Designing High Quality Units: Where to Start

We all struggle sometimes to design high quality units and we find it a very complicated process. Let me tell you something, I can give you an excellent unit designed by an excellent educator and once you implement it in your classroom it will not be successful for many reasons. Let’s explore them together:  

1-      You can’t copy and paste a unit: you need to do it collaboratively with your colleagues and coordinator, the unit needs to be authentic, engaging, relevant and challenging for your students.

2-      It’s a learning process: the more you try, make mistakes, learn from your mistakes, the more you improve in the design process and the implementation phase.  You will notice how your understanding of the process; the implementation and the reflection will change with time.

3-      Know your curriculum: you need to really unpack your learning outcomes, objectives, standards, scope and sequence before you start.  A unit is not only about fun activities.

4- Collaborate with your students: invite them to collaborative planning, and if not possible, in the classroom listen to them, to their questions, what do they like, what do they want, their interests, passions and align this with your curriculum. 

5- Engage the whole learning community: check your resources, the physical and human one, organize a field trip, invite guest speakers, make connections to the world, to real life. A unit without a real-life connection that will not lead to an action is a waste of time. The learning process needs to be visible, and the final product as simple as it can be is shared. Final product can be a poster, flyer, blog article, morning assembly, small event, and awareness campaign.

6- It’s not a recipe: we as educators or humans, we want a secure environment, a list of steps to follow, and these days in education we need innovation, we need to take some risks, we need to think outside the box, we need to be flexible and adaptable.  Some teachers might start the unit with writing the central idea, others they might start by looking at the learning outcomes or they might start the design process by writing the essential questions. Find a starting point that is meaningful for you and your team. Yes, a unit includes non-negotiable elements but It’s not also about the template and the format, it’s about our understanding and the implementation. You can’t teach a unit that you don’t understand.

7- Don’t put a lot of restrictions: all my units are 6 weeks; 2 specialists need to integrate in each unit. A unit plan is just a draft, it will be edited on a weekly basis if you are really taking care of the students’ needs. A unit designed collaboratively between 4 teachers of grade 4 for example can take different directions in the 4 sections based on your students’ questions.

8-      Enjoy it: we are living in a stressful world, and we don’t want our job to be stressful as well. Come to your collaborative planning meeting prepared, look for ideas on the internet, read and connect with other educators, explore new ideas… and have fun.

Reflective Questions:

What are the challenges that you are facing when you design a unit? 

Which of these 8 points will you focus on during your next collaborative planning meeting? 

Do a book study using one of the following recommendations:

1- Lynn Erickson, Lois Lanning, Rachel French: Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom
2- Lois Lanning: Designing a Concept-Based Curriculum for English Language Arts
3- Tania Lattanzio and Andrea Muller: Taking the complexity out of concepts 
4- Jennifer Wathall: Concept-Based Mathematics: Teaching for Deep Understanding in Secondary Schools