Sample lesson plans

• Mapping of Personal Narratives - In this activity students create a map that tells the story of their family's journey to their present location in South Central. This was designed to both build community in the classroom as the first lesson plan of the year, and to orient students to geospatial awareness. In the presentation portion groups of four have to present each others maps to the class (they cannot present their own), and teachers are able to build collective knowledge around the basics of cartography based on what students include on their maps. For example some students will include a compass rose or a legend on the map so you ask them to explain that to the class so there will then be a basic understanding of the fundamentals of maps. Students also record those key elements in their notebooks, or teachers record them on a word wall in the class. 

• Autoethnographic Essay Scaffold - This tool is designed to scaffold students through the multiple paragraph writing process, and prompt them to articulate the correlation between the course content and their own story.

• Community and Cultural Capital Observation Tool - Students bring a wealth of experience and knowledge that act as assets in both their personal life and academic life. This tool helps connect their daily observational talent to the field observation necessary for students to collect qualitative data.

• Four Worlds Field Observation Tool - This is an analytical tool (adapted from CALIS) that students use to articulate power networks that each have their own actors, needs, priorities and sources of power. There are a variety of stages that students can see the four worlds; often it is used to describe globalization and its role in international relationships. In this specific tool students are using the Four Worlds Framework to articulate the actors, needs, priorities, and power sources of their communities.

  LA Riots Project - Students examined their local context thru a then and now analysis, 20 years after the LA Riots.  Students engaged in authentic research, interviewing community members, examining primary sources, and creating an essay, story map, and visual art piece. 

  Urban Ecology Sustainable Design Challenge - Students examined their local campus community to uncover issues of sustainability.  Students identified, categorized, and re-imagined social and ecosystem services that impact campus life.  These ideas were represented in annotated 3D models. 

• Urban Ecology PSA Script Task Card - This tool acts as a precursor to the process of students creating a informative commercial. The directions are designed to connect theory, data, and a call to action; thus, facilitating youth participatory research rather then research for research purposes.

• Steps to making a Public Service Announcement - After students create a script, they are equipped to create a short public service announcement. This tool outlines how students can transform their script into an I-Movie.
  

The following lessons meet Common Core Standards:

• World History Economic Theories Group Task Card - This is a sample 10th Grade World History activity for HSS 10.3.6 which requires students to analyze the emergence of capitalism as a dominant economic pattern and the responses to it, including Utopianism, Social Democracy, Socialism, and Communism. In addition to the task card, students have been equipped with resource cards that provide primary and secondary sources to facilitate students' examinations of the economic systems. Their task is to create a commercial to promote the economic theory that they believe best addressed the problems that arose during the Industrial Revolution. They used flip cameras and iPod touches to film their commercial, and then they edited it using Apple iMovie software.

• US Imperialism - Digital Maps and Wiki pages - This is a sample 11th Grade US History lesson plan for HSS 11.4, which requires students to trace the rise of the United States as a World Power in the twentieth century. In this activity students reviewed a variety of primary and secondary source documents about their assigned colony. They then had to identify the location of the colony on a shared digital map and include a metaphor that represented both the dominant and counter-narratives of US Imperialism, they then linked the digital map to the websites (wikispace) created by the student groups that provide additional information and primary resources found by the students.