Thriving in Chaos: The Importance of Planning

The key to being a PBL/Flipped Instruction teacher is organization. There is no way for students to be successful without having a carefully planned out idea of: the year; the curriculum; the standards; and the class. Below are copies of all of the curriculum planning organizational tools I use. 

 The document on the right is a list of my "competencies". Comepetencies can be equated to a benchmark or a standard in that each has a name, a description and corresponding CCSS or HSCE to support the idea.






The document to the left of here is pulled from the Understanding by Design book by Wiggin-McTighe which allows for me to dissect each of my competencies into information of various importance for the students to learn and master.

Once I know what my students should learn, based on the various Standards collections and close work with my colleagues, I then use the Marzano 4.0 grading scales as a guide to help me write out how well I believe that my students have mastered the material. 

The first document helps me to determine various ways to formatively assess students mastery level. 

The second document is given to students to see the criteria of understanding for each mastery level. 

 Once I've written all of my competencies (or refined ones that worked last year, but need some tweaking/updating), and I've set my mastery scales, I can then determine how long each of the competencies should take to master and how students could go about demonstrating their mastery of the content and I can start anticipating projects and lessons for the students to work on. 

Thankfully, my competencies are written for the year for the entire math curriculum (as I am the only math teacher, I am the math department, ha!). Now it is on to writing the grading scales.