Unit Planning

UNIT PLANNING OVERVIEW
Unit planning is important because it allows me to formulate key components of unit mastery. My unit plan consists of a unit overview, exemplar summative assessment, and unit calendar. Since my units are backwards planned, I create the unit summative assessment after the unit overview, but before pacing daily objectives on the unit calendar. Backwards planning ensures that my daily lessons are aligned to unit tests that assess for the big ideas delineated in the unit overview. ​

First, I  lay out all the competencies required for student mastery in a unit plan overview. My unit overview consists of a unit description, essential questions, enduring understandings, Common Core State Standards, content knowledge, vocabulary, objectives, formative assessments, and summative assessments. Classical knowledge, cultural competence, and critical consciousness are all major themes in my unit plan. I emphasize culturally responsive teaching in my unit plan by re-shaping traditional curriculum to incorporate more active teaching methods. Classical, academic knowledge is the foundation for student learning. However, in order for my students to become agents of change, cultural competence and critical consciousness must be intentionally and explicitly incorporated in my unit plan.

Second, I create a summative assessment exemplar. All questions on the summative assessment are aligned to objectives listed in the unit overview. My summative assessments typically consist of multiple choice and short answer questions. While short answer questions provide more insight into the level of student understanding, the ACT math section is all multiple choice, so my students need familiarity with multiple choice questions. I create an exemplar of summative assessment short answer questions in order to visualize what mastery looks like. By creating and engaging in the short answer problems on my summative assessment, I can set expectations for student work. In addition, I create a rubric for each short answer so that grading is fair and consistent. 

Third, I pace objectives, content knowledge, and vocabulary listed on the unit overview through a unit calendar. I have altered the traditional template of a unit calendar to add a column for reflection on culturally relevant teaching. The reflection column is essential to my unit calendar because it holds me accountable to incorporating cultural competence and critical consciousness on a weekly basis.

Finally, after completing a unit, I engage in a unit reflection with my department head and co-teachers. The unit reflection dives into the assessment data and looks for trends in student mastery by objective. In addition, I use the unit reflection to assess which objectives I need to re-teach, when and how I will re-teach them. I share my unit reflection with my department head and co-teachers, so we can collaborate on how to help specific students, and how to re-teach objectives that were not mastered, using new methods.

Please scroll down or click on the table of contents below to learn more about my unit overview, summative assessment exemplar, calendar, and reflection.

​TABLE OF CONTENTS
Unit Overview
Unit Summative Assessment Exemplar
Unit Calendar
Targeted Re-teach and Unit Reflection

Unit Overview
The unit overview begins with a description stating the end goal of the unit, which is for students to be equipped in conducting their own statistical experiments and critiquing the statistical data of others. The project-based unit description supports student-centered instruction and teacher facilitation. Following the unit description, essential questions and enduring understandings promote not only academic excellence, but also self-efficacy and ownership. For example, students will experience that conducting one's own statistical research is an effective means of quantifying social injustices and one can use the data to support action. The non-traditional framing of the unit increases student engagement because the material is more relevant to them.

The middle section of the unit overview aligns Standards with content knowledge, vocabulary, and skills. The Common Core State Standards covered in the unit are listed, and I include a link to the Common Core website, so that other connected Standards can be easily referenced. Next, I list the content knowledge and vocabulary necessary to master the Standards. For example, in order to master Standard S.CP.9, which is to "use permutations and combinations to compute probabilities of compound events and solve problems", students will need to know and define permutations and combinations. From the Standards and content knowledge and vocabulary, I create daily objectives. To master Standard S.CP.9, students will need to "use the fundamental counting principle to determine the number of permutations" and "determine the number of combinations and differentiate when to use permutation versus combination".

The unit overview concludes with details on formative and summative assessments, because I want my lesson plans to be aligned to assessments. My formative assessments consist of multiple methods such as a do now, homework, exit ticket, and mid-unit projects. However, for the Probability and Statistics Unit, I also included a weekly news article analysis because I want my students to grow in critical consciousness by critiquing how others have gathered statistical data and determining its effectiveness. My summative assessment is a unit test that contains both multiple choice and short answer questions. The multiple choice questions prepare my students for the math section of the ACT exam, as it is all multiple choice. The short answer questions are scaffolded to help me determine any gaps or misconceptions in student knowledge.

Below please find my unit overview on Statistics and Probability. 

