Literacy Design Collaborative: Day 1
Today I met with the teacher who is going to begin implementing Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) within her next unit. LDC basically breaks down Common Core literacy standards for English Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies and creates teaching tasks that can easily be implemented into curriculum. These teaching tasks are created to maintain rigor, upholding important aspects of the Common Core. LDC gives the teachers a template for writing teaching tasks wherein the instructor can select the text and task while guiding the learning by adding an essential question. These tasks can become modules, which are like your teaching unit. Multiple modules become courses based on the LDC principals. For more information on LDC, go to www.ldc.org.
For our first meeting, I gave the teacher some packets on LDC that provide information about the development of this curriculum tool along with the templates for different tasks. We are focusing on a political science course in the social studies department that most ninth grade students take when entering high school. I hope to roll out LDC to teachers gradually, starting with teachers who work primarily with ninth graders. Our first set of teaching tasks will occur during the unit "Introduction to Criminal Law." This unit focuses on different crimes over a series of chapters of the students' textbook.
After introducing the concept of LDC, I had the teacher select a literacy standard to work into their unit. During this part of our meeting things were getting tricky. To start off, the Common Core has identified literacy standards in the back of the ELA standards packet for History, Science, and Technical subjects. I had assumed we would use one of these standards to think about possible teaching tasks. However, the standards for Political Science/ Civic Literacy are also described as "literacy" standards, though I'm thinking that this means that students have an understanding of civic responsibility and law rather than the ability to read an engage with texts in the field of social studies. For this upcoming unit, we selected the following essential concept and/or skill:
Understand the rights and responsibilities of each citizen and demonstrate the value of lifelong civic action.
This essential concept will ground the general learning targets for the upcoming unit. We also decided that students will complete an "After Reading" task from the after reading rubric. Our next steps will include deciding on an ELA social studies standard and selecting a task to begin creating the assessment that will demonstrate student learning. I think many great things will come of our work with LDC, especially because the content area teacher is so excited to try new things. Hopefully I can roll out more LDC modules next year with other teachers.
This sounds great. I think the collaboration between teachers will be a valuable learning experience. I have some questions:
ReplyDelete1. How does this model fit with the backward design process that we are using in our Standards and Assessment work? Similar? Can this process be adapted to meet the Design in 5 framework, or do we need to adapt the Design in 5 to meet this?
2. How will you decide on literacy standards for the unit? Will you jump to performance tasks (like a speech or presentation) and pull from speaking, or are you just aiming for reading standards?
I'm excited to hear how this process goes!
Those are great questions. I'm hoping that this model feels like added value to teachers rather than more work. Here's my response to your questions:
ReplyDelete1. I do think that this model is reminiscent of backward design. One of the things I find lacking in the model, which I am supplementing for the teacher I am working with, is a focus on breaking down the standards. The process for LDC consists of four steps: a) What task?; b) What skills?; c) What instruction?; d) What results?. In the first step, the instructor selects a specific task from a set of templates. I expanded the first step to have the teacher select a standard for literacy. After we break down the standard, I will have the teacher look at the list of task templates and select a task that fits the standard based on the skill it is teaching the student. I do think the process can be adapted for fit the Design in 5 framework. For instance, the second stage, what skill?, asks the instructor to select the skills necessary for students to comprehend the reading piece. These components can be ranked for difficulty. However, I'm sure that this first unit will be a learning experience. There are bound to be difficulties that we have not yet encountered.
2. Your second question touches on an interesting subject. Initially I was focusing on using the ELA standards that are written for History, Science, and Technical Subjects, but they don't seem to fit will with the templates. The teacher selected a standard from the Political Science standards, which we will be using to begin some backward design for this unit. However, the performance tasks appear to be the standards that LDC focuses on because they want the student to read, comprehend, and then create. The LDC tasks focus on the end product created by the student with the focus being how do we get the student to that point. So, to give you another non-answer, it will be trial and error to figure out the best way to work with the standards. Unfortunately, the problem with using templates is how difficult it is to adjust the work to meet specific needs. After completing a teaching task in this political science unit, I hope to be able to write up these templates and assign specific standards to them.