FFT-YouPD Challenge Grant: Unit Slam!
This Challenge is the 2nd part of a supplementary round of the NYC-wide Fund For Teachers grant application. It is is designed to foster the sharing of expertise and practices among all teachers who apply. We think this format will help teachers make valuable connections with one another.
As part of your grant application, you are challenged to create and post an original, Common Core aligned curriculum unit for a Regents course (in English, Global Studies, American History, Math, Living Environment, Earth Science, Chemistry, or Physics) for which you were or are the teacher. You will share your unit in two ways:
- Create and upload a short (5-7 minute), narrated slide deck that showcases and narrates the instructional arc of your curricular unit.
- Submit any relevant supporting documents (unit plan, lesson plans, worksheets, graphic organizers, etc.)
The rubric to be used for judging submissions can be found here.
When you have successfully completed steps one and two of the YouPD component, as well as Component One, the Fund for Teachers application, your challenge grant application will be considered complete.
In addition to gaining access to consideration as an FFT Fellow (summer grant up to $5,000 as an individual or up to $10,000 as a team) Unit Slam! participants that meet the rubric criteria will earn the esteemed 2012 NYC Unit Slam! participant badge in their digital profile.
Click on the Action Steps in the center of this page to get started.
If you have any questions, please email Patrick Rimassa at primassa@newvisions.org.
Good luck!
Challenge Facilitators
 |
 |
 |
Challenge Sponsor
Overview
Package and Publish Your Best Regents UnitThis challenge, should you choose to accept it, is the second component of the Fund For Teachers-YouPD Challenge Grant application. The "Unit Slam" is an opportunity for creative, dedicated NYC public school teachers to showcase original, field-tested curriculum units that address the NY State Regents standards while also ensuring development of the higher-order skills vital to college and career success. Learn more about the Fund for Teachers grant. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, submissions must include all documents that make up an original Regents unit, organized and presented for review, adoption, and adaptation by a colleague. Accompanied by a short (5-7 minute), voice-narrated slide deck, successful unit submissions should pitch a compelling "how to" for other teachers that describes important assessment points, identifies Regents objectives, explains the essential instructional techniques, activities and mechanisms for driving the Common Core standards within the unit, and provides an overview of the instructional sequence of attached resources. Submissions to YouPD will be evaluated, along with the full FFT application, to identify practitioners whose existing unit designs offer solid evidence of reflective teaching practice, and that demonstrate their ability to translate new learning into engaging, rigorous experiences for their students. FFT provides fellowship grants (up to $5,000 as an individual or up to $10,000 as a team) directly to teachers, with more than three years of experience, to support their professional learning during the summer. Their experiences come in many forms, but share the purpose of better teaching. Click on the “Challenge” tab to get started!
|
Who's eligible? The Unit Slam is only for eligible teachers applying for the 2012 FFT-YouPD Challenge Grant. If you have not already submitted an online application through Fund for Teachers, please click on the link below to confirm your interest and eligibility. Extended Deadline: Monday, March 5th @ 5PM EST Submission Requirements: In addition to completing the Fund For Teachers' online application, submit a short, voice-narrated presentation with all supplemental documents that packages your original curriculum unit for adoption and feedback by collegaues. Learn more by previewing the challenge space. Is this the same Fund for Teachers application that just closed in January? No. This is a separate, citywide round in which 10 applications will be selected. Teachers who applied to the traditional FFT application due in January are not eligible and will not be considered in this pilot program. |
Preview Action Steps
- Already have a YouPD account? Log in and take this challenge.
- Don't have an account yet? Register and take this challenge!
Let's say a colleague was open to adapting one of your best units for use her course. Other than handing over a bunch of files, if you had 5 to 7 minutes to present the unit to her, imagine what you would want to say. What makes it work? What would your colleague most need to know in order to implement it with another group of students? What relevant instructional wisdom would you want to impart to her?
Put yourself in the position of a colleague who hasn't taught the unit before: what questions would they likely have about it?
This kind of practical, reflective teacher wisdom is the essence of what YouPD.org seeks to distill and celebrate in short, user-generated videos and screencasts. We have taken to calling these short videos "Hacks" in the spirit of the do-it-yourself, creative problem-solving that defines the practice of teachers who are avid professional learners.
