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SEL FORWARD

Social and Emotional Learning Towards Meaningful Social Contribution

CONTENT OVERVIEW

STANDARDS

This curriculum will address and target goals that have been included in the NY State SEL benchmarks, C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards, provided by the National Council for Social Studies and certain ELA Writing Standards from the Common Core. Additionally, ISTE Standards for students are used to guide the technology integration in the curriculum units.

NEGOTIATED CURRICULUM

According to Boomer (1992), before teaching can happen students must first be motivated (p. 6). In this curriculum, the teacher and students are both involved in the planning of activities, goals and assessments. Teachers must always take into consideration the interests of the students in order to keep them engaged and enable them to have a sense of ownership over their learning process. Students must also be involved in developing assessments so they themselves draft the rubrics and summative requirements, identify their goals and understand what is expected of them.

Negotiating the curriculum means deliberately planning to invite students to contribute to, and to modify, the educational program, so that they will have a real investment both in the learning journey and in the outcomes (Boomer, 1992, p.11).

PBL Focus in a Spiral Curriculum

This curriculum will use the project-based learning method for the final assessments of students learning. Inquiries spiral up to a wider scope as students continue to the next grade level. As a culmination of students understandings, learners will be diving into a social issue they have identified. They will analyze the situation and come up with solutions using the knowledge gained throughout the course. Starting at a micro level, the design intends for students in the younger years (Kindergarten and First grade) to focus on social concerns that are present within their classrooms. In Second and Third grade, students will begin to widen the grounds of their investigations and analyze issues at a school level. Finally, in Fourth and Fifth grade, the unit will end with a social project that deals with their concerns that exist at a community level.

The idea is for learning to build on one another taking students deeper into the subject as they progress from one grade level to the next (Walker & Soltis, 2009, p. 59).

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