Tanya Katovich, a Nationally Board Certified teacher leader from Illinois, demonstrates a unit-planning routine known as the “whiteboard activity” and how this can be done in the context of professional learning teams (PLTs). This routine can be done on chalkboards, dry-erase boards, or butcher block paper. Your team should have plenty of Post-it Notes handy. The purpose of this activity is to determine the big ideas in the curriculum or standards that are related to the unit being planned. Read more in her own blog here…
Whiteboarding with peers to plan for AST units
Ambitious Teaching—An overview
In this video we illustrate what Ambitious Teaching looks like in classrooms ranging from high school to kindergarten. The practices were developed through collaborations between teachers and researchers, and they are continually evolving as we learn more about how they work with young learners. There are several themes that you’ll see in all examples, such as a focus on puzzling and complex phenomena, opportunities to make sense through talk, making thinking visible, attending to who is participating, using various forms of scaffolding and tools, and much more.
This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award #1907471 and #1315995