“It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.” --Roger von Oech
Starting in the 2015-16 school year, we are moving to Project Based Learning. Many of my past assessments have been performance or project based, so I this adjustment is probably going to be easier for me than it will be for many of my colleagues. But, PBL is not the same as teaching a unit with a performance task as a final assessment, so I still have quite a bit of work to do to effectively make the transition. I would love to have all of my units completely planned before school starts, but that isn't realistic, or really even a good idea. I will need to meet my students before ironing out the details. However, I do need to have as much done as I can, so I have pulled out my trusty spreadsheet program and started with a long-range plan template to help me organize my year.
My template starts two weeks before school starts and continues for a week after graduation. I have color-coded each month in reverse rainbow order, just to mix it up a bit. The grayed out days are school holidays, though the big blocks like winter and spring vacations are just omitted from the calendar. I have rows for each of the subjects I will be teaching (or so I've been told, at this point) and the row underneath each subject is for me to list the standards for each unit. This is a two-page spread (landscape), so I can put it in my teacher binder when I finish my long-range plan.
I've broken up the weeks of the school year in two ways. Each course is broken into week-long sections, starting on Monday and ending on Friday. Also, above the months I have made note of each actual "week" of school, starting on the first day and taking into account each of the school holidays.
My next step is to figure out my individual PBL units. I don't want to spend a lot of time doing in-depth planning right now, but I really do want to figure out the basics of each unit, so I have created a planning template that I will be using to do my preliminary planning.
It is double-sided, and I will use the front side to plan the basic project, and then use to back to do more detailed scheduling when it is time.
If you like this and want to use it, just look in the "Free Stuff" tabs and get the link to the free TpT download.
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