Making Lessons Connect and Build to Rigor

Mini-Unit Planning: Making Lessons Connect and Build to Rigor

Imagine you walk into a classroom–Ms. Pieces’ classroom–and you ask a student, “What have you been learning this week?” The student responds: “On Monday did conflict, on Tuesday we did symbolism, and on Wednesday we did theme…”

Now imagine you walk into another classroom–Ms. Puzzle’s classroom–and you ask a student the same question, “What have you been learning this week?” This student responds, “This week we have been trying to understand why this novel is titled Lord of the Flies. In order to figure that out, we learned about conflicts and how they can sometimes be expressed through symbols that show the themes.”

(1) Would your students be more likely to respond like Ms. Pieces’ or Ms. Puzzle?

(2) Who would you rather be like, Ms. Pieces or Ms. Puzzle and why?

Bottom Line: If you have puzzle pieces but you never connect them, you will not see the picture those pieces are a part of. Unconnected puzzle pieces are meaningless. à If students are given a box of individual standards but don’t know how they work together, they will not see the big picture and meaning of a text.

Introduction to Purpose of CLC

Many of us struggle with how to make our lessons connect from day to day. This is particularly true because at Institute we are so focused on learning to manage and plan single days that we don’t practice unit level planning. We teach one new objective a day, usually using very short, isolated passages.

Now that we understand better how to teach a single day, it is essential to think about how days connect to one another because teaching lessons in isolation does not allow for enough rigor and it can also confuse students.

The goal of this CLC will be to improve our ability to create a series of lessons that connect from day to day and build toward rigor. In other words, we are trying to create mini-units to become more like Ms. Puzzle.

Please Note: Our CLC will be using a short story to practice the skill of creating a mini-unit so that we have a common, manageable text to work on in a concrete way. These skills are transferable to a novel-length text, and I will provide an example at the end of the CLC. To briefly explain, in a short story you will likely have only one mini-unit to cover the whole text; for a novel, you will break the novel into chunks and create a mini-unit for each chunk. In other words, a complete unit for a book may consist of 3-4 mini-units.

What is a “mini-unit”?

In a high school English classroom, we are trying to get kids to accomplish three things when reading a text:

(1) learn new knowledge and skills (the discrete standards – like at Institute)

(2) comprehend the text at the literal level

(3) interpret texts at high levels that require a synthesis of different skills/standards & really get at the text’s overall purpose

Too often, we focus on teaching a discrete standard (aspect 1 above) at the expense of the other two aspects of literary learning. This is because we often think about days in isolation and it is impossible to do all three of these things in-depth on a single day.

In fact, I often have to devote entire days to comprehension before my students are able to learn new skills and then interpret the text at high levels. This is what it takes to get to high levels of thinking, because I know if I jump right into an open-ended interpretive question, students might get lost, discouraged, and checked out. They have to be carefully guided through levels of understanding of a text to reach the highest level and this process takes several days – not a single 5-step lesson.

Planning a chunk of days is about balancing these three components of good literary thinking and doing each thing at the most appropriate point in a text. (It usually does not make sense to try to interpret a text’s theme at the end of chapter one, for example.)

In order to make a chunk of days flow, lessons should be building up to students being able to answer a tough Focus Question, such as the question “Why is The Lord of the Flies the title of this book?” in Ms. Puzzle’s classroom. When you teach new skills/objectives, you should be teaching them in order to prepare students for the Focus Question rather than teaching the objectives “for their own sake,” which often leads to lessons that are stuck at the identify and apply levels of Bloom’s and can leave students (and you!) feeling like each day is not related to what comes next.

Bottom line: At the end of a chunk of days, students should be able to demonstrate their mastery by answering the Focus Question in a way that synthesizes their (1) comprehension of the text (2) new skills/standards/devices you taught (3) previous skills/standards.

Don’t look at the PIECES… use the pieces to see the BIG PICTURE!

That’s great in theory… so what does an excellent mini-unit look like?

Look at the handout for Ms. Pieces’ Great Gatsby Mini-Unit 1. This is an example of a low-rigor unit where the days do not connect and scaffold.

Compare it to the handout on Ms. Puzzle’s Great Gatsby Mini-Unit 1. This unit is an example of a high-rigor unit where the days do connect and scaffold. (Below: Gatsby Example and Non-Example)

Key Difference between Ms. Pieces and Ms. Puzzle’s Units:

§ Ms. Pieces lists the standards that apply to the unit, but unlike Ms. Puzzle, she does not weave them into a narrative that shows how they relate to the meaning of the text and relate to one another. A unit should reflect the text for which it is written.

§ Ms. Puzzle’s class defines the end goal as a high level Focus Question that requires students to use the skills they have been learning all together. Ms. Pieces’ classroom doesn’t provide that opportunity for students to think about how the story looks as a whole when you use a mix of skills.

§ Ms. Puzzle’s class thinks of literary analysis as a cycle. In every unit, with every text, Ms. Puzzle will practice comprehension skills. Ms. Pieces might think of comprehension skills as easy objectives to be taught at the start of the term and checked off the list, instead of realizing that we use them each time we read a new text.

Steps to Mini-Unit Planning

Good units have a clear end goal, a list of the skills and knowledge that are part of that goal, and a plan for reaching the end goal. In a mini-unit, the end goal is students being able to answer the Focus Question thoroughly in a way that demonstrates mastery of the skills you taught. The skills and knowledge are the skills/standards that fit with the question and text. Your plan is the calendar.

