Project+Description-Interdisciplinary+Feedback+Letter+Exchange

** Interdisciplinary Feedback Letter Exchange: ** ** An Experiment in Collaboration ** Involving students in     Dr. Sawyer’s Teaching English in the Secondary School & Dr. Mattson’s Teaching Social Studies in the Secondary School The assignment is meant to introduce you to cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration, and to challenge you to think about your work as a teacher within a broader humanities-oriented framework. For this project, you will participate in a curricular exchange with a student who is pursuing teaching certification in a different discipline than you. The assignment has three central parts: 1) You will be paired with a student from the other class. (We’ll call this person your “cross-disciplinary peer.”)   2) You will be invited to join the wiki that we have created for the purposes of this assignment ( [] ), and you will join. 3) You will create a small curricular portfolio to submit to your cross-disciplinary peer, and then post it on the wiki. Please include in this small portfolio the following:   · a lesson or a class assignment that you have begun developing in your Methods course;    · a narrative overview, explaining the instructional objectives that guided the development of this plan or assignment, and indicating the reasons you made the choices you made therein (this narrative can be anywhere from 1 paragraph to 3 pages in length); and    · A list of 2-3 **questions ** you would like your cross-disciplinary peer to give their input on. Here are some examples of the sorts of questions you might ask your partner:    o From your perspective, what is useful/meaningful about this lesson or assignment?    o I think this is an interesting approach to teaching about [whatever the topic is]. In what ways might you adapt what I have done to make it fruitful in your own classroom? o What joint projects or supplemental materials might you imagine using to bridge English and social studies education around this topic? o What assignment ideas do you have that connect to this work? o In what ways does this work correspond to the instructional goals that you are developing for your history or English classroom?

4) You will find the portfolio that has been posted on the wiki by your cross-disciplinary peer. Then you should:   · Schedule an in-person meeting with your partner to review/clarify the materials each of you posted. (Feel free to ask your own subject-area peers for help thinking about how you might respond to your partner); and then    · Write a 2-3 page letter responding to this portfolio. In this letter you should respond to your partner’s questions, and you should suggest texts, documents, visuals and other materials, as well as teaching strategies, that might complement or deepen their lesson/activity/work/approach. Is there a joint project you can imagine using to bridge English and history ed? Assignment ideas? How might you complement this work in your disciplinary class generally speaking? In what ways does this correspond to the instructional goals that you are developing for your history or English classroom? 5) Debrief this activity on the wikispace discussion board. Was this a useful activity? How would you improve it?

(If you run into any problems with this assignment, please send an email to both Mary Sawyer sawyerm@newpaltz.edu and Rachel Mattson mattsonr@newpaltz.edu .)
 * DUE DATES: ** Please post your materials by **April 13**. Reply to your partner's materials the week of **April 27**. Post to the debriefing discussion board the week of **May 2**.