Building a Unit Plan

Planning your path protects against getting lost

A Unit Plan should serve as a teaching map that helps you know where your instruction is going. It forces you to be organized to reach the goal. It helps you be selective about what you are going to teach and how you will facilitate student learning. It helps you pace your teaching to achieve the goal and stay on track. It helps you limit distractions that can pull you off task. It provides the map for developing a coherent set of lessons that build on each other to ensure that students are learning.

The Unit Plan should be developed before you begin developing lesson plans. Will you develop lessons that are goals-based, thematic, or project-based? A goals-based approach begins with the central questions, big ideas, or standards-based objectives. A thematic approach integrates standards from multiple subjects to focus on the themes of the unit. A project-based approach focuses on the end product that shows how students have learned to apply the expected knowledge and skills through a performance, presentation, or project such as building a roller coaster.

Building off of the work Unpacking a Standard and Backwards Planning, the next step was to build an objective-oriented unit plan that outlines summative and formative assessments, designs projects and activities with differentiation, for all the lessons within.