Jesse Gottschalk Curriculum Rationale

A. How is your topic central to one or more disciplines [and how does it meet mandates]? I chose to construct my curriculum beginning with science and social studies, mostly because those were the subjects that seemed most reasonable to plan for 2-3 months in advance of teaching; our schools math and literacy curricula, although mapped out in advance to some extent, tend to be more flexible in order to be responsive to student development. Within science, the topic Life Cycles is one that is placed both within the PA science standards (e.g. 3.1.K.A.3: Observe, compare, and describe stages of life cycles for plants and/or animals), and within the regular curriculum for Kindergarten at Penn Alexander. A unit on Life Cycles gives our class the opportunity to explore some critical areas of scientific understanding. While much of the study of life cycles particularly absent actual butterflies to observe in the classroom (which, for seasonal reasons, they will have after the lesson is complete, which provides a different sort of opportunity for connection/reflection) seems like it would fit under the heading of content rather than skills acquisition, I prefer to conceptualize this domain of learning in the way described by Michaels et al. (2007): To be proficient in science, students need to know, use, and interpret scientific explanations of the natural world. They must understand interrelations among central scientific concepts and use them to build and critique scientific arguments. This strand includes the things that are usually categorized as content, but it focuses on concepts and the links between them rather than on discrete facts. It also includes the ability to use this knowledge.1 Building on this conception, the science portion of the lesson plan will be about students drawing together information from a variety of sources (prior lessons, group and independent readings, outside experiences & observations, field trips/speakers, etc.) to build an understanding of life cycles as patterns that can be applied to a variety of things (beginning with animals but extending to products).
1

Michaels, S., Shouse, A.W., & Schweingruber, H.A. (2007). Ready, Set, SCIENCE! Putting Research to Work in K-8 Science Classrooms. National Research Council. Retrieved from: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11882. P. 19.

The social studies content is not precisely drawn from the class curriculum, but is instead an extension of the science lesson that ultimately merges with a separate unit from the social studies curriculum: community helpers. While the subject of product life cycles doesnt fit as directly into the social studies standards as the science one does, there are connections that can be drawn to both the PA standards particularly those that involve identifying local connections to products (e.g. 6.5.K.C: Identify goods and services provided by local businesses.) and to the standards produced by the National Council for the Social Studies (2002), which has a thematic standard titled Production, Distribution, and Consumption. Although this latter standard is clearly geared towards more advanced understandings (it centers around four questions: What is to be produced? How is production to be organized? How are goods and services to be distributed? How shall factors of production (land, labor, capital, and management) be allocated?), a basic understanding of some of the processes and patterns of production, distribution, and consumption provide a critical underpinning for eventually developing those more complex and critical conceptions. While I am still working with my teacher to fix precisely what literacy content will be focused on during my takeover weeks, a substantial portion of it will be directly connected to the science and social studies content, such as significant reading and writing of informational texts, in various formats. In addition, I will attempt to use literacy skills to reinforce the scientific practices discussed above students will, through writing and discussion, identify and articulate patterns, while also crafting and sharing arguments using evidence from our life cycle studies. All of these skills have connected PA and PA Core standards, and are clearly essential skills to be developing for future work with literacy and connect to the new Common Core-tied focus on informational texts and content literacy.

B. Why would your topic be interesting?

1) To your students?

There are several ways in which I feel this topic will be interesting for my students. Based on my prior work with this class, I am fairly confident that this group of students will be interested in the content that composes the subject matter we have done prior units involving animals and involving how things are made, both of which seemed to be quite interesting to the students. In addition, the students in my class have demonstrated an eagerness for learning and applying concepts. For example, students eagerly point out when they come across a compound word, or a switcheroo fact in math, or an antagonist in a book, even out of the context of lessons about those concepts. Consequently, I feel like they will take well to the life cycle framework we will be working with Origin, Transformation, Maturity and I anticipate them making interesting and thoughtful connections as we incorporate more material and expand the concepts we are working with to move beyond the more straightforward, flashy life cycles (like butterflies or frogs) and into animals whose transformations are more subtle, and products which undergo stages which are parallel in some ways and entirely different in others. I believe that this concept in particular will be engaging to students because it is my hope that they will come to see it as relevant to a huge variety of things they have encountered, and will encounter in the future, in the real world. Beyond simply the curriculum content, I will be using a variety of techniques and strategies to promote student engagement in the material. The activities that comprise the unit are deliberately diverse, to engage students in different ways visual and auditory presentation of information; opportunities for logical reasoning and creative expression; students using written, visual, and oral methods for presentation; and more. Individual lessons tend to be multi-stage for example, a short discussion may be a lead-in to a read-aloud with active solicitation of student engagement, which could be followed by a discussion and mini-lesson, and would all lead into a writing or art project. Further, the lessons are constructed to connect with one another, so students will hopefully enter each new lesson still feeling prepared and engaged in the material from the previous lesson. In addition to these

considerations in the overall lesson construction, I will also use what techniques I have acquired for conducting the activities in an engaging way for example, combining the use of higher-level questioning with a variety of talk moves designed to keep all students engaged while pressing them to think deeply and critically about the relevant concepts (my use of talk moves draws from a variety of sources, not least of which are my observations of my Classroom Mentor and the writings on the subject by Shindelar [2009]2).