Unit Summative Assessment Exemplar
After completing the unit overview, I create and take the unit summative assessment. It is important for me to be thoroughly aware of all content on my assessment, so that I can prepare my students for mastery. In addition, I can check the assessment for errors and skills that may need to be spiraled into lessons. I write exemplar responses for each short answer question. Short answer questions assess for mastery using multiple methods, as students are required to explain, match, classify, calculate, critique, draw diagrams, graphs, use technology, etc. 

In the image below on the left, the short answer requires writing full sentence explanations, solving equations, and drawing graphs. By creating an exemplar, I noted how I wanted students to explain the shape of a parabola, show line-by-line steps in finding the vertex, and label key components of the graph. When possible, I create an alternative exemplar for students receiving special education services to incorporate multiple methods of assessment. For the problem illustrated below, general education students are expected to solve it without a calculator. My special education students are held to the same rigorous assessment standards; however, they are allowed to use graphing calculators to aid their computations. To earn full credit, they must write down their calculator steps, as done in my exemplar.

In the image below on the right, the rubric shows how to grade student responses. I follow Pearson's suggested grading rubric for short answer questions. The rubric emphasizes college and career readiness skills that can be applied to all other assessments such as a clear explanation, accurate answer, and detailed diagraming.  By referencing a rubric, I can visualize the breakdown of student knowledge and differentiate future instruction.
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In this exemplar, I demonstrate expectations for the depth and breadth of student thinking, as well as how I expect their work to be organized. General education students must show mastery of manipulating a quadratic equation so that they can graph a quadratic function by hand. Special education students can opt to use a graphing calculator, but still need to show mastery of the properties of a quadratic function.
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This rubric allows me to grade consistently and with fairness. Students receive full, partial or no credit depending on how they meet the requirements of the rubric. For this question, I am looking to see how students relate the quadratic function to their graphed model.

Unit Calendar
With the unit overview and exemplar summative assessment created, I can pace the objectives on a daily unit calendar. My school operates on 76-minute block scheduling, so I teach one to two objectives each day. As culturally responsive teaching is core to my classroom philosophy, I reflect on its incorporation in each week of my unit calendar. For example, in the first week of the Probability and Statistics unit calendar shown below, cultural competence is incorporated into the teaching of multiple events and conditional probability.

To be culturally competent with conditional probability, students will watch a clip from the movie 21 about the Monty Carlo game show problem and then solve and justify it using a tree diagram. To demonstrate critical consciousness with conditional probability, students will read an article about the pitfalls of game shows and lotteries and reflect and calculate why the probability of earning money through intentional savings is higher than the probability of earning money through game shows and lotteries. I build of prior learner knowledge and interest in game shows and earning money to create a lesson that is engaging, relevant, and rigorous.

Targeted Re-teach and Unit Reflection
After the conclusion of a unit, I reflect on student mastery and re-teaching opportunities with my department head and co-teachers. Below is the reflection form I completed for our unit on polynomial functions and equations. The average student was approaching mastery on polynomials, which made the reflection particularly important.

First, I present the number of students who took the summative assessment and the average score. Next, I divide the standards into mastered, approaching mastery, and not mastered. Then, I reflect on which each standard fell within its mastery category. For the polynomials unit reflection, I noted that students mastered objectives that used graphing calculators because they enjoyed technology-infused learning. I found that students were still approaching mastery on factoring polynomials. I had expected students to master factoring in Algebra I; however, I found that many students had no practice with factoring before taking my class. Students did not master polynomial long division, and I reflected that I would need to do a complete re-teach.

After analyzing mastery by objective, I analyze mastery by student. I reflect on why certain students mastered this unit, while others did not. I reflect on each students' classroom behavior and study habits. In addition, I intentionally examine my relationships with students across assessment scores to see if there may be any bias in my instructional delivery. For the polynomials unit reflection, I noted that a majority of the lowest performing students are students receiving special services. I flagged this with my co-teacher, and we decided that she would create more scaffolding on future summative assessments and pull out students during assessment review days.

Finally, I create next steps for re-teaching and topics to bring up with my department head. I spiral objectives partially and not mastered into future lessons. For the polynomials unit reflection, because the following unit was another related function family, I decided to spiral in all objectives not fully mastered into future Do Nows. In addition, I created a list of students who did not master the assessment and communicated with their parents about additional office hours I was holding for assessment corrections.