Teaching with a unit plan makes your weekly lesson planning a snap. It also helps you organize and plan your year.
Here are some quick steps to unit planning that will really work!
If you’ve already created a year long plan, you’ll use that to pick the unit you want to create.
If your yearlong plan is already out the window, don’t fret. You can still create meaningful units that you can plug into youryearlong plan later.
Start your Unit Planning with an Essential Question
Before you even start your unit plan, you probably already have an idea of what it will be about.
You may want to (or be required to) begin with an essential question for your unit. This is an open-ended question that will help you frame your unit and help develop a theme for it.
So, let’s say you want your students to participate in book clubs. You decide that you want your essential question to be:
How does conflict and challenge lead to change in a character?
Once you choose your essential question, you can probably begin to “see” your unit take shape. Your students will be looking at the characters of their books and how they respond to conflict, what that conflict looks like, what the characters challenges are, and how they will change the protagonist.
The essential question will also help you choose the books for your book club. You’ll want books with a strong protagonist who struggles with conflict. (Books like Holes, Flush, and Red Kayak spring immediate to mind for me!)
When you start with what you want students to be able to do, you have your summative assessment. This is what your students are going to create to show you that they’ve mastered the concepts of the unit.
Continuing with the example of the book clubs, you may want to your students to:
write a character analysis that addresses the essential question
present a book talk summary, book trailer, or commercial (group activity)
create a plot diagram of the novel (group activity)
You, of course, will need to determine if your students can complete all of those items through the unit and within the time frame you’ve set.
Next stop – standards.
Identify the Standards for your Unit Plan
First, to clarify:
Standards come from your state or district – they are for your unit.
Objectives are what you write for your individual lesson plans. What will the student be able to do at the end of the lesson?
Start your unit planning with your standards. You can easily convert them into an objective. For example:
CCSS RL 6.1 states: “Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.”
Your objective might be: Student will be able to cite explicit evidence from the text to respond to questions.
Your objective probably won’t cover all of the elements of the standard. Just look at CCSS RL 6.1 again. The objective above doesn’t address inferences. You will probably quickly notice that you’ll need more than one lesson to address a single standard.
And, in the case of our book group example, you’ll want your students to write acharacter analysis where they cover the two big concepts of RL6.1. They’ll need to show and infer why the character acts the way he or she does. So you’ll put RL 6.1 in your unit.
Scan through the rest of your reading objectives. For the CCSS, you’ll see that RL 6.3 states “Describe how…characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.” (That sounds a whole lot like your essential question! Yay!) That standard will be addressed with your character analysis as well, so pop that standard into your unit.
Continue matching the outcomes (character analysis, book talk, plot diagram) with your standards.
When you finish, you’ll have a list of standards for your unit.
At this point, you’ll want to determine which standards support the goal of your unit. You may need to weed a few out.
Break Up Your Assessments
I find it very helpful to list formative and summative assessments in a unit plan. This provides me with an “at a glance” list of how I’ll be assessing student progress. Additionally, I’m able to see where my grades are coming from.
You may have the following formative assessments for your book clubs:
I think formative assessments are really helpful in keeping students on task and in helping me understand where students are, if they are keeping up with the readings or falling behind.
Break Down Activities
Next stop, start breaking your unit down into activities. This is where the formative assessment list will help.
Your list for your book club might look like this:
introduce fiction and essential question (quick write response)
who are the characters lesson
club meeting 1 – task: cast of characters
club meeting 2 – task: set up plot diagram
club meeting 3 – task: setting
club meeting 4 – task: add points to plot diagram
club meeting 5 – task: problems encountered
club meeting 6 – task: how is the protagonist responding to problems?
club meeting 7 – task: add points to plot diagram
club meeting 8 – task: protagonist growth chart
group book talks
character analysis essay
Use Sticky Notes
Post it notes or sticky notes are key here.
Try this:
Start with the final product. What do you want the students to do? Write an essay, create a book report, complete research?
Use sticky notes to write out all the steps of a project — from brainstorming to revising.
Put your sticky notes on a wall, your whiteboard, or desk. Somewhere you can step back and see the big picture.
Look at your notes — is something missing? Do you need to add a work day? Do you have mentor texts and examples?
Rearrange and add to your notes.
The beauty of this is you can move them around and add lessons or reteaching options when needed.
You can probably see here that the sticky notes can be your daily plan or mini lesson. As you are looking at all the lessons, you can also see how they can be plugged into your weekly lesson plans.
Once you have this overview of your unit, you’re ready for the next step.
Take a Step Back
Look at your list of activities and determine how long your want your unit to last. Sometime we get overambitious about what we think our students can do!
Adjust the activities and assessments to meet your time frame, your student needs, and the speed at which your students can work!
For our book club example, you may decide that you don’t need all those formative assessments. You may just want students to provide you with an exit slip or a reading summary each day their group meets.
Additionally, as you plug your activities into your lesson plans, be sure to allow “overlap” time for lessons that run longer, need to be retaught, or days that the unexpected happens (Is that a fire drill? squirrel? snow day?).
A word of caution: Be sure your unit doesn’t last too long — or that you get bogged down and it drags on and on.
This is deadly!
Keep the pacing tight enough for students to feel successful — and not bored. This may mean dropping elements out of the unit if you need more time for reteaching.
Moving Forward
You can probably already see how you’ll use the unit to create your weekly lesson plans.
As you begin to do so and teach the unit, make sure that you make notations on your unit plan. What worked? What did the students have questions about? What activities took longer than others? That way, you’ll be able to revise the unit plan for next year, or be able to teach from it more effectively.
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I have been researching how to do unit plans for several years. This post is very clear, and informative.
Unit plans change up the curriculum and allow for more hands on work. Great topic!
I have been researching how to do unit plans for several years. This post is very clear, and informative.
Unit plans change up the curriculum and allow for more hands on work. Great topic!
Thank you Michelle!