Clients

Uncommon Schools Network, Newark NJ

Curriculum Revision, Unit & Lesson Planning

The Uncommon Schools Network is one of the country’s leading charter networks, operating over fifty schools in urban districts in New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts. During the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 school years we partnered with Uncommon to develop units and lessons that are more engaging, rigorous, and meaningful to students than what they were using previously. We introduced the Four Question Method Method to a group of a dozen middle and high school curriculum planners, and helped the team to design new unit and lesson planning templates that were applied across the network. We also wrote a full school year of 4QM units and lessons for a new modern world history course aligned with the New York State Global History II Regents Examination. Rebecca Lord Gomez, Senior Manager of History for grades 5-8, had this to say about our work: “Working with Jon and Gary has revolutionized the way my team and I create history curriculum. From shifting our thinking about how to tell the stories of history in unit plans and lectures to how we push students to precisely paraphrase for meaning before unlocking the author’s purpose in close readings, our lesson plans have become both more engaging and more grounded in historical thinking. The Four Question Method has also made our curriculum much easier for our teaching staff to understand and internalize, which in turn, has made history much more exciting and accessible for our students. My team and I look forward to partnering with 4QM throughout the year; the Uncommon middle school history planning team is always eager for what comes next!”