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Unit Planning

With an intentional long-term plan in place, I can begin effectively planning units. When developing unit plans, I take into account a variety of factors. To the maximum extent possible, I seek to ensure that my units are learner-centered by planning them with students' cultures, academic levels, interests, strengths, and areas of growth in mind. This allows me to develop units that are responsive to my learners and their academic needs. To ensure cross-disciplinary skills are integrated within my units and instruction, I regularly collaborate with my social studies department. Planning for explicit interdisciplinary connections in this fashion positively impacts student achievement as it facilitates both the transferability of content knowledge and skills and the application of prior knowledge. This fosters deeper learning, enriches students' overall learning experiences, and makes learning more culturally relevant. All of these factors contribute to student investment, which is crucial to student growth, achievement, and mastery of rigorous learning goals. 

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In order to create effective unit plans, essential questions and enduring understandings need to be refined. These elements create a common thread throughout the unit, allowing students to articulate the connections between lessons within the unit more effectively. Based upon these essential questions and enduring understandings, I articulate what content knowledge students need to know and what the skills students will need to do in order to demonstrate mastery on the unit summative assessment. This ensures that the lessons I create are aligned and will facilitate students' success on the summative assessment, thereby allowing them to meet rigorous learning goals.

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Typically, my units are centered around a universal theme. What makes themes universal is that anyone, regardless of culture, race, ethnicity, religion, etc., can find relevance and meaning within them. Because my classes have significant diversity, centering units around universal themes allows me to strategically incorporate students' interests and cultures into the unit plan. Furthermore, because universal themes deal with humanity at its core, I can more easily, efficiently, and relevantly incorporate interdisciplinary connections. Planning units this way also helps me strategically plan ways for students to develop their leadership and advocacy skills.

Identity Unit:

Since my long-term plan is the bones of my instructional planning as it holds all of my units and lessons together, my unit plans are the organs of my instructional planning process. To this effect, developing strong, purposeful units is crucial to keep the rigorous academic goals alive in my instruction. Thus, when developing unit plans, I begin my creating the unit summative assessment to ensure proper alignment to both curriculum goals and content standards.  

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Once I have developed the unit summative assessment, I design the unit by utilizing the backwards design process. I refine the enduring understandings that students will need to know and do throughout the unit by ensuring that these facilitate students' success in meeting rigorous academic goals. These enduring understandings thus inform how I scaffold learning experiences, thereby ensuring that students will be able to successfully accomplish the unit summative assessment. 

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My first unit of the school year focuses on the universal theme of identity. Of all of the possible universal themes, I choose to begin the school year with this one because, in 6th grade, my students are the new kids. They are attempting to forge new identities in the context of a new school all while attempting to balance numerous new and unfamiliar roles and responsibilities. Not only does this unit provide me with multiple authentic opportunities to get to know my students personally, but it also allows students to begin thinking about the type of students, leaders, advocates, friends they want to be as they forge their new identities as Pryor Pirates.

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In addition, my initial unit focuses heavily on the Key Ideas and Details standards. These standards provide the foundation for reading comprehension, which is essential for content mastery. Both diagnostic and prior FSA data show that my students are particularly weak in these standards. By beginning the school year with these more challenging standards, I can purposefully spiral and reinforce them in subsequent units, thereby allowing me to revise my unit plans based upon demonstrated learner needs. This unit also focuses on word choice and characterization standards. By analyzing how word choice affects meaning and tone, and through analysis of characters and how they respond to changing circumstances, students will be able to see the parallels between literature and their own realities, which will deepen their enduring understandings of identity and how it is forged. Moreover, planning for explicit connections to interdisciplinary standards allows me to develop specific opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in multiple ways, which promotes authentic learning and transferability of skills.

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The PDF below showcases an overview of my identity unit and the focus, supporting, and cross-disciplinary standards emphasized throughout it.

Scroll through this PDF to explore samples of both the regular and differentiated performance assessment for this identity unit. The accompanying rubrics are also attached. 

Identity Unit

Scroll through this PDF to explore the goals and standards, including cross-disciplinary standards, this unit will address. 

Scroll through this PDF to explore the essential questions and enduring understandings addressed through this unit.

Scroll through this PDF to explore  the academic, content, and thematic vocabulary and the methods of assessment throughout the unit.

