Unit Plan Format

Page 1

State University

Unit Plan Format

Course Objective:

Develop a unit plan for a motor skill covering the following areas:

1. Introduction

2. Needs assessment

3. Course outline and block plan

4. Motor skill task analysis

5. Arrangement of Resources

6. Behavior management strategies

7. Monitoring system

8. Evaluation procedures

9. References and resources

Detailed Guidelines:

1.Introduction

Provide in this section the following information:

  1. List the Physical Education Standards that this unit will address
  2. The name of the school
  3. What type of equipment will be available and how much of each do you have?
  4. Where will you teach? What type of facilities will you be using? Draw a picture of the facility and any features that will be useful for your unit (baskets, goals, dance floor with mirrors, etc.)
  5. A list of any responsibilities you have other than teaching; For example, locker room supervision, hall duty, etc.
  6. The times at which your class begins (or how long each class will last) and ends and the number of students in your class
  7. Policy pertaining to attendance, dressing, non participation, etc.

2.Needs Assessment

List the factors you took into account in determining students' entry level abilities in the activity you are to teach. There are several possible sources of information:

  • The teacher
  • The students
  • The physical education records
  • The curriculum
  • Any other???

Do the following items and then explain how these will impact your unit (if they will not be a factor as you develop this plan, also state that and your reasoning behind that decision

  1. Identify the skills and knowledge that your students already have prior to beginning this unit.
  2. Identify any special considerations (socioeconomic factors, ethnic origins, gender) that might affect unit planning
  3. Create a description of the developmental characteristics for students the age which you will be teaching. Cover physical, socio-emotional, and mental factors in your description. Understanding that there is no such thing as “normal” and that there no doubt will be a wide variation in skills, size, strength, etc., your description should reflect a typical or average student that age. Note: Part c is worth many more points than the part of this section. Do some research and give it adequate attention.

3.Course Outline

Prepare an outline of the material you expect to cover when teaching the unit. This section should be in a form which, when presented to the cooperating teachers for approval, gives them enough information to accurately foresee the type and range of activities you plan to teach over the course of your unit. The following points should be covered (but only in outline form)

a.What will you tell students about the origins of the activity? Its development? Its rules and regulations? This should be 1-2 pages long. It will actually be a handout that you could give students. You may use the one generated for your resource unit.

  1. Are there any special strategies involved in team play which will be taught?
  1. What are the skills (based on the needs inventory) you will be teaching?
  1. What type of tests will you provide at the end of the unit to assess students' skill performance and knowledge?

Note: Details of these tests should be included in your evaluation procedures. An outline here will suffice.

e.Complete a block plan for your unit. This plan should be a day by day outline of the progress you expect to make toward your terminal objective. Skills to be taught each day must be shown; other details can be outlined. The purpose of this section is to provide an overview of your unit. A one-page calendar would be sufficient.

4. Motor Skill Task Analysis

  1. Write an instructional goal which covers the scope of this unit in terms of what the student will be able to do when the lessons are completed.
  1. Complete a task analysis of the instructional goal. You will create a hierarchy which indicates the order that skills will be taught. Remember that each sub-skill box must contain a term for which you can write an objective (8 12 subskills should be adequate).
  1. Once you have diagrammed the task analysis, then for each subskill write a behavioral objective. For example: If you are teaching a track and field unit, then one of the subskills would cover the sprint start.

Situation:Given a set of starting blocks, set an appropriate distance from the starting line.

Task:Performing a sprint start

Criteria:Passing below a string stretched across the track 10 feet from the start and at a pre determined height. Hand opposite near foot driving above the level of the head on the initial movement.

  1. For each psychomotor skill, list the critical elements necessary for correct performance in descending order of importance. Star the ones you will use for introducing the skill to students (should only be 3-4)
  1. List a series of extending tasks that will allow students to reach the desired performance objective. You should have at least 10 good tasks in your progression.
  1. Describe in detail several drills which will provide students with an opportunity to practice the skill and eventually achieve the objective. You will need a minimum of 2 drills for each skill taught. These should be unique to the skill and not duplicates of ones from other skills. Drills do not generally include a way to keep score. They are more complex than an extension task, but less involved than a game.
  1. Describe a modified game in detail (I could teach it from the information given) that will allow students to practice the skill in an applied setting. Indicate the purpose of the game (what aspect of the skill it is to develop). The game will focus on the skill, but in a more open environment than the drill. The game should be described in detail with the method of scoring included. Remember, to get students to focus on the skill, points should be awarded for correct performance of the skill being featured. The game should be unique to this skill and not a duplicate of ones used for other skills.
  1. Create modified games which allow students to practice the skill in combination with other skills. These should be very game-like and simulate a regulation game situation. Games will probably involve competition in small-sided situations. Be sure to identify the purpose of the game (i.e. the aspect of skill development that you are trying to work on when you have students play the game).

Note: If you are doing a gymnastics unit, you will do the following instead of f, g, and h as written above.

F1. Describe how to spot the skill (where the spotter stands, the body parts of the performer that will be supported, etc.

G1. Explain how this stunt could be done in a routine (e.g. what moves would be appropriate before and after the stunt? What skills could be done in combination?, etc.)

