Mid-Planning

Essential Questions – I had taken along a “TLC (Teacher and Librarian Collaboration) Worksheet” with me to my first meeting with Jeff, my collaborative teacher partner on this unit, which helped us in our conversation and planning. After wonderful conversations concerning the Romeo and Juliet unit and some of the things that Jeff does as part of this unit (see “pre-planning” post), we started going through the worksheet. The essential questions for the Romeo and Juliet unit are:
· How do my relationships within and across groups affect others?
· How may personal decisions affect my family or neighborhood?
· Can decisions based on violence or anger have a peaceful resolution?
· How do we understand material that is difficult to read?
It was shortly after this that I asked Jeff what he saw as my role in this collaborative unit. He told me that frankly he had the lessons all ready for what he wanted to teach, he just wanted me to focus on plagiarism, proper citation, and bibliographic entries in MLA style in whatever manner I would like to do that. In other words, I am mainly filling the role of a resource person in this unit. He is happy with the unit, he just wants to tweak these areas a bit and felt that the school media specialist would be a good person to teach these areas that this particular class is weak in. I have since added the following essential questions:
· How do we properly cite material without plagiarism?
· How do we create a bibliography in MLA style?

Task Division - Since my role in this collaborative project is mainly that of a resource person, there are not many tasks to “divide.” Jeff will teach the Romeo and Juliet unit within his English 9 class using the applicable academic content standards, and I will make sure that some of the information literacy standards are met. Since this project is for my grad school class for my grade, I will have to design and write everything that I feel should be in the unit plan according to the requirements. I am free to contact him if I have questions of any kind, though. As I said in the previous post, this is our summer vacation from the regular school year and Jeff wants to enjoy it, his family, and the evening classes that he is taking. Our biggest hindrance is the timing of creating this unit because it falls over the summer vacation.

Assessment – During our latest meeting, which took place over the telephone, we specifically discussed assessment. Since I am teaching the plagiarism, citation, and bibliography lessons, I offered to be responsible for these areas. Jeff was thrilled and said that he would incorporate into their grade for the unit whatever grade I gave them (ex.: “References” page).

Ethnolinguistic Minority Learning Needs and Abilities – Ours is a very small school which has been declining in enrollment over the last five years due to the economy and loss of jobs in the area. Jeff taught this in-coming 9th grade class as 8th graders last year. There are only 18 students in this particular class, 100% White/Caucasian, 3 males and 15 females, one special education student, and two students who would qualify for Title help if we still had it in the upper grades. One of the “Title” students may be moving out of the area this summer. Most of these students have been together since Kindergarten, with the “newest” member of the class joining over two years ago. Most of the students in this class are readers who love to “book talk” and they all get along pretty well together. In order to meet the needs of all learners as well as add variety and fun, a lot of different methods are employed including small group brainstorming sessions where groups rotate to a different focus station every few minutes, use of video segments, class discussions, Reader’s Theater style script readings, acting out certain scenes, and various writing activities. Accommodations are made for the special needs students (ex: more time for writing activities).