Scroll through this PDF to explore the projected daily learning plan and activities for this unit.

Click the image above to explore a slideshow depicting some of the ways this unit comes alive and further informs instruction within my classroom.

After articulating the unit's goals and standards addressed, I map out the unit's essential questions and enduring understandings. Like other components of planning, these essential questions are scaffolded to facilitate students' mastery of rigorous learning goals. As indicated previously, this unit was specifically chosen to relate to students' adjustments to middle school. Thus, the essential questions and enduring understandings for this unit are relevant to students' current lived experiences, which create. Many of the factors that are currently shaping my students' identities are included within the texts we analyze throughout the unit. This will help students make meaningful, relevant connections to the content, thus enriching their content knowledge.

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The PDF below showcases the essential questions and enduring understandings for my initial identity unit.

When planning units, I map out vocabulary that will need to be specifically taught and/or reinforced throughout the unit. While this practice assists all learners, this practice specifically helps me assist my special education and ELL populations as they often need explicit vocabulary instruction (with pictures) in order to access the content. Throughout the unit, these words appear on my word wall, and students often complete Frayer models to assist them in attaining the academic, content, and thematic vocabularly necessary to ensure mastery at the end of the unit.

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Formative assessments, such as weekly quizzes, observations, checks for understandings, and exit tickets, allow me to adjust the pace of instruction based on learner needs to ensure mastery. Often, my pace is accelerated from this plan for my advanced classes. Adjusting the pace of instruction to account for my students' mastery allows me to maximize instructional time and ensure that my instructional focus remains grounded in accomplishing the rigorous academic goals outlined in my long-term plan.

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The PDF below showcases how I highlight key academic, content, and thematic vocabulary throughout the unit and how I plan for multiple types of assessment throughout the unit.

In accordance with the backwards design framework, my daily learning experiences are drafted in a way that scaffolds students' learning, content knowledge, and skills towards success on their summative unit assessment. The unit begins with texts that delineate what identity is, gradually increasing in rigor to address factors that influence identity and then to texts that portray how we can create an identity for ourselves. While all of the texts are chosen based on their alignment to the focus standards and the unit theme, they are also chosen based upon how well they reflect my students' identities. For example, many of the texts included in the daily outline below are reflective of my students' Asian, Hispanic, and Dominican identities; these texts are also used to connect my content to the interdisciplinary standards mapped out above. The corresponding novel addresses many of the factors that play a role in the development of my students' identities: friendship, bullying, disabilities, trauma, and non-traditional homes. Providing my students with meaningful texts with which they can identify, connect, and relate is essential in building students' investment and activating their prior knowledge. Additionally, I also include supplemental texts that I can use for remediation and/ or enrichment, depending upon demonstrated student needs. To reinforce learning of abstract concepts, students work in cooperative groups, stations, and complete graphic organizers. To promote real-world experiences and transfer of skills, students engage in role-playing activities, utilize technology to create projects, and have opportunities to conduct research.  As a result, I use a range of evidence-based instructional strategies, resources, and technological tools to effectively plan instruction that meets and supports diverse learning needs.

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The PDF below outlines the daily learning objectives over the course of this unit as well as some of the supplemental texts that may be utilized for enrichment and/or remediation.

Below are samples of students' personal narratives composed at the culmination of our unit. One of this unit's ensduring understandings centered around each of us having a unique identity and story to tell. Thus, students were able to apply their key understandings of identity and how identity is forged or changed in light of various factors when composing their personal narratives. For this summative assessment, there were two versions of the prompt to which students could respond, depending on students' accommodations and/or familial backgrounds. For example, ELL and special education students were given the option to complete a modified "All About Me" prompt. Students from non-traditional homes who were unable to interview a parent or family member were likewise able to compose an "All About Me" essay. 

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Samples of students' personal narratives are included in the PDF below.

At the end of a unit, I reflect on the unit as a whole. I determine the strengths and areas of growth for the unit. I also analyze the data from the unit to specifically determine spiraling and reteaching needs for the upcoming unit. Doing so allows me to assure student learning and mastery of rigorous learning goals.

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For the grade 6 language arts identity unit presented above, 81% of students demonstrated mastery with a score of 80% or higher on their personal narratives. The following trends were evident for students who did not achieve mastery:

  • 26 students scored 79% or lower.

