Tamara Griffith
Long-Term Planning
"If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail."
~Benjamin Franklin
When I first switched from teaching special education to teaching general education three years ago, I did not fully comprehend long-term or unit planning, and often planned one week at a time. As a result, my lessons lacked a common thread and were disjointed, unfocused. While I thought I was planning great lessons and working toward big goals, the reality was that I was spending too much time on "fluff" and "filler lessons." After analyzing my students' standardized test scores at the culmination of my first year teaching general education, I realized that something needed to change -- and drastically.
What needed to change was the way I planned. Instead of looking at planning as something that was done the weekend before it was taught, I began to instead employ the backwards design model. This model required me to first consider the specific skills, content knowledge, and goals students need to acquire or achieve by the end of the school year and how these skills, content knowledge, and goals would be assessed throughout the school year. It is only after these have been considered that learning activities are developed. Thus, by utilizing this framework, I am able to plan for instruction deliberately, allowing my classroom big goals to remain center-stage. So, rather than having lessons that are largely "fluff" and "filler," I am able to effectively and deliberately plan units and lessons that remain connected to my big goals by purposefully and appropriately sequencing learning experiences. Doing so allows me to maximize the instructional time, thereby facilitating the content mastery necessary for students to score proficiently on their Florida Standards Assessment.
In the era of high-stakes testing and with the added pressure of ensuring that students graduate college and career ready, students need to be continuously working toward meeting the rigorous academic goals called for by the standards. Without a long-term plan in place, it is easy to lose focus of attaining the standards' overarching goals. Creating an effective long-term plan ensures that my students are consistently working toward achieving these rigorous academic goals by applying both their content knowledge and cross-disciplinary skills. An effective long-term plan strategically plans spiraling opportunities to ensure previously mastered content remains mastered. In addition, long-term planning allows me to strategically make connections between my units and to other disciplines; when students are able to make these strong connections, their retention of content knowledge and skills improve, thereby facilitating their academic achievement. Moreover, long-term planning provides both my students and me with the big picture we need to stay focused.
To maintain focus and ensure student growth, effective long-term planning requires me to unpack the standards and identify the enduring understandings that need to be addressed and reinforced throughout the school year. From these enduring understandings, I create essential questions, which form the basis of my summative assessments. Throughout this planning process, opportunities for students to clearly demonstrate their enduring understandings in a variety of contexts and formats are mapped out. When students can demonstrate their content knowledge and skills in multiple ways, they are better suited to transfer their knowledge and skills independently, a key sign of mastery. Furthermore, including the essential questions and enduring understandings in my long-term plan ensures that students are continuously making progress toward rigorous academic goals from one unit to the next. As a result, I have a purposeful instructional plan for the entire school year, with clear alignment guiding the creation of relevant, standards-aligned learning experiences.
Grade 6 Language Arts Long-Term Plan:
The long-term plan I have created is utilized in my 6th grade language arts classes. I am not given a mandated curriculum guide; instead, my standards are my curriculum guide. As a result, I have a significant amount of freedom in choosing the texts and novels I use to teach the content and skills articulated by the standards. In my current district, we utilize the Language Arts Florida Standards, or LAFS, which are very similar to the Common Core.
These standards are broken down into several categories:
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Key Ideas and Details
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Craft and Structure
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Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
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Language and Editing
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Speaking and Listening
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Text-Based Writing
By analyzing how my standards are organized, I am better able to determine the enduring understandings my students are responsible for mastering. After determining the enduring understandings contained within the standards, I am able to determine which enduring understandings and/or standards need to be given priority. This process allows me to determine which standards are anchor standards and which are supporting standards. Anchor standards need to be prioritized as they contain crucial content knowledge required for success in subsequent grade levels. Supporting standards serve to support and enhance students' understanding of the anchor standards. Organizing my standards in this fashion by no means asserts that certain standards are not taught; instead, organizing my standards this way merely gives some standards priority over others. This organization maintains the focus on attainment of the standards' overarching goals ad ensures students will be able to leave my classroom with the content knowledge and skills they need to be successful in subsequent courses. Furthermore, it is only after I truly understand and unpack my standards that I am ready to begin drafting my long-term plan.
Once I fully understand and have unpacked my standards, I begin to group standards into units, which allows me to ensure my curriculum is appropriately sequenced and organized. To effectively group my standards into units, I consider both the organization of the standards themselves and my incoming students' prior FSA results. Doing so allows me to meaningfully adjust my long-term plan to meet and enhance my students' learning needs and ensuring that students are continuously meeting rigorous academic goals. Intentionally grouping standards in this fashion ensures that both pacing and scaffolding are appropriately sequenced to ensure mastery.
Having effectively grouped my standards into units, I choose a universal theme for each unit. By centering each unit around a universal theme, I am able to more effectively and efficiently connect ideas and skills between units and across disciplines. Doing so ensures that I integrate cross-disciplinary skills in instruction to engage learners in purposefully applying their language arts content knowledge. Using each unit's universal theme and the enduring understandings of the unit, I begin drafting essential questions. These open-ended questions encapsulate the transferable ideas and enduring understandings of the standards and promote both inquiry and critical thinking. Typically, unit summative assessments require students to meaningfully engage with these essential questions.
Once my essential questions have been drafted, I break down the nuances of the standards and enduring understandings to create content objectives. In this process, I explicate what students will know and be able to do to achieve the desired learning outcomes. Having listed the content objectives, I then sequence them meaningfully in order to build upon students' prior learning, thereby facilitating students' abilities to make connections between lessons, units, and other disciplines.
Because I teach both regular and advanced sections of 6th grade language arts, I also draft remediation, enrichment, and spiraling opportunities within each unit. This allows me to meaningfully plan for differentiation throughout the year to assure student learning.
Explore the PDF below to view my long-term plan for 6th grade language arts.
While long-term planning creates a road map to guide my development of instruction throughout the year, I am unable to account for every possible situation. As a result, sometimes circumstances arise that lead me down different instructional roads, roads that, while different, maintain alignment and focus on meeting rigorous academic goals. Thus, my long-term plan is adjusted and revised over the course of the school year and guides my development of more specific unit plans
Scroll through this PDF to explore my long-term plan for Grade 6 Language Arts.
Once my long-term plan is complete and my units have effectively been drafted and aligned to meet rigorous academic goals, I align and adjust my plan to my district calendar and to the state testing calendar. When aligning my long-term plan to these calendars, I build in flex time to account for both changing circumstances and learner needs. This process allows me to visualize how and when my instructional plans may be impacted by changing circumstances, such as interim benchmark testing, professional development, activity schedules, etc., and allocates time needed to adjust my plan to meet learner needs through reteaching and enrichment. A sample of my 2017-18 adjusted long-term plan is included below.