Over the past months, I have been working with a group of five teacher candidates to create a unit plan, with 10 subtasks. Our "big idea" or inquiry question for this unit was:
How do human behaviours, occupations, physical environments or resources within a province contribute to Canadian identity?
After completing our final inquiry social studies project, there is a lot to reflect upon. This was certainly not an easy task, but something that I am proud to have contributed to and completed. I have learned about the importance of collaborating with my peers, creating a big idea that fosters higher order thinking and integrating other subjects into my lesson to engage my students.
When we did have class time to work on this project, it was difficult to come to a collective agreement about what our unit should focus on. It took more than one class to come up with a question that we were all satisfied with. Once we had done so, we developed our culminating task and then individually created subtasks that corresponded with the culminating and the big idea. Independently creating these subtasks was difficult for me. I was not used to completing a unit plan in this manner. I had always been taught to create a sequential unit plan with lessons that connected and feed off of each other. After reviewing what we had completed in the end, however, I was surprised at how well the lessons connected, even though we had not collaborated on the subtasks. This was probably my "aha" moment during the unit planning process.
We came so far and I honestly did not believe that we could do it. It's amazing to think that we could complete this unit plan and I hope to someday use it in my classroom. I learned that my peers often have ideas that will strengthen my lesson plans and my understanding of curriculum content. I still want to find out more about the new social studies curriculum and inquiry based learning, but I feel like this course and this project has given me an opportunity to understand how a unit occurs in the classroom.
Here is my unit plan! Check it out!
