Tuesday was my session at NECC: Progressive Pedagogy and the 21st Century. This was a way to teach folks about Understanding by Design and how we use it to create the curriculum at SLA. A lot of the keynotes and workshops and sessions I’ve been doing lately have been sort of a "birds-eye" view of school… I’ve been talking a lot about school reform, and the big ideas that I think we need to consider when we think about schools, but even back in October, I was feeling that we also would need to talk about how those big ideas turned into concrete practice.

But I was also really struggling with how to do it. I wasn’t sure how to structure the balance of talking about tools and talking about structure… I wasn’t sure how to set up the "why" of the session with the "what" of the session. I wasn’t sure how to strike the balance between making this about large pedagogical ideas and making this about Understanding by Design. And I had no idea what the room was going to look like, and whether or not I could do anything but talk at people.

Moreover, perhaps because we don’t see many sessions with a specific pedagogical focus, I really felt that this was high stakes for me. I wanted this to be something that gave people something concrete but also thoughtful that they could take away and use. Practical theory, if you will.

So this was one of those presentations where I had gone through ten different slide decks and thought about fifteen different ways to present it before realizing that I had to decide on one concept because, well, the presentation was in a few hours. Fortunately, it was also one of those times that once I finally came to a structure in my head, I was able to really put it together in a way that I liked. (It always helps to have Bud The Teacher sitting next to you to bounce ideas off of too.)

In the end, I was really pleased with the way the session went. The folks in the session did an amazing job of creating a first pass at a very rich unit plan on Natural Disasters on the fly. And I felt good that I had framed both how this can lead to better schools and how it can be used to make technology infusion and integrate rich and deep and meaningful. This is the kind of stuff that really is the meat of what makes us at SLA able to talk about curriculum, and I think I honored the work that the SLA teachers do every day.

Wes Fryer was kind enough to uStream the whole session and some reactions after the session and blog about it too. So here’s everything from the session:

UbD21C — the wiki

The uStream of the Session:

The uStream with reactions:
The backchannel

And the slidedeck:

Tags: sla, necc, necc08, understandingbydesign