areas that we would
talk about in the future they started to understand. The first major takeaway from the meeting was that
they really enjoyed Mind Meister, the mind mapping software that we used, and want to use it next
year with our students. The first area of the map that I highlighted were the conceptions of curriculum.
It was easy to explain some of the conceptions such as: academic rationalism, social reconstruction, and
humanistic as they are conceptions that they were familiar with. Some of the difficult conceptions were
the systems approach but I tried to apply it to an example of a company so they understood that is was
more about hierarchical knowledge. Next, we spoke about philosophies and here they found the mind
map helpful because they were able to visualize the divide between differing philosophies. Once they
understood these two topics, we dove into curricular designs and spent the majority of our conversation
here. At first, they took a similar approach to myself and thought that a curriculum would be based
solely off of one design and therefore they tried to place our BC curriculum under one design. We
struggled to do so as we found that there were a few designs that we think encouraged our new
curriculum. We agreed that the new curriculum was definitely learner centered but since the subjects
were still separated there were some aspects of subject centered design. Of those designs, we felt it
most closely aligned with broad fields as there is some encouragement in the new curriculum to look
into areas for interdisciplinary work. We also felt that there were elements of society-culture-based
design since there is a big emphasis on students working on real work problems, whether they are local
or global. After looking at the curriculum through the curriculum design lens, we found that we
understood better aspects of the curriculum. One aspect was the core competencies, with a humanistic
approach, the focus is on the learner and the new curriculum really emphasizes personal improvement
and awareness of strengths and weaknesses. Also, we started to understand how we could work more
of these personal and life skills into our courses. Also, understanding that the curriculum is learner
centered we better understood the emphasis on student voice and choice and want to work harder to
implement this in our teachings next year. All in all, it was just a start to our conversations but I feel that
is was very productive!
Meeting #2

1) Look at teaching, planning and assessment for the type of design

2) Discuss the idea of using backwards planning

Meeting Summary

During this meeting, we focused on the teaching, planning and assessment portion of the mind map.
With time to digest and think further about the conceptions, philosophies and designs we felt we were
ready to tackle teaching, planning and assessment. Along with me, my colleagues liked the headings of
the planned curriculum, the experienced curriculum and the learned curriculum. We have felt in the
past that what we have planned has not always been executed the way we wanted and that the
students may not have learned what we wanted them to. With this in mind, we talked about the
potential of using backwards design. It was something that we started to try at the end of the school
year but felt it was a difficult time to implement it. We took our plate tectonics unit and tried the
backwards design model with it. Although we had activities that we knew we wanted to keep, by
adapting the assessment and which curricular competencies we wanted them to learn, it changed how
some of the topics or assignments were delivered. To include more student choice and voice, we
opened up topics and allowed them to choose which area they may have questions about instead of
lecturing and giving notes. Also, we had an earthquake structure project that we love doing but struggle
to assess it. With working backwards, we were able to clearly outline which curricular competencies we
wanted to achieve and better align the project with its assessment. Although we feel that our planned
curriculum will be more aligned with our new curriculum it will be interested to see what students
experience. With the addition of more student choice, they may experience different curriculum than
what we had planned and even every child may experience different curriculum. Our goal is for the
students to work on the same skill set during student choice assignments and then share what they have
learned with their peers. It may lead to students’ depth of knowledge and not necessarily breadth but
we will see what happens when we implement in the fall.

Meeting #3

1) Create a rubric for the curricular competencies so students understand how they are being
assessed (since it is very different than previously)
2) Create projects that use the new rubric

Meeting Summary

One of our goals last year was to familiarize ourselves with the new curricular competencies with the
goal of creating a master rubric for them for the upcoming year. We want to build a master rubric with
the following headings: Emerging, Developing, Proficient and Extending. We want to create a master
rubric so students become familiar with the language and can track through the year, how they are
doing with varying curricular competencies. It will also be helpful for us as teachers because we will be
able to more accurately track student progress when it comes to curricular competencies and scientific
method skills. During this meeting we changed the curricular competencies into simpler “I can…”
statements and also changed the language so that Grade 8’s would understand what and how they are
being assessed. This is also a part of our backwards planning since we will need this rubric for
assignments, labs and projects. We started with some of the common curricular competencies last year
and found that students enjoyed this style of rubric because they became familiar with it as the year
went on and understood the differences between each column. At the start there was a lot of learning
needed and students were somewhat overwhelmed as there are a lot of curricular competencies. This
year our team wants to roll out the curricular competencies in sections (ie. Questioning and predicting)
so that students do not get overwhelmed by a wealth of information. Also, another goal we are setting
for ourselves is to work a method to gather conversational and observational evidence with accuracy
and ease of documentation. We want to use conversations with students to get to know what they truly
understand, not just what they have memorized for a test or quiz. A tough part for us has been how to
record these for assessment purposes. It is something we will look into when we return to work at the
end of August.

Reflection

This was a welcomed change from my other Professional Learning Community experiences. In the past, I
have found in the past that I have not had much success with online Professional Learning Communities
so it was great that I was able to discuss what I have learned during this course with my colleagues. As
you can see from my summaries above, many of the concepts we learned about in this course were
directly applicable to what our Science 8 team was trying to accomplish. Some of the tricky parts of
these meetings were: finding meeting times that worked for 4 people (we had to reschedule a couple
times), accurately communicating the concepts to my colleagues at a level they understood (they had
not done the readings that we have done in the course) and finally, my colleagues looking to me as an
expert on these ideas (which I am certainly not!). With this last concept, I stuggled the most. I feel this
course has given me a good foundational understanding but I am by no means an expert. I felt that my
collegues were looking at me for all of the answers to their questions, like asking Google, but for many
of their more difficult questions I did not have an answer. As difficult as this was, it was also the space
where we had our richest discussions since we would have to work together and bounce ideas off of
each other. Questions I have moving forward mostly relate to the documents and scaffolding we have
created during our meetings. Will the restructured plate tectonics unit work? Or be better than its
previous version? How will students respond to our shift in teaching and assessment? How will we help
students understand new ways of teaching and assessment so they are more active in their learning?
How will backwards design planning work during the school year? Will we revert back to our old
methods because of time or ease?

Obviously, I won’t know the answers to these questions until we are back in the classroom but I feel that
our group is at the start of an adventure and we have more solid of a footing than last year to jump off,
thanks to this course!