Unit Planning   

 

Understanding by Design

• Enduring Understandings

• Essential Questions

• Performance Assessments

  • “Performance assessments have the potential to play a powerful role in accelerating learning. Hattie's research has shown that learners profit from adopting concrete, crystal clear goals and from receiving clear feedback (Hattie, 2009). Teachers can help students work towards those goals and can give that sort of feedback when teachers use performance assessments to clarify goals for themselves and students. The tasks are important, but the learning progressions that result from studying student work and describing the differences between one level of work and another are especially helpful. Although some suggest that it is particularly important for teachers to spend time generating text-dependent questions, we think it is far more important for teachers to study student work, construct and adapt learning progressions that detail the differences between novice and proficient work, use exemplars to clarify next steps for learners, and so forth. It is also crucially important for students to be engaged in this work continually, so they are invested partners in goal-setting and creating action plans in order to develop internal accountability and ensure the acceleration of achievement.”  Teachers College

 

Anchor Texts:  Bands of Proficiency/Genre/Reading/Writing/Content Connections

• Annotation/note taking

• Text Accumulation

 

Curriculum Integration—Science/Social Studies/Reading/Writing

“Skills and strategies should not overwhelm the thinking.”Moskowitz

The text instead becomes the driver indicating which strategic actions will be necessary for readers to construct meaning.   The skills and strategies provide the process through which the readers will journey through the text arriving at a deeper understanding of the enduring understanding, guiding questions, world knowledge and universal truths.   The shift then focuses on the thinking and there is an intentional absence of drumming obtrusive strategies into kids heads by asking them constantly to make an inference, “contextualize” what they are reading, make predictions or “self-to text connection, and jump through other hoops.  Skills are necessary but they are means to an end, not the end goal.  The basic structures and tools provide the reading community K-8 with the framework that supports readers to use strategic thinking throughout the process of making discoveries and figuring things out, first collaboratively and then independently. This shift from strategies being the driver to the text driving the work is one of the most critical to understand in the new work of common core.   Our goal is for students to love reading, read books by the barrel, understand books at a deep level and be able to communicate elegantly. In instructional planning teachers must ask the question what is then new work here….and how do we use existing structures, tools and ways of being in order to best facilitate the learning community through the NEW challenging work.  For example:  if the text complexity is presenting new challenges like multiple problems or complex secondary characters or a stance where the readers knows more about the character than the character himself then we plan with this in mind so that we can intentionally challenge readers to navigate the NEW text complexity through theory development, reading and close reading through collaborative discussion that allows the reading community to figure this out together leading to the reader being able to figure out and navigate this genre or level of text complexity  independently.

 

Instructional/Intellectual Preparation

• What is the focus of this unit?

  •  The teaching team must clearly define what readers will know and be able to do as a result of this 4-6 week series of learning experiences INDEPENDENTLY or with prompting in the lower grades. (performance task) 

  • Is this a unit on a new level of text complexity? 

    • A unit where the things the reader has come to know about story elements and how stories go changes and the reader needs time and experience in order to learn, practice and figure that out.

  • Is this a unit where we are we focused on a new genre?

    • A unit where there are specifics to that genre that the reader needs to know in order to support making meaning and will usually require a study of multiple levels in this genre often below what we might think is an independent level so the reader can navigate the new terrain of this genre.

  • Is this a unit that also is developing world knowledge?

    • Content specific vocabulary, historical context or scientific principles.

• Identify the enduring understandings

• Identify the common core standards that will be worked toward through this unit.

• Identify the text complexity definition of the level of text you will read.

• Read the Text and annotate marking the pages where the common core standards come to life.

• Reread the text and annotate for stopping points.

  • choose your stopping points

  • mark up your text

  • plan to guide readers through the process of constructing theories across the text by going through the process yourself

  • plan to support ongoing note-taking to accumulate text

  • Note-taking Tools Menu

    • On the wall—chart it

    • notebooks

    • sticky notes

    • graphic organizer specific to the unit

    • Keys to Literacy Resources

• Question Menu ---stop and question

  • Reread---silence ask:  What is really happening here?

  • Stop—Text Dependent Question: What is the character feeling? 

  • Stop—REREAD:  What is the author telling us, how is this moment helping us to better understand the character.

Consistent School-Wide structures, resources and tools for learning

• Defined in the next section