  • 7 of these students scored below 69%.

  • 2 students took their personal narratives home and never returned them.

  • The 3 lowest scoring students engaged in task refusal and/or had excessive absences​.

  • Students failed to connect their quote to their lives or failed to make connections as to how their identities were formed by their past experiences. 

  • Students did not plan adequately prior to writing their narratives.

  • Students did not make the suggested corrections to their rough drafts. 

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In order to help these students meet the rigorous learning goals of the unit, I provided the following reteach opportunities:

  • I offered tutoring before and after school to reteach brainstorming and essay organization.

  • I offered tutoring before and after school to reteach how to research quotes/ song lyrics and historical events from the year students were born. 

  • I offered tutoring before and after school to reteach how to turn a plan into a rough draft.

  • For students who could not attend tutoring, I offered them reteach possibilities during homeroom. 

  • Once students' skills had been remediated, they were given the opportunity to rewrite or revise their final drafts. 

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Of these students, 15 took advantage of these reteach opportunities and all 15 opted to rewrite or revise their final drafts. All 15 of these students procured 80% mastery upon re-submission.

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This unit was particularly strong in its interconnectedness since all of the texts were relevant to the central theme of identity. The most successful component of this lesson was using technology to create 6 word memoirs. Students were able to effectively apply their understandings of word choice, connotation, and tone to convey a succinct depiction of their identities. Even though my students are at varying degrees of technological literacy, students went above and beyond to show each other how to utilize the features of Google slides.

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The area in which this unit needed the most improvement was with our novel study. To maximize instructional time, I had planned for students to read the majority of the novel outside of class or after they completed their classwork. However, several students opted to read summaries online rather than complete their assigned readings, resulting in an inability to apply key content knowledge and skills effectively. As a result, I had to provide some class time each day for students to catch up on reading, which took away from the amount of instructional time that students had to effectively apply their content knowledge and skills. Next year, I will need to teach excerpts of the novel and/or create a daily reading schedule for students to assist them in effective time management. 

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At the culmination of this unit, students reported that their favorite part of the unit was the Socratic Seminar, and that overall, they enjoyed the unit, particularly when they read texts that they could relate to. They indicated that the hardest part of the unit was the summative assessment, claiming that they felt rushed to complete it and would've liked clearer guidelines as to how to incorporate the evidence from their family interviews into their writing. Keeping that in mind,  I will allot more instructional time for the completion of this assessment the next time I teach this unit, so that I can effectively model how to cite evidence from interviews when writing.

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While this unit is far from perfect and I still tend to over-plan what students can realistically accomplish in a day, my ability to develop unit plans has significantly improved and evolved from when I first began teaching and planned one week at a time. While the realization of this unit took a couple more weeks than I had intended, the sequence of instruction was   purposeful and focused on meeting rigorous learning goals. As I continue to grow and refine my ability to purposefully plan instruction, I will modify future iterations of this unit based upon my reflections and based on students' data and observable trends. Doing so will allow me to engage in a responsive pedagogy that meets the needs of my diverse learners.

Identity Unit Reflection:

"Proper planning and preparation prevents poor performance."

~Stephen Keague

As evidenced in this unit's daily outline above, I strive to create learning experiences that are not only tied to the standards, but are also relevant to my learners and their cultural backgrounds. Throughout this unit, students are able to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in multiple ways, some of which are showcased in the slideshow below.

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The slideshow encompasses the following learning activities and experiences, which are described in more detail within the slideshow: 

  • Perception activity

  • "Self-Concept" analysis sample

  • "The Rose That Grew from Concrete" graphic organizer sample

  • "A Dragon's Lament" text-marking and annotation sample

  • Tone words ort

  • 6 word memoir project

  • Freak the Mighty hook activity samples

  • Bullying role-playing activity sample

  • ACE strategy & citing text evidence samples

  • Supplemental citing text evidence strategy: PEEL example

  • "Names and Identity" passage set annotations sample

  • Characterization group activity samples

  • Thumbprint poem samples

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Together, these samples demonstrate the various ways in which this unit has come alive in my classroom and has delivered appropriate, high-interest, relevant learning experiences to meet my students' unique learning needs.

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