// Langwitches Blog

Presenter Earl Nicholas talks about A Necessary Prelude to Consensus Map

Practice beginning consensus building techniques to help establish the professional atmosphere needed to reach later consensus on major curriculum issues.

Why map?

Essential Question

How can we assure a meaningful set of learning experiences?

Curriculum:

• A set of unit plans outlining meaningful learning opportunities that including concepts, skills, essential questions, assessments, activities and standards aligned
• blue print for teachers to guide their teaching
• broad picture that schools are experiences

Curriculum is the vehicle by which we facilitate student learning. Effective implementation results in student accomplishment of state and district commencement outcomes. To serve that purpose, the curriculum must be relevant and meaningful to the students to whom it is taught.
taken from the Canadaigua Curriculum & Instruction Procesures Manual Adopted 2003.09

Consensus: agreement, acknowledgment, accepting truth

Wikipedia defines “Consensus”:

in English as, firstly, general agreement and, secondly, group solidarity of belief or sentiment. It has its origin in a Latin word meaning literally to feel together.

Skills across the disciplines

• editing and revising skills in ALL work
• organizational skills
• reading for decoding
• reading for text integration
• speaking skills in a range of forums
• Instructional Technology Expectations
• Character Ed Connections
• Service Learning Outcomes

Activity for your staff.
Give  them list of verbs pulled from Standards. Have them categorize them into three columns (recall/compare/predict)

Parrot (recall)

• classify
• describe
• identify
• summarize
• observer
• respond

Process (compare)

• Connect
• Discuss
• Contrast
• analyze
• diagram
• organize

Prognosticate (predict)

• elaborate
• reason
• exploree
• visualize
• solve

My thoughts:

My thoughts...

Taking the time to develop a consensus map is to get the “buy in” from teachers. It is to set the stage… Consensus maps are not only horizontally among teachers of the same grade level, but also vertically among different grade levels. In order to prepare incoming sixth graders with the right skills, Kindergarten through 5th grade teachers will have to work together and decide what will be included and what will not be included in their curriculum map. Teachers can take what was put into the consensus map and transfer to their individual map, then add their individual activities and give it their personal mark (art of teaching)