ITL526 Single Subject Integrated Design I

Snapshot Overview of ITL26: Integrated Design I

What do we want students to know and be able to do? How will we know if they are successful in achieving mastery? How can we ensure all students have equitable access to the curriculum and are receiving the appropriate supports and instruction to achieve this mastery? Each week scaffolds you to thinking deeply about these questions and create lesson design components that allow you to easily answer these questions for your given lesson. Effective teaching involves developing and creating standards-aligned instruction, activities, and assessments that support the needs of all learners. With strategic opportunities for feedback integrated throughout your lesson design, you learn to be purposeful about where and how to give strategic feedback to support student progress towards mastery of your established learning objectives.

The course content and assignments are primarily aligned with Universal Teacher Performance Expectation (UTPE, sometimes just referred to as TPE) 3: Understanding and Organizing Subject Matter for Student Learning, with elements from 1, 4, and 5, focusing on engaging and supporting all student in learning; planning and designing learning experiences for all students; and assessing student learning. These are the elements that go hand in hand with organizing subject matter for student learning. Through successful completion of assignments and discussions, you will be demonstrating mastery of the identified UTPEs and meeting the intended purpose of the UTPEs. Additionally, assignment tasks and rubrics are based on and aligned with CalTPA Cycle 1 and 2 performance expectations, so what you do for these assignments will not only be familiar, but directly applicable when you begin CalTPA process.

This course intends to sharpen your focus on the idea of mastery and how to design lessons with a clear beginning, middle, and end that build to learning outcomes all students can access, with assessments that tracks that learning progress, and curriculum and instruction that supports and engages students in that process. All of this culminates in each learner achieving mastery. You will walk away feeling more confident in the construction of rubrics, various kinds of assessments, and instructional strategies. You will also have a more focused lens on the identification of your learners’ abilities and needs, so you may better design curriculum that is equitable for all.

Below are the Course Learning Outcomes. By the end of this course, upon thorough and thoughtful completion of discussions, assignments, and reading/viewing course content, you should be able to:

1. Analyze relevant California academic standards for a selected content area for the purpose of designing instruction for all learners, including a variety of English Language learners, students with exceptionalities, and other learning needs.
2. Design the instructional approaches for a given content area created to meet established targets and effectively teach for all learners, including English speakers, English learners, Standard English learners, students with exceptionalities, and students with other learning needs.
3. Analyze the effectiveness of the integrated design process through socially-constructed feedback mechanisms.
4. Reflect on instructional practices and beliefs needed for designing an integrative approach to teaching a designated content area in grades 7-12 and ensuring for all learners socially-emotionally thriving and meaningful academic achievement within an equitable, inclusive learning environment.

Stretch your mindset to make the connections to everything you are learning, do not view them in silos as they all intersect!

Week One: What do we want students to know and do, and how can we measure mastery?

The Week One weekly learning objectives are as follows:

1. Analyze a set of standards to identify the content and skills students must master (CLO 1; TPE 3.1)
2. Determine the criteria by which all students would be evaluated on the progress towards mastery of a standard that allows for teacher feedback and student improvement (CLO 1; TPE 5.1)

Defining Mastery for a given Content Standard

Before you can begin to design lessons or assessments, it is crucial to know exactly what your content standards expect students to know and be able to do. Through deep analysis of the standards and frameworks, you then must establish what mastery looks like. This week, you will focus on TPE 3.1 and 5.1.

Week One Discussion will push you to take a deep dive understanding your content standards and frameworks, learning how they have been written to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. The reading will help you identify and prioritize core standards that are central to your given content area, those that deserve the greatest attention. Understanding your standards through this discussion will set you up for success in the Week One Assignment: Assessing for Mastery, where you will choose three standards to unpack and define what mastery looks like for that standard. Using the concepts and skills from your unpacking will allow you to determine the criteria by which you define mastery. You will learn how to create a rubric for said mastery, and in doing so, will have an objective measurement tool to score and track student learning progress towards mastery. The act of doing this will segue into your assessments and instructional strategies that are aligned with these criteria and progressively build on one another. It will also help you understand what feedback to give students to progress them to the next step.

CONNECT ~ Now, keep in mind your definition of mastery as you begin Week Two and make connections to the Week Two content!

Week Two: Identify the Needs of your Students and Tracking Student Learning Towards Mastery

The Week Two weekly learning objectives are as follows:

1. Utilize two or more strategies to identify prior knowledge, specific needs of learners, and appropriate strategies that will allow you as the teacher to design a lesson that is developmentally and academically appropriate (CLO 2; TPE 3.2, 4.2)
2. Develop a sequential set of assessments (i.e., informal/self-, formative, and summative) that aligns with one standard, meets the specific needs of target students, and allows for specific targeted feedback from teacher to student (CLO 2, 3; TPE 3.5, 4.2, 5.1)

Identify Knowledge and Needs

Differentiation starts with using a variety of strategies to get to know your students because the better you know your students, the better you know where to focus your attention and effort. Pre-assessments, often in the form of student self-assessments, help identify student goals and abilities. This in turn allows you to meet students where they are through the organization of your curriculum and making accommodations and modifications as needed to ensure access to the curriculum (TPE 3.2). It’s also integral to designing developmentally appropriate instruction (TPE 4.2) that supports the progression towards mastery (TPE3.2).

Some of the readings will inform your understanding of the how and why we use pre-assessments to get to know our students, and other readings will give you options and ideas for how you might design the right pre- assessment for your content area. The discussion itself will have you describe two strategies you would use to identify prior knowledge, specific needs of learners, and their goals. Reading and discussing the various strategies your peers choose will help calibrate your approach to ensure the strategy you choose actually does what you intend it to do. You’ll also see the variety of ways teachers can approach this which will broader your skillset further.

