Unit of Study Tasks

RCD-Developed Unit of Study

This set of tasks focus on the unit being developed during the RCD book study. Although we are tentatively looking at developing a unit on cemeteries, this may change. The unit we develop and pilot at the end of the year will be showcased during the ALCA Conference during the summer.  Whatever unit we collectively decide on, we are speculating it should have these traits:

• Neutral as far as discipline focus while being strongly interdisciplinary. That is, the tasks should address the Common Core Math and Language Arts standards with components of science, history, geography, among others.
   
• Diverse set of Arch resources incorporated (e.g., tests, rubrics, checklists, activities, bookmarks, files - videos and graphics, locations, learning and professional tasks, presentations, forms, etc.)
   
• Strong emphasis in 21st Century Skills.  This will be manifested in the discussion boards, shared artifacts, and the smashing up (integration of simple artifacts into more complex artifacts) of those shared artifacts. This where the geographic component should become apparent.
   
• Strong local geographic component where the questions are the same but the answers are different due to local geographic concepts. The learning tasks will need to involve students evaluating or analyzing results from different communities, essential dialogue across communities to ensure grounded conclusions, and a mechanism (such as an Arch-based presentation) to be able to report the overall results. For example, each team from each community can provide a web page resource reporting their local summary. These collective web pages can be combined in a matter of seconds into a presentation to be published online.
   
• Addresses Common Core Math, Language Arts, and the associated science, technology, and history CC standards. All the curriculum and assessment resources (maybe even the student products) need to be wrapped documenting with great detail how the content, skills, rigor identified with Bloom's, big ideas, and essential questions are addressed.