2) To you as a teacher? I am personally extremely interested in this subject matter, which I think is always an advantage to a teacher who seeks to make their lessons engaging. The material surrounding animal life cycles is, for lack of a better word, fun during my research for this lesson, Ive certainly enjoyed getting to learn unexpected new facts about animal life stages (why do adult grasshoppers suddenly appear all of the place in the late spring/early summer? Its because younger grasshoppers dont have wings, so they stay closer to the ground, in addition to being smaller!). On the other hand, I am deeply motivated to teach the concept of product life cycles, which I think gets at the root of several critical lessons that I hope my students will eventually learn more substantially: a study of product origins gets at factors like materials usage and scarcity, energy consumption, geography, different categories of farming, etc; transformations connects to an understanding of capitalism and globalization, as well as bringing in a huge number of issues connected to the local community (particularly if distribution is considered a part of the transformation process, then a huge percentage of professionals the students will have encountered can be seen as involved in this process); and a focus on usage and waste has obvious environmental implications, both locally and globally.

C. How is this topic accessible to students?

2

Shindelar, A. (2009). Maintaining Mathematical Momentum through Talk Moves. In B. Herbel -Eisenmann & M. Cirillo (Eds.), Promoting purposeful discourse. (pp. 165-178). Reston, VA: NCTM.

1) In terms of developmental appropriateness? As I have tried to make clear elsewhere, I have constructed this curriculum largely in response to two major inputs: my work with and observations of my students, and collaboration with my Classroom Mentor (a 20-year veteran Philadelphia public school teacher). The latter has consulted with me to help me ensure that the materials are appropriate, and are being taught in a way that students will be able to grasp and engage with; the former has played a particularly central role, and will continue to play such a role as I refine the curriculum in advance of teaching it. All reading and writing assignments are designed with reference to appropriate student literacy development: my classroom is an extremely data-rich environment, and I have had ample time to do extensive work with each student, so I am fairly familiar with each individual students areas of comfort and challenges regarding literacy, which should help me ensure that I am only presenting tasks that they are capable of engaging with productively. The content of the lesson should be developmentally appropriate as well. It has been frequently observed both by authors whom I have read, and by myself that young children engage eagerly with animals, so using animals as both a focal point and as an entry point into further analysis should help make the material both interesting and approachable. The way that the lessons and topics within the curriculum build upon one another is clearly consistent with much of what we have learned about development the sort of scaffolding I intend to provide in this way is clearly consistent, for example, with Vygotskys Zone of Proximal Development, although the format of posing questions and presenting information but allowing students to develop and refine the concepts is rooted in constructivist theories of learning. I am also certainly drawing upon Gardners work regarding Multiple Intelligences when I attempt to incorporate a variety of methods both for teacher instruction and student work. Finally, I believe that the curriculum is rooted in some very basic skill areas such as categorization and

comparison that are both developmentally appropriate and also critical underpinnings for more complex skills.

2) In terms of resources available? While we wont be bringing actual animals into the classroom, there are a number of ways that I will attempt to draw upon resources to bring my subject to life. To teach about animal life cycles, for instance, I am hoping to acquire various animal artifacts snake skins, egg shells, etc. that relate to life cycle stages. For the section related to product life cycles, I am hoping to have field trips and/or speakers that will show students how people in their own community are playing a role in these life cycles. Each of these will be accompanied by some sort of hands-on activity. For instance, if students meet with a baker, I will make sure they get the chance to bake something; after our visit to the Dirt Factory, we will collect scrap paper from other classrooms and make our own paper.3

D. How does this topic provide opportunities for multiple connections? I see this as one of the greatest strengths of my curriculum topic and one which I think I have commented on throughout the various components of my Term IV write-up. My plans draw heavily on connections outside of the limited purview of the curriculum. Our analysis of animal life cycles will draw heavily on previous class lessons on animals, as well as on student prior knowledge of animals (which I have found to be very mixed, unsurprisingly, but in some cases quite substantial). Our analysis of product life cycles will draw in many ways upon the products that students are familiar with, use in their own lives, and/or are interested in; it will draw upon connections in the local community (particularly as it leads in to the community helpers lesson), and include processes that students will probably be familiar with (agriculture, recycling, sales), even without knowing much.

And possibly collect and compost their own food scraps? I admittedly just thought of this, and since this is the last thing Im writing, Im not going to go back and revise my curriculum write-up to include this idea, but Ill certainly investigate it!