Columbia Secondary School English-Social Studies Curriculum Development Process

Curriculum Overview: 6th Grade English-Language Arts

Essential Understandings, Skills, and Discipline-Specific Habits of Mind:

• How do you think knowledge is constructed in this discipline or subdiscipline?

• What skills and big picture ideas are requisite for expertise in this realm of knowledge?
  

Pedagogical Stance:

• How will this curriulum promote the development of the above skills, understandings, or habits?

• What are the most common preconceptions specific to this subject matter that students bring into the learning process? How will this curriculum address these?

• What experiential resources might students possess that will aid the adoption of these new understandings? How will this curriculum utilize these?

Common Unit Structure:

• What patterns and/or rituals will punctuate and motivate the movement of learning in this curriculum? Is there a learning cycle? A project-driven structure? A skills/content-driven cycle?

Supporting Research:

• What educational research supports the adoption of a curriculum that takes these pedagogical and/or epistemological approaches? Provide a brief synopsis of the existing corpus of evidence with links, if this exists.

• If limited research currently exists, describe an action research plan that will enable you and others to assess the value of this instructional methodology.

Action Research Tools (optional):

• What measurement tools can educators use to quantify the relative success of this curriculum in their classrooms?