Putting it all together

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for putting it all together. By the end of today's tutorial, we will explore how technology, pedagogy, and content are related in practice. Essentially, we will walk through a sample unit and will consider how these three areas are connected to form effective instruction.

First, let's quickly review understanding by design for planning instruction, because that is what I used when I was planning the instruction for this model unit. Essentially, understanding by design is backwards design. And it just promotes a close link between tying standards and learning goals to the actual assessment that you have.

With backwards design, you have a performance task that allows for personalization and differentiation, and which also shows mastery of the content. There's also an emphasis on understanding and applying knowledge. The learning that students are doing is going to promote a transfer of knowledge. And through understanding by design, students are going to experience depth of a curriculum.

So understanding by design has three stages. In the first stage, you decide the big ideas of the unit, or the key understandings, and these are what you want your students to walk away with from the unit. What you want them to know and what you want them to be able to do.

From there, you plan your performance a task. And this is where we talk about personalization and differentiation. In addition to the performance task as a summative assessment, you also plan other formative assessments as a way to check in with the students understanding. And then step three is when you plan the learning activities, which is how you get from point A to point B.

Today's unit example is for a secondary biology class. And the objectives are pretty much the big ideas of the unit. So you can pause this lesson and take a few minutes to really read about the unit in depth. In a nutshell, students are just going to be looking at pollutant levels in their own cities, and they're going to share their findings with students across the state.

And then in teams that are made up with students from schools across the state, they are going to problem-solve why certain pollutants are in various water areas and what some solutions might be to eliminating the pollution problem. Essentially, this is going to be a PBL because they're solving a real-world question.

For a summative assessment students, will present their findings along with their possible solutions to the class. This has been left very open-ended because, again, with differentiation and personalization, students can present these findings in a variety of ways. And I don't want to limit it by saying they have to have a PowerPoint or something like that. I want to keep it open for the students.

And then for formative assessments along the way, there's going to be a variety of things I do to make sure my students are on task. And then I've listed the learning activities, which start with assigning a group, and end with the students have a choice of technology to compile their findings and create a presentation. With that in mind, we want to look at how this lesson incorporates different instructional strategies.

So we've talked about various instructional strategies in the past, including TPACK, Marzano, universal design, PBL, and deeper learning. I'm just going to highlight a few from each. We're going to start with TPACK. We're going to quickly review what that means.

So remember, TPACK is an extension of Shulman's pedagogical content knowledge. And it basically says that teachers have technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and content knowledge. Where these three intersect create different types of knowledge. So you have technological pedagogical knowledge, and technological content knowledge, as well as pedagogical content knowledge, and so on.

And in the middle where they all connect, that's where you have TPACK, which is the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. So I feel that this unit really does take TPACK into consideration because it really demonstrates how technology, content, and pedagogy can intersect.

So in terms of content knowledge, that's, what am I teaching my student? I'm teaching them about pollutants and the scientific method. But I'm doing it in a hands-on way. The technological aspect of it is collaborating through perhaps the use of Google Docs, using Skype to talk to students across the state, and then collaborating with students across the state in a way to create solutions. And then pedagogical knowledge is just my delivery of the content. And this is differentiated based on the different needs and multiple intelligences of my students as well as their student profiles.

Additionally, we're going to look at universal design. So universal design is just a learning that is based on several principles. And these principles include providing multiple means of representation. And this just goes back to the fact that students are really diverse learners, and so we want to provide our representation in diverse ways so that those different types of learners can be reached. And this is really something that is taken into consideration with our sample unit here because I have not limited the way that the students are able to collaborate with one another, form their groups.

Principle two is providing multiple means of action and expression. And this again goes directly to the students representing their own knowledge. And then principle three is providing multiple means of engagement. And so this is just having diversity in the way that students engage with the learning. So we might have some students who want to email one another, we have some students who might want to have a Google Doc, we have some students who might want to use Skype or Face Time. So there are multiple means of engagement.

This lesson also really beautifully encompasses Marzano. And Marzano's high-yield instructional strategies include nine areas of focus. One is identifying similarities and differences, one is summarizing and note-taking. So one thing that this unit really does well is cooperative learning. There's cooperative learning within the class when they are doing their field work. Another is cooperative learning with students from across the state when they have to share findings and work together to propose solutions to problems.

Setting objectives and providing feedback is also something that's taken into account with this lesson because the students are able to, within their own goal groups, set timelines and objectives that they want to meet, and then check in with the teacher one on one, where the teachers providing feedback on their performance. In terms of generating and testing hypotheses, this is definitely happening here because these students are participating in the scientific method.

And then PBL is Problem-Based Learning. And this is when the teacher poses real-world problems to the students and they have to use their arsenal of knowledge to solve that problem. And the problem that the teacher is posing in this lesson is, how can we solve this recurring pollution problem across our state? And so the students have to come up with practical solutions that could be implemented. And then they're going to present those not only to the class and the teacher, but to a panel of stakeholders they might actually impact with their findings.

Deeper learning is just rigorous core content that helps students prepare for post-secondary college or a career. And so it has many aspects to it, including students need to master core content, students need to work collaboratively, and so on. You can clearly see that our lesson here encompasses students thinking critically and solving complex problems, as well as students working collaboratively. Students are also really self-directed here. And they use the feedback that they're being given from their peers and from their teacher to get on track and stay focused.

Let's reflect for a moment. Out of the instructional strategies that we reviewed, which included TPACK, Marzano, universal design, PBL, and deeper learning, which are you most likely to use to guide your lesson plan creation, and why?

Today we discussed how technology, pedagogy, and content are related in practice by looking at a sample unit and the many ways it relates to the different frameworks. To dive a little deeper and learn how to apply this information, be sure to check out the additional resources section associated with this video. This is where you'll find links targeted towards helping you discover more ways to apply this course material. Thank you for joining me, and happy teaching.