Sequential Assessments

Once you have identified and defined mastery (Week One) and have a better understanding of the abilities and needs of your students (Week Two Discussion), the next step is to develop a sequence of pre-assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment to track student progression towards mastery and identify needs obtained from these assessments to provide timely, actionable feedback that supports their progression. This Topic addresses TPE Elements 3.5, 4.2, and 5.1. In the Week Two Assignment you will choose one standard and rubric from Week One, refined with feedback from your instructor, and develop these three assessments. Think of them as a beginning, middle, and end to your lesson design whereby you are using the rubric to track learning progress towards mastery and use the data you collect to determine the specific feedback you will need to give either directly to individual students and/or collectively to the class through your next instructional activities. When approaching your assessment with this deliberate detail, you are practicing the act of ensuring equity in outcome for all of your students.

CONNECT ~ If you think of your pre-assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment as benchmarks and opportunities for feedback, the next topic of focus is designing instruction between those assessments that builds on the feedback you are giving. Now take these intersections forward into next week.

Week Three: Designing Instruction to Support All Learners

The Week Three weekly learning objectives are as follows:

1. Curate various instructional strategies, technologies, and tools one could use in lesson design to provide equitable access to curriculum through multiple means of representation (CLO 2; TPE 1.4)
2. Design standard-aligned instructional activities with appropriate resources and accommodations that supports a wide range of learners and allows for multiple means of engagement (CLO 2, 3; TPE 3.2, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 4.4)

Instructional Strategies that Provide Access Through Multiple Means of Representation

There are a myriad array of instructional strategies, tools, and technologies one could use to provide equitable access to their curriculum. Through the Curating and Sharing Resources discussion this week, you will learn, share, and curate some of these resources and begin applying the appropriate strategies to your own content standards. The purpose here is to provide multiple means of representation of your content and skills unpacked from your standard that progress the students towards mastery. This discussion is directly aligned with TPE 1.4, pushing you to use a variety of developmentally and ability-appropriate instructional strategies, resources, and assistive technology, including principles of UDL and MTSS. These strategies can and should be integrated into your one- or two-day lesson plan, the Learning Map (Signature Assignment) in Week Four.

Designing Instructional Activities that Allows for Multiple Means of Engagement

While we want to represent what we are teaching in a variety of ways, we also want to engage our learners through a variety of means. The Week Three Assignment B: Station Rotation gives you a framework for how you can structure a day’s lesson through station rotations to cycle students through multiple means of engagement (and representation). Tailoring the instructional strategy to your subject, you will create a station rotation that meets the needs of your learners, targets your interaction with students, and engages students in their progression towards mastery. Through this assignment you will learn and apply a variety of means that are developmentally and academically appropriate and student-centered. For this topic, this week, you will be pulling together many of the TPE elements that are the focus of this course (1.4, 3.2, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, and 4.4).

Think of this as where the instructional pieces come together with your assessments and tracking towards mastery. If you sense how they are building and connecting with one another, you’re on the right track.

This week’s focus is also on receiving feedback and broadening your perspectives. For the former, this comes in the form of the creation of a draft of your Week Four Signature Assignment, shared with peers in the class, with intention of giving and receiving feedback to one another. The latter will send you to the field (or virtually) to observe a classroom teacher in your content area teach a lesson. The observation template

provided mirrors the Learning Map template, which itself is based on the CalTPA. The intention here is to observe a teacher utilizing some of the same strategies you are developing in this course, such as articulating learning expectations to students, using assessment strategies to track learning and provide formative feedback, differentiating instruction to support all learners, using UDL principles, and more.

CONNECT ~ Think about how you have now defined mastery of a given standard (Week One), developed a system to track learner progress towards mastery and given feedback on next steps (Week Two), and now developed the appropriate instruction (Week Three) that builds on that feedback and supports all learners in the progression towards mastery. Let’s put it all together in Week Four.

Week Four: Applying Concepts of Mastery, Assessment, and Instruction

The Week Four weekly learning objectives are as follows:

1. Explain what it means to design lessons to support all learners and how that takes shape in our interaction with students, instruction, feedback, SEL strategies, and assessments (CLO 3, 4; TPE 3.1, 3.4, 4.4)
2. Design a one- or two-day, standard-aligned lesson that utilizes principles of Universal Design for Learning, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support in the way the lesson is designed, implemented, and assessed (CLO 1, 2, 3, 4; TPE 1.4, 3.1, 3.4, 3.5, 4.4)

Design a one- or two-day lesson and reflect on your Learning

Now, you will use all content from Weeks One through Three, the feedback you received on discussions and assignments, and your own deeper understanding to help inform your creation of a one- or two-day lesson. This lesson is your signature assignment because in doing so, you will be applying the concepts learned and the assessments and instructional strategies developed in your assignments. You will notice how the learning map template aligns with expectations of the CalTPA Cycle 1, so performing well on this assignment will have a direct benefit to you when you embark on the CalTPA process.

Additionally, this week, you will reflect on your learning and growth in this course through the discussion, addressing this core question of the class: What does it mean to support all students? What instructional moves will you make to support all learners in achieving mastery? With your assignments and discussions serving as artifacts of your progressive growth and mastery of the identified TPEs, you will upload these as artifacts to showcase your mastery through a LinkedIn Portfolio assignment.

CONNECTIONS MADE in ITL526 are your foundation moving into ITL528. You will continue to build your knowledge and skills as you have mastered the ability to unpack your content standards and frameworks and design mastery rubrics, standards-aligned assessments, and standards-aligned, universally accessible, instruction to support all learners. As you move into ITL528: Integrated Design II, you will shift to thinking about how to stretch this out over a unit of study and deepen your ability to create a classroom environment that is conducive to learning for all.

Assignment Summary