Prepare to Teach
The California State Common Core Visual and Performing Arts Framework is closely aligned with best practices for Social Emotional Learning (SEL); the following are critical in ensuring success in implementation.
Students feel safe communicating ideas and co-constructing learning with peers and teachers.
Students are exposed to multiple cultures, perspectives, and viewpoints and have opportunities to engage and feel safe to express their own culture, philosophy, and views.
Students are offered opportunities to collaborate and work with peers and instructors to develop a product and extend their knowledge over time.
Students have opportunities to reflect on learning, identify personal strengths and interests, test new approaches to problem-solving, and innovate as part of the learning experience.
Students are offered opportunities for critical thinking and encouraged to form opinions, solve problems based on evidence, and link learning from multiple disciplines.
Students are provided agency to create and share stories through the visual means of filmmaking and other forms of digital media. Students’ cultural, historical, and contemporary experiences are valued.
Essential Knowledge for Educators
The Imagining Equity curriculum provides a clear, easy-to-implement guide to support classroom learning. The professional development required for implementing a new curriculum in film and media studies may vary depending on the specific needs and context of the district. The Imagining Equity curriculum serves as a guiding document to provide a good foundation for the necessary knowledge, skills, and support to effectively teach the subject and facilitate student learning and incorporate the following areas.
How do I use the curriculum?
What guidance does the curriculum developer offer about planning routines and customizations?
Often times developers provide guidance on how teachers can prepare to use the materials. Frequently this guidance is around how the materials are structured or designed. This can be helpful in figuring out what makes a set of materials rigorous and impactful for student learning. When looking at developer guidance, keep in mind that you know your context best, and consider what adjustments make the most sense for your context, while maintaining the integrity of the resource.
What decisions are teachers going to need to make within a given unit?
In order for teachers to be able to make informed decisions around how to best execute a unit of study, teachers need to first have an in depth, internalized understanding of the unit itself. Teachers must carefully evaluate the sequence of standards, how the daily objectives build towards the summative task, how specific skills are sequenced, and how the rigor progresses throughout the unit. Once teachers have carefully examined a unit in its entirety, they can better identify the areas that will potentially lead to misunderstanding or misconceptions based on that teacher’s knowledge of his/her students, and plan accordingly. Then, teachers can also make some decisions around pacing, taking into consideration topics or concepts that they anticipate might take longer for students to master, etc. Teachers will also need to be clear on what assignments/assessments they will grade and provide thorough feedback to students on, and what assignments/assessments will be used in more informal ways to adjust instruction.
What decisions are teachers going to need to make within a given lesson?
In some cases, lesson plans in a curriculum provide more content than can be taught within a given instructional block. If it is not already provided within the curriculum, teachers will need to consider what pieces of the lesson are “must dos” based on the demands of the standard that the lesson is addressing, as well as that day’s learning target and end-of-lesson assessment. Some considerations for how to determine the “must do” parts of the lesson are thinking through which pieces students must engage with in order to master that day’s objective (including making sure students complete tasks at the full level of rigor outlined by the objective), and which pieces are additional practice or only loosely connected to the target standard/day’s learning target.
Which aspects of the unit do we want all students to experience in a common way?
There are often many embedded assessments within a given unit, from informal checks for understanding to more formal end-of-unit assessments. Be sure to think through the pieces of each unit that should be uniform for all students. These might be the pieces from each unit that you use to measure student progress. This information should be shared with teachers prior to teachers engaging in unit internalization so that they are aware of the assessments that must be common.
Imagining Equity is made possible by the generous support of:
