Mid-Planning

As Diane and I met over dinner to discuss our collaboration unit we both began to get very excited about the project. Our unit will be taught from March 23rd to April 1st. While we have built the unit around Elie Wiesel's Night, the unit will encompass more than a broad overiew of the holocaust. My responsibilities as the librarian will be to gather resources, generate assesment tools, assist in planning, facilitate discussion, and compile evaluation data. Diane will be responsible for teaching the unit, planning the unit, facilitating discussion, and evaluation.

As we were determining the responsibilities each of us would have, Diane expressed some concerns about discussion. Sometimes it is difficult to get students to share freely in the classroom. Even as the teacher, it is sometimes hard to share thoughts on a topic such as the holocaust. That is why we decided that both of us would participate in the facilitation of discussion. We are considering using a blog for students to share questions and thoughts outside of class so that we can anticipate how to drive the in class discussions.

The assessment tools I am building will include a pre-teach and post-teach checklist. This will include topics such as knowledge about the holocaust, knowledge about different forms of oppression worldwide, evaluation of information, use of technology, and creative writing skils. For evaluating specific tasks I will create rubrics that students will use as a guide throughout the unit activities.

The unit activities are varied. In order to engage students in this historical topic, we have decided to group students together and give them images of oppression worldwide. This will be part of our pre-teach lesson. The students will generate questions about the images given and will share them with their classmates. Then we will introduce them to the book. Most classroom time will be used to read and discuss Night. The main homework assignment will be for the students to create a short story based on research of the images given on the first day.

One of the main challenges we will face as we pursue this unit is establishing the classroom as a safe place to discuss issues of race and oppression. The school we are teaching at has a student demographic that is 49% African American and 49% Caucasian with a 2% minority. One way to create a safe environment is to determine ground rules as a class before we begin the unit. We are also hoping that the structure of our unit will open our students' eyes beyond their immediate environment to the issue of oppression throughout the world.