The steps for planning a mini-unit are similar to the steps that we discussed for planning a lesson during our fall CLC, with the addition of calendaring. Calendaring is not simply dropping standards onto a calendar. It is the process of scaffolding and ordering the lessons in a mini-unit. It is really, really hard!

1. Make sense of the text (read meta-cognitively to understand the text’s meaning, being consciousness of the instinctual strategies you are using to understand that you may need to make very explicit for students)

2. Create a Focus Question (an interpretive, high level question the answer to which encompasses the essential meanings of the text.)

3. Determine the literary skills/standards that students must practice/learn to be able to answer the Focus Question

4. Calendar! When and how will you cover:

Level 1 – comprehending (using reading strategies)

Level 2 – new skills/objectives (analyzing devices)

Level 3 – interpretation that uses a synthesis of skills (answering the Focus Question)

Step1 – Make sense of the text

We will not be focusing on steps 1-3 as a group because we did this in October. But we do need to get on a similar page in terms of making sense of this story, so we are going to take 15 minutes to try to unlock this story’s meaning as if we were in a college seminar.

So, what’s the deal with this here story, y’all? (Below: Text of “The Lesson”)

Step 2-3 – Create a Focus Question + Pick Standards

In the interest of time, I am giving you a mini-unit plan where these things are already done for “The Lesson” so that we can focus on calendaring. For help creating a Focus Question and picking standards, see your October 4th CLC packet. (Accessible at: http://en-c-glish.wikispaces.com/CLC+Session+Documents. Look at “CLC Session 2 – How to Plan Practice” and it is the second document.)

(See: Sample Mini-Unit of “The Lesson”)

Please note that although we are jumping over this step for the sake of time, there is NO substitute for carefully and meta-cognitively reading the text before you do your planning. You cannot do good planning without taking the time to do this. That said, it can speed up your interpretation to use Google and Sparknotes to help you come up with what the high level analysis and focus question for the text should be. I usually try to struggle with the text myself for awhile first because I know that the things I notice first and the things I never notice until the internet helps me might be the same for my kids.

Step 4 – Calendaring/Scaffolding

I have given you a mostly blank calendar. Use this template if it helps you. As you can see, I have already filled in the number of days, the portions of the text that will be covered or focused on for each day, and whether the focus of that day is level 1, level 2, or level 3. (Basically, you are spending 1-2 days on each level to complete the lesson cycle.)

Our job is to fill in which standards/objectives we will be addressing and what they will look like for level 1, level 2, and level 3.

Level 1 – Comprehension – How will we get kids to comprehend and engage with this text and where will they likely get stuck?

A – How can we prepare them to sympathize with the main character, the conflicts or the themes by making them reflect on something from their own life experiences?

(anticipation questions related to the theme/main conflict/characters)

B – Does comprehending this text require outside information about the cultural context? If so, what?

(context about the values and practices of other cultures, things that have become antiquated – whether vocabulary or technology or societal norms)

C – Look for “snags” in the text. (See the box below.*)

(I will model paragraphs 1-2. We will do another few together.)

D – How will we correct snags/what skills will kids use while reading to self-correct?

(think alouds, annotations, and knowing exactly where to pause for basic comprehension questions)

E – How do we know the extent to which they comprehend so that we feel confident about increasing the rigor?

(have students write a brief plot summary and hand it in.)

Level 2 – New Skills/Objectives – What devices will students need to be aware of?

A – What order do we teach new standards in? (Which are pre-requisites for others or which would we be aware of first ourselves in trying to answer the Focus Question?)

B – After we have introduced tone for students, how will we practice it?

§ What passages that are important to the story include strong tone?

§ What questions that are important to analyzing the story involve tone?

§ How do questions related to tone lead to internal conflict and the Focus Question?

*NOTE: When we “practice tone,” we are NOT asking questions about tone. Rather, we are asking questions ABOUT THE STORY that involve tone. (See: Heather’s Handout)

C – After we have introduced internal conflict for students, how will we practice it?

§ What passages are important to the story & relate to internal conflict?

§ What questions that are important to analyzing the story relate to internal conflict?

§ How do questions show how tone contributes to our understanding of internal conflict?

§ How do questions lead to Focus Question?

Level 3 - Interpretation that uses a synthesis of skills (answering the Focus Question)

You’ve already planned for this step by coming up with the Focus Question. If you’ve calendared well, you should feel comfortable asking your students to write independently for a block of time on this question. Their answers may be very rough, particularly in the beginning, but they should have enough thoughts related to tone and internal conflict to sustain a literary reflection for 20+ minutes/1-2+ pages of writing.

After they write independently, hold a literary discussion. Planning a literary discussion is about establishing the structures for management and accountability as well as investing kids. Often, students enjoy being able to debate classmates, so they might be fairly invested even if rambunctious.

To get even more investment, debate, and creative analysis, end the unit with a question that relates the themes of the story to students’ lives. Have them judge the story’s message based on their own opinions. (This means answering questions like: In this story, Sylvia becomes more self-aware. Do you think Sylvia becoming more self-aware is more of a good thing or a bad thing? In what way is it both? In general, based on your experience and people you know, is it a good thing or a bad thing? In particular, is it good or bad to realize things about yourself you wish weren’t true? What do you think Miss Moore would say?)

APPENDIX

I know that many of you may be thinking, this is great but how do I do it in a book. As mentioned above, teaching a book is just like teaching a number of mini-units back-to-back. Below I have a rough example of this for the Great Gatsby. This example is missing the calendar due to a lack of time on my part, but the calendaring would be similar to what we did today with “The Lesson.”