How to plan a unit of work using student input:

• Ask students to read outlines and list major points to be covered.
• Students write a mind map - showing how these ideas are linked; below this raise either more areas of interest or questions you would like answered during the process.
• Form a general week by week plan of how to cover these ideas in the unit.
• Skim read the text book. Does it cover all the areas needed. What else is needed? Who will do this?
• Plan a week at a time of activities that they agree on.
• Agree on a way of determining if people understand the key ideas.
• Do the same with skills.
• All students to write up their learning plan for the week.
  

General Weekly structure of my senior lessons

As part of my radical new teaching style, I want to set up what I will call learning environments (as opposed to classrooms).
I will emphasize that I am here to learn from them how to be a better teacher, but they will also learn from me and from each other (and from others beyond the classroom).
During the week I will need to cover:

• What needs to be looked at this week. This could be done with mind maps. We could also look at the parameters of each concept.
• What resources can we use to try and understand the concepts.
• What might stop us from understanding them. What do we need to do to overcome these problems.
  
• What skills do we need to develop to help with the assessment tasks. Where will be the problems.
  
• What learning style will we try and use this week. What are three signs that this style is effective.

At some stage early in the term I need to cover:

• What content we will cover
• What assessment items we need to produce
• What issues there might be between them (as students) and me (as a teacher)
  
• What the deadlines policy means to me
• Ethics - critical to be covered before ANY exercises can be done in class.
  
• My ideas for Web 2.0 and how we might use it.
  

Issues in 11 Psychology

I want to be able to teach this class by being "embedded" (thanks George Bush) in the class. So here are some ideas:

• I have done a cursory look at the big ideas of the first unit on Introduction to Psychology. I have listed the key resources in a database and only briefly looked at the key points.
  
• I have a general idea of how I could use them in a class. For example, there are a number of sections on identifying variables in an experiment, graphing data etc. It would be very boring to go through each one of them and then do the review questions. I would like to attempt the class activity which is an example practical first but then examine each problem with the students method as they become apparent.
• I would like to start the unit by getting the students to articulate what constituents an effective teaching session for them. List these off and then when I come to a new area ask which method might be appropriate.
• I did have the idea of getting them to do all the Review questions for homework but that would be difficult to manage and might tempt students to copy. I guess I would have to discuss the reasons for doing homework and ways to avoid copying.
• The wiki idea is starting to take shape. I can see the importance of the students coming up with their own ideas of what words like "normal distribution" and "histogram" mean. Again, collaborative work means that it would be easy for "social loafing" to occur. Perhaps I could allocate each student a set of words that they must initiate the discussion of the meaning of and then get others to add to or comment on as part of their homework. So for example, I would say "your homework for tonight is to add the meaning of these words to the wiki and contribute to the meaning of at least two other entries".
• Will also need to discuss the ethics section very early. This would be critical in creating trust in the class.

Ideas for Shared Documents

Further to my discussion on using Google Docs, I would envisage a letter being sent home to parents asking that they guarantee access to the Internet on the three days that I have lessons in Psychology and Biology. During access students will have to:

• read certain documents that I publish. For example, course outlines and assignments given out in class. This is a fairly passive process but I could ask students to comment on the publication - ask for clarification, suggest some resources of their own etc. This would be a document that I publish. I wonder if there was a way to ensure that they have read it?
  
• work individually on a document. At this stage, I am looking at formative documents only that they would work at online so that I could monitor their progress and give immediate feedback. I am not sure about summative work as I could not guarantee that it was student work (not coerced friends or even parents) but maybe some of the research notes and plans could be done online. This would be a document that I would collaborate with one student.
  
• work as a group on a collaborative project. This would involve me setting up the document name and then inviting groups of students to contribute. This could help me monitor their progress and check to see the quantity and (more importantly) the quality of each students contribution to the project. This would be a document that I would collaborate with a group of students.
  
• work on a document as a class. This could include posting aspects of the syllabus and asking them to explain it in their own words, or posting a question that they need to answer and discuss with others. It could include a class revision resource where collectively they try to understand the key points of the course at the end of the year. This would be a document that I would collaborate with the whole class.

The idea, then, is to ensure that students have access to the internet all the time - including having a back up plan if things go wrong at home. They would have constant access to the document (no more excuses like "I've done it but left it at home") and, in theory, I could have constant access to what they are doing (Big Brother-like).
The other aspect that this opens up is if parents complain that students are not doing homework or say that they have no homework. There is the possibility that I give parents access to the sites as well! What about Subject Coordinators? Hmmm. The possibilities look endless.