Unit Planning
My units align closely with the Eureka Math modules described on the long-term planning page. However, I still take the time to create detailed unit plans that identify goals for student understanding, anticipated misconceptions, key knowledge and skills, and even assessment strategies. The document below is my unit plan for the eighth grade’s second unit of the year, which focuses on basic rigid motions and congruence but also includes some important information about the properties of triangles that will be essential in subsequent geometry and trigonometry courses.
Eighth grade unit plan for The Concept of Congruence. This is the first geometry unit of the year for my eighth graders. I begin planning for every unit that I teach by identifying the learning standards that I plan to address and then analyzing these standards in terms of the enduring knowledge, skills, and understandings that they encompass. This helps me and my students to stay focused on the big-picture goals of a unit even as we delve into more granular mathematical material. I begin thinking about the questions that I may ask students and the misconceptions that they may have while unit-planning, but I address these aspects of planning in much greater detail during the lesson-planning phase of the process.
My unit plans begin by expressly identifying each content and practice standard that will be addressed. I find that this exercise is particularly important for the standards of mathematical practice because it helps to clarify what skills students are building as they learn about the content. This unit, for instance, involves students learning to use compasses, protractors, and rulers in new and exciting ways. Knowledge and skills to be learned are further described in the “Key Knowledge” and “Key Skills” sections of the document.
The “Enduring Understandings” and “Essential Questions” sections of the unit plan are also helpful guidelines for me as an educator. Thinking about what students need to understand at the end of the unit helps me ensure that I cover all of the necessary material, and framing unit themes as questions prepares me to push student thinking with targeted queries in class. Indeed, part of my lesson-planning approach involves mapping out specific questions that I will ask during a class period, and the “Essential Questions” box is a great starting point for these. Similarly, anticipating student misconceptions is an integral component of lesson-planning for me, and this section of the unit plan helps me to clarify predictions about what students will find challenging.
My unit plans also have space to describe the formative and summative assessments that students will experience throughout the unit. When I started teaching, these boxes often just mentioned exit tickets, quizzes, and tests. However, I quickly began challenging myself to include more details about how I plan to score assessments and different types of assessment activities. This unit is illustrative of my progress in this sense. My plan features information about how exit tickets may be graded and how these grades will be communicated to and discussed with students. Furthermore, one of the summative assessments will actually be a hands-on performance task (described in greater detail and with student work samples on the Lesson Planning page of this section).
Creating comprehensive unit plans is even more important for me this year than it was last year; because my school has switched to block scheduling, I need to cover two Eureka lessons during most class periods to stay on pace with my instructional goals. Thus, when I develop a unit plan, one important task is to decide which content should be covered during each lesson. The “Daily Objectives/Learning Goals” calendar at the end of each plan is an opportunity for me to map out this information explicitly.
Heat Maps of Student Growth, Created with Excel
Calendar of daily objectives and lesson goals. This information is the basis for my monthly instructional pacing calendars. I always write objective and goals in terms of what students will be able to do at the end of a lesson, which keeps me focused on teaching my students practical skills and effectively planning backwards from standards-aligned assessment tasks.
Of course, the daily objectives and lesson goals that I identify at the beginning of a unit are subject to change as I teach new lessons and measure students' learning. As I grade each new set of exit tickets, I regroup students based on their demonstrated mastery and identify opportunities in subsequent lessons for both extension and remediation activities. My typical lesson involves at least one small-group reteaching of prioritized content that was introduced in an earlier lesson (and, thus, is not completely aligned to the daily objectives and goals listed in my unit calendar). I track student exit ticket scores using heat-mapped spreadsheets that quickly identify scholars who may need additional support to master key concepts. I also record their scores on formative and summative reassessments of the same knowledge and skills in order to measure their growth.
Excerpt from a data-tracking spreadsheet. The middle column shows students' scores on the initial exit ticket aligned to Common Core State Standard 6.NS.A.1. I used small-group time during the next lesson to reinforce key concepts and practice division by fractions with the scholars who did not achieve mastery on this exit ticket and then reassessed their abilities with another short, formative assessment. The reassessed scholars improved by 42%, but the spreadsheet still highlights six who have yet to achieve their 80% mastery goal on this standard. These scholars will benefit from additional support and scaffolding in subsequent lessons.