Hacks are rough-cut, short (5-7 minutes) and framed around providing colleagues a possible solution to a clearly defined "Problem of Practice." Because few solutions are perfect in education, hacks are also an invitation for feedback from a colleague in the form of a "Push my thinking" question that viewers can respond to on the site.
Challenges, like this one, seek to build informal learning communities around shared problems of practice. True to form, we strive to design YouPD Challenges so the products are built for a real audience, in response to problems that participants actually face.
The defining problem of practice being presented by the 2012 YouPD-FFT Unit Slam is near to the heart of many NY State high school teachers:
"How do I ensure student mastery of the NY State Regents standards in [YOUR SUBJECT AREA HERE] while deeply integrating the Common Core [Math and /or Content-Area Literacy] Standards?"
Your challenge is to frame your unit plan to an audience of colleagues as a possible solution to this important problem.
The Evaluation Process:
In preparing your submission, we strongly recommend you unpack and reference specific Common Core standards in presenting your unit plan.
Let's face it: most teachers are still pretty new to the language and framework of the Common Core.
Why we should prioritize this professional learning: Whereas the Regents exams provide a well-worn, high-stakes data point at the end of the year, volumes of recent data suggest a troubling pattern: large numbers of NYC students are passing enough Regents exams to earn a high school diploma, enroll into college, but then go into debt to pay for non-credit-bearing remedial classes in math, reading, and writing before eventually dropping out.
In short: Getting students to pass Regents exams simply isn't enough, and their eventual success or failure in college and the workplace increasingly depends on skills that Regents exams don't necessarily measure.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative was developed by a consortium of state governors in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare students for college and the workforce.
Considerable online resources exist at the State and City level to help you better understand the instructional "Shift" that is required to implement the CCSS.
Go Broad: High Level Overview of the Common Core
Go Deep: Resources from NYSED
- Six Common Core Instructional Shifts in Literacy (across subject areas)
- Common Core Introductory Video Series
Exemplary Common Core Aligned HS Units and Assessment Tasks from NYSED and NYCDOE
- NYSED:
- NYCDOE
Skim through the below helpful tips for organizing a unit plan that others can easily use:
- Be explicit about the Regents and Common Core standards taught and assessed in the unit, as well as important contextual information like the number of days required, required resources, intended age and pre-requisite knowledge of students, etc. in your unit plan.
- Backwards design is better design. Likewise in presenting your unit. Spend some time describing culminating tasks or assessments up front, so people can understand the sequence as a progression towards the assessed skills and competencies.
- If possible, organize your unit plan into a single file or URL so that it travels easily on the internet.
- If your unit lives in folders and sub-folders, consider creating a ZIP file of the top level folder and uploading that.
- Whenever possible, use file formats that others can MODIFY. DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX and Google Docs are better than PDF.
- If linking to Google Docs, organize your unit Docs into a collection that is specifically set aside for sharing. Set the documents to "Anyone with the link can Comment" and you will have enabled the world to offer you feedback directly in your unit plan! If there are multiple Docs in the collection, provide the link to the collection and set the collection to "Anyone with the link can view."
- Create a standard document footer to give yourself credit as the original author of the materials. Anything you post on YouPD will be listed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, which means that others may freely use and adapt your work as long as they acknowledge you as the author and they do not use your unit your unit for commercial purposes. If you want to be hardcore, include the phrase, "Published under CC BY-NC 3.0" with a hyperlink to the license.
- Use numerical labels and descriptive titles to indicate the sequencing and content of resources in the unit. (Ex: Mini Task 1: Making Reasoned Predictions, Mini Task 2: Designing Our Experiment, etc.)
You will be attaching your unit resources to your Hack post in the final action step.
Much of what you need to know to produce a successful Hack for this Challenge was outlined in the first action step, so please revisit it if you need a refresher.
Start to finish, you should probably set aside 2-3 hours to make a hack you're proud of. At minimum, you will need a computer roughly newer than a 2005 model with an internal microphone and a modern web browser (Chome, Firefox, IE, or Safari).
Depending on your comfort level, below are basic and advanced technology recipes for hack production, where you should find everything you need to get started.
Take a moment and preview the "Submit a hack for this action step" link below to get a sense of how it works.
- In the "Problem" section, change the language to suit your submission.
- In the "Solution" section, provide a concise summary of how your unit addresses the challenge of teaching both the Regents and the Common Core.
