241 Indigenous Discussion 5

OL 241 Indigenous Assignment 5 Discussion

Online Learning. OL 241 Writing Your Local Climate Action Plan: https://training.csd-i.org/indigenous-climate-action-plan/

Center for Sustainable Development: https://training.csd-i.org/

This week’s resources:

Assignment 5 Homework

Magee Example Project Assignment 5

OL 241 Assignment 5 Lesson Plan on Participatory Mapping of Soil and Water Resources

Participatory Mapping How To Card

Assignment 5.

Turning one of your project’s activities into a lesson plan and a take-home, how-to card.

The concept of sustainability also has implications for your organization or community group—not just the sustainability of the project results.

Nonprofits:

In working with nonprofits I’ve discovered that many of them don’t document their activities. This means that next year when they decide to do an activity again, they might not have names and addresses of partners they worked with or background information for the activity, or the specifics of how they conducted the activity. I try to encourage organizations simply to take their loose documentation at the end of an activity and stick it in a folder. Even if it’s not tidy nor well organized, they will probably have 80% of the information they need for the next time.

Community Groups:

The same goes for community groups. Members of community groups evolve and change—and so if in two years new members of the group want to replicate a successful project—it will be a lot easier for them to do it if they have the background information and documentation for that successful project. It’s the same concept as for a nonprofit: collect everything for project in a folder and put the folder in a central location where new members can access it in the future.

Templates:

Also, a great timesaver are templates of the different phases of a project. If you can develop a lesson plan template for a how to workshop, or a detailed project schedule, or a budget—the next time that you want to launch a similar project your templates will only need to be edited to bring them up to date.

Over the next eight weeks in this pair of courses, 241 and 242, you will be building a series of templates. You are designing a specific project and developing the documentation for that project, but this documentation can be used over and over again for different projects and different activities just by making simple modifications to the original template. So be sure to save these examples of your work. They could even come in handy during an interview with the donor about a new project; you’ll have examples for them to see the quality of work that you’re capable of doing.

So this week we are going to begin developing our first template — a lesson plan for a community workshop. The project you are designing is made up of a series of activities—activities that might be launched with a workshop. The Week 1 needs assessment that you did with the community was a workshop and we provided you with a lesson plan for conducting the workshop.

A well-written lesson plan will be a helpful to:

your organization in scaling up similar activities in other communities with other staff members in the future
your community group in scaling up similar activities in new neighborhoods or in outlying areas

Last week we wrote a one-page field guide for one of your project activities. This week we’re going to expand that field guide into a lesson plan. We have provided a lesson plan this week as a template for you to edit into your own activity.

Converting your field guide into a lesson plan is mostly copy/paste, but you’ll need to visualize yourself presenting information to a group of people. You will need to use your imagination to think of fun ways for them to adopt the practices that they will learn in ways that will help them remember how to do it.

Also this week we’re going to draw a ‘how to card’ for your workshop participants to take home. The card should be a simple reminder of the different phases of the workshop. I try not to include words on my cards because community members may speak different languages.

So try your hand at drawing a simple how-to card. Even if your illustrations aren’t as good as you would like them to be — don’t worry — your how-to card will be a useful tool to give to an illustrator so that they will know what are looking for. You can also go to the Internet and look for how-to cards on your activity and simply copy and paste the illustrations.

This week is a process of projecting into the future what your activity will look like in a workshop setting. When I wrote my first lesson plan I sat down with a teacher friend and had her go through it and make suggestions to me on how to improve it. Her biggest suggestion to me was “don’t forget to make the lesson fun.”

Enjoy this week’s assignment. Click on homework for Assignment Five to get started.

Tim Magee