Case Study 2

GoGo Travel Company

Project

GoGo Travel Company: Destined for Sustainability

Audience

Grade 6 intermediate-proficiency emergent bilingual learners

Format

Interdisciplinary thematic curriculum unit

Focus

Biliteracy, project-based learning, sustainability, and interdisciplinary content integration

Tools

Google Slides, multimedia resources, hyperlinks, collaborative digital workspace

Design Challenge

Create an engaging, interdisciplinary, project-based learning experience for Grade 6 intermediate-proficiency emergent bilingual students that maintains rigorous grade-level content while providing meaningful opportunities to develop reading, writing, listening, and speaking across English Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, Math, and Spanish Social Studies.

Solution

The team created GoGo Travel Company: Destined for Sustainability, a simulated travel company in which students assumed the role of travel agents and investigated sustainable tourism. Rather than studying each discipline in isolation, students developed content knowledge and academic language across disciplines while working toward a shared, authentic purpose:

Science: investigate sustainability.
Spanish Social Studies: explore geography and its relationship to sustainability.
Math: develop and manage a travel budget.
English Social Studies: create persuasive travel materials.
ELA: research destinations and communicate findings through travel blogging.

The unit culminated in integrated products and presentations that required students to apply both content knowledge and academic language.

My Role

Project Lead • Curriculum Collaborator • Editor • Assessment Designer

I served as project lead for a five-member graduate curriculum team, collaborating with colleagues to conceptualize the interdisciplinary theme, establish the curricular structure, and divide content-area responsibilities. Each team member authored her assigned content-area introduction and lesson plan, while I created and managed the master curriculum document, integrated and edited team contributions for clarity and consistency, and designed the common assessment framework used across the unit.

My individual leadership and design responsibilities included:

Led development and organization of the shared curriculum project.
Created and maintained the master curriculum document.
Coordinated integration of five contributors' work into a cohesive interdisciplinary unit.
Reviewed and edited team members' content as needed for consistency and clarity.
Collaborated with the team on concept development, instructional structure, and division of responsibilities.
Designed three common assessment rubrics addressing collaboration, oral presentation, and written/spoken academic language.

Assessment Design

I designed a common assessment framework to evaluate student performance across the interdisciplinary unit. Because the project was designed for emergent bilingual learners, assessment extended beyond content mastery to include collaboration, academic language, oral communication, and written language development.

Three analytic rubrics provided students with clear performance criteria while allowing teachers to evaluate both content learning and language development throughout the project.

SELECTED ARTIFACTS — GoGo Travel Company

Interdisciplinary Unit Design

GoGo Travel Company guides students through the authentic process of planning travel while exploring sustainability across five content areas. Working as travel agents, intermediate-proficiency emergent bilingual students investigate sustainable travel in Science, explore geography and sustainability in Spanish Social Studies, create travel budgets in Math, design persuasive travel brochures in English Social Studies, and develop destination blogs in ELA.

Aligned with the English Language Proficiency Standards (ELPS), the unit integrates rigorous content instruction with language development across reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Students research, collaborate, use technology, draw upon first-language resources, build academic vocabulary, and communicate for authentic purposes as they develop their travel agency.

VIEW FULL PROJECT ❯

Google My Maps —

Sustainable Travel Research

Students use Google My Maps to research destinations, analyze geographic information and organize location-based research as part of the sustainable travel-company simulation.

Standards-Aligned Curriculum Artifacts

These three curriculum excerpts demonstrate the intentional integration of grade-level content standards and English Language Proficiency Standards (ELPS) within a single instructional sequence. Content and language objectives were designed together so emergent bilingual students could develop academic language while engaging with rigorous disciplinary content.

Assessment Artifacts

Together, these assessments reflect an integrated approach in which content mastery, language development, communication, and collaboration are treated as interconnected dimensions of student learning.

Assessment Rubric 2.1

Collaborative Work Skills

Assessment Rubric 2.2

Oral Presentation

Assessment Rubric 2.3

Writing Model - Language Objective