- In the "Ingredients to replicate" section, provide files and links to all unit resources.
In addition to completing all the Action Steps on YouPD, remember you must complete Component One, the Fund for Teachers application. If you haven't already done so, you may begin the process here.
See who's joined so far
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Browse submissions
Enjoy browsing through the challenge submissions. Recommend those you like!
- Problem of practice:
How do I ensure student mastery of the NY State Regents standards in Earth Science while also ensuring development of the Common Core Literacy Standards?
- Solution:
I will enhance my unit on climate by incorporating pictures and documentation of my trip to Alaska. The knowledge and experience I gain from learning the natural history of Glacier National Park I can share with my students.
- Problem of practice:
How do we engage students while preparing for ELA Regents and addressing CCLS?The academic problem is that students have a difficult time making arguments based on research and facts--they rely on opinion and passion. There is a broad behavioral and societal problem of being a slave to digital media by constantly checking our phones, email, Facebook, and Twitter. We are not as present in actual interactions because we are distracted and absorbed in an addictive cyber world.
- Solution:
Teach students how to analyze non-fiction, write argumentative essays based on research and facts, and use technology to create content to join the online conversation and community.
- Problem of practice:
How do I ensure student mastery of the NY State Regents standards in 9th Grade ELA while also ensuring development of the Common Core Literacy Standards?
- Solution:
I've adapted the TC Readers and Writers Workshop Model to teach 9th grade English Language Arts, focusing on LOTS of revision while introducing students to advanced tools for literary analysis. The resources here show how!
- Problem of practice:
How do I ensure student mastery of the NY State Regents standards in social studies while also ensuring development of the Common Core Literacy Standards?
- Solution:
By using the Literacy By Design Unit template I created an indepth module on the British Industrial Revolution. All materials needed are attached!
- Problem of practice:
How do I ensure student mastery of the NY State Regents standards in basic statistics while also ensuring development of the Common Core Math Standards?
- Solution:
A project-based learning experience that simultaneously engages students in math concepts while hooking them into learning by subscribing to their own interests. Using data that is applicable, interesting and informative ensures deeper learning.
- Problem of practice:
How do I ensure student mastery of the NY State Regents standards in US History while also ensuring development of the Common Core Literacy Standards?
- Solution:
Front load content and vocabulary with easy to reference outline sheets, provide highly stimulating lessons, provide multiple choice questions as do nows and exit slips, and end a unit with a significant essay from an old Regents exam
- Problem of practice:
How can I create a differentiated semester unit that diverse classrooms of mostly Levels 1&2 ELA Readers with little 21st century digital skills can comprehend and understand complex themes/elements/ideas of Dante's Comedy by mastering Common Core College Readiness Standards for Reading, Writing, and Speaking, practicing ELA Regents skills, and developing technological skills? How can I create assessments that helps low-level students write effective claims that include textual evidence?
- Solution:
I created 10 differentiated sub-units that challenged students to: compare our world with Dante's by analyzing our own society and pop culture; develop 21st century skills; and stengthen writing claims through use of textual evidence.
- Problem of practice:
How do I ensure student mastery of the NY State Regents standards in U.S. History while also ensuring development of the Common Core Literacy Standards? How do I address the needs of all students to build them up to higher level thinking and college readiness?
- Solution:
Use the common core standards to help break down the skills necessary for the Regents Exam and provide options, levels and intentional building throughout the unit to meet all students' needs.
- Problem of practice:
How do I ensure student mastery of the NY State Regents standards in Earth Science while also ensuring development of the Common Core Literacy Standards?
- Solution:
We research different locations on Earth through scientific text, experiments and Google Earth, to create an informational, multi-dimensional project addressing why this place on Earth looks the way it does! (Writing Standard 2)
- Problem of practice:
How do I ensure student mastery of the NY State Regents standards in biology while also ensuring development of the Common Core Literacy, Speaking, and Listening Standards?
- Solution:
Interdisciplinary math and science unit on public health and the growth of bacteria in locations throughout the school.
- Problem of practice:
How do I engage students in mathematics through technology?
- Solution:
Students have frequent access to many different technological devices so we must try to use this to our advantage, rather than fight it. Geometer's Sketchpad is a wonderful tool for engaging students and has a wealth of resources already developed.
