EDIT 2000

By now you’ve identified the curriculum standard you want to address (Step 1) and you’ve listed several problems that could occur while teaching this standard (Step 2). Then you selected one of these problems to work on (Step 3).

Once you have narrowed down the instructional problem, it is time to brainstorm ways to teach the curriculum standard while ensuring minimal instructional problems. The most important thing you need to do is use all of your available resources to come up with as many ideas as you can.

Generating Solutions

What are you thinking about doing for your lesson activity? How is your solution going to encourage communication among your students? What type of communication does your instructional solution encourage – one to one, one to many, or many to many? Are students just talking to each other to get work completed? How is technology assisting communication? How can you create a solution that will encourage students to communicate with people outside of your own classroom?

How is your solution going to encourage collaboration among your students? Are they just working in groups? How is technology assisting collaboration? How can you move past traditional (and not always effective) group work?

Don't forget to consider the communication technology examples in your text on pages 78-81.

Something to consider: if your solutions are really just different versions of students working in groups to create PowerPoint presentations to communicate information to the class, are you really doing anything interesting? Are your students? How does this activity meet the needs of the students you described on your “in my classroom” page?

Once you’ve come up with ideas, you’ll trade topics with a partner and brainstorm as many ideas as you can in the allotted time.

Peer Review

Now what you need to do is get feedback from a classmate or two about the instructional problem you selected. Using this class roster, find two classmates who have selected the same subject and/or grade level and have them review your Design Guide. Make any adjustments to your plan based on the feedback you receive.

For Tuesday

1. Complete Step 4 in your TLAT #1 Design Guide to review your solutions and eliminate 2 that seem unreasonable or don’t make any sense
2. Add 2 new possible solutions by asking other people how they would teach your curriculum standard (note these 2 new items with a * next to them in Step 4 of your Google Doc)
3. We’ll work on Steps 5 and 6 in class on Tuesday