Teachers are leaving the field at an alarming rate, often citing the burden of the job. To keep passionate teachers in the classroom they must be engaged in building purposeful lessons that create “lightbulb” moments for their students.

Kanban Zone streamlines the process, allowing teachers to create meaningful lesson plans while still adhering to the standards and curriculum of the state/school.

The easy to follow template scaffolds the natural learning process of students to ensure that each lesson is embedded with a process for building schema and opportunities for hands-on application.

Kanban Zone specializes in igniting conversation, collaboration and communication between teachers and students, allowing both parties to feel valued and successful. Teachers are able to develop lessons that lead to the mastery of knowledge while developing future reading skills at the same time. The Kanban method brings the idea of STEAM to new levels, by developing a culture of growth, adaptive thinking and innovation to all classrooms.

The benefit is not only for the teachers, students can take a leadership role in their education by pulling units, lessons, and activities across their own Kanban boards which develops independence, resilience and AI proof skills that will benefit them throughout their academic careers and best prepare them for an ever evolving world.

This Unit Design template helps build agility skills by scaffolding the learning process as teachers design their lessons. The important skills of brainstorming, refinement, and celebration are essential to the learning process. By scaffolding this mental circuit it becomes a natural thought process that is applied to student learning as well.

The template begins with developing a strong open-ended essential question that will focus on an entire unit. Teachers begin by looking at their standards, brainstorming ideas, refining them to ensure mastery of knowledge can be assessed, and ends with a celebration of work.

The template then moves to the LEARN & PRACTICE part of the board. In this area, teachers can brainstorm possible resources ensuring that different mediums are being used to appeal to all learners. They again go through the process of refinement and celebration which helps deliver only the best materials to students.

The card is now moved to PRACTICE where teachers can group their resources and create hands-on learning activities that will allow the synthesis of knowledge, the highest level of Depth of Knowledge (DOK).

The template ends with developing rubrics for the unit. Ideally, teachers will create content and skill-based rubrics that will help them assess student learning while allowing students choice and voice in their product. The RUBRIC containers allow more than one rubric to be built along with ideas of how to write simplified rubrics that prompt student reflection before and after work is submitted.