H1. Instead of a modified game, explain how students could put this together in a routine. Consider developing a compulsory routine which contains several of your easier skills and then allow students to create their own routines. You must give guidelines for creating a routine (e.g. show change of level, use the entire beam/floor area, etc.) This will become your culminating game/assessment for the unit.

You have two ways to approach e.

  • Give a teaching progression that you would use for the stunt. If you do this, you are actually creating gymnastics extensions.
  • Arrange movement tasks by classification (e.g. backward rolls) and then list stunts that have increasing difficulty as extending tasks (back rocker, back shoulder roll, back roll, back extension roll, etc.) You will include the critical elements for these tasks with the skill
  1. Create a way to evaluate student skill for this skill. These are usually more skill tests that evaluate the skill in a closed environment. If you have written a complete objective, you probably have already written the test. In this section describe the assessment in detail and explain how you will administer it. You must show that the procedures you have chosen are functional, valid, and reliable measures of student performance. An example of a dysfunctional procedure for assessing the ability of students to perform a basketball chest pass over a certain distance with a certain level of accuracy and speed would be to require, say 20 trials per student. If this was done for a class of 30, there would be at least 600 trials before the evaluation of the chest pass was complete. There are probably more functional tests which could be constructed to evaluate this skill.
  1. In this section indicate your objectives for the cognitive domain and how you intend to evaluate them. If you choose to evaluate with a written test, you will actually write this and provide answers for the questions you wrote.
  1. The final section should contain your objectives for the affective domain and how you intend to evaluate them. There are a variety of ways to do this. If you are using a checklist, produce a copy of the documentation. If using journals, provide some of the prompts that you will have students respond to. Make sure that you provide enough detail for the items you will use to evaluate this area so that others could use them.

5. Arrangement of Resources

In this section, you should be concerned only with motor skills. All your remarks should be directed toward the optimal arrangement of human, material, and temporal (time) resources.

Apart from this general principle, there are four related principles of instruction.

(1) Communicating what's to be learned

Consider: the first day

as each new skill is introduced

in setting up drills, modified games, and games

(2) Maximizing opportunities to respond:

Consider: equipment ratio

apparatus ratio

time occupied by:

instruction/demonstration (knowledge)

feedback

activity

waiting

off task behavior

changing activities (transition)

number of trials per student

3 Provision of feedback

Consider: clarity

- frequency

information value

who provides it

knowledge of results or knowledge of performance

artificial or intrinsic?

provide good examples in this section For example: "Well done, Jim! Your arms were straight on that bump pass.")

(4) Motivation:

How will you plan instruction, drills, and modified games so that as students move into activity, they will work hard at completing the tasks you set them?

Identify the motivational tools you will use for this unit. Some of the possibilities include:

  • Feedback on behavior (positive specific)
  • Feedback on skill (positive specific)
  • Ways to measure skill improvement and progress (can be done through assessments
  • Public posting of results or excellent performance
  • Public recognition of results or excellent performance
  • Reinforcement of progress made by students
  • Use a variety of teaching styles (be specific about the ones you will use most often while teaching this unit)
  • Designing interesting and challenging activities that are fun to do as well as educational

6. Behavioral Management Strategies

In this section you are to:

a. Develop strategies for having a well-organized class

  • Routines that will be established with this unit
  • Method for taking attendance
  • Bathroom procedures
  • Provisions for handing out and returning equipment
  • Provisions for equipment when students are using it
  • Opening of class
  • Class closure
  • Late arrivals
  • Good use of space and facility
  1. Create your classroom rules. You should have no more than 5 or 6. Also include any rules specific to this unit.
  1. Include a comprehensive list of appropriate and inappropriate student behaviors. Some of these behaviors will involve individuals, groups or the class as a whole. The behaviors listed in this section should reflect your earlier visits to the schools.
  • After preparing this list, briefly describe how you will attempt to bring about a high level of appropriate behaviors.

  1. Develop a management plan for poor behavior (e.g. what happens after the first offense, second offense, etc.
  1. Safety

Identify any safety considerations for this unit

  • Develop a procedure for addressing these safety concerns
  • Develop a procedure for handling accidents
  • Accident report form (you will need to create one of these)
  • Release of liability form (if necessary)

7. Monitoring System

This system should answer the question: "How will I keep abreast of my students' progress throughout the learning experience?" Since you want your students to move on to new tasks only after reaching criteria on previous ones, the monitoring system should reliably indicate the current skill level of each student. Consequently, if students know when to move on to the next task, and do so only after completing the previous one, your job is simply to monitor (e.g., using a student controlled checklist) their progress toward the terminal objectives.

Note: Since you will be writing criteria for each skill and the drills you use to help students practice it, use the criteria as checks of student progress.

8. Evaluation System

In this section you should outline the procedures you will use to measure student performance against terminal criteria. Have you measured the degree to which students have reached your objectives?

This section should include a copy of your own method for determining student grades for this unit, the basis upon which you will evaluate students. Please include the appropriate details.

Although you have already indicated skill tests that you can use for assessing individual skills, you also should have some type of assessment that requires students to put all these skills together. If you are using sport skills, you probably will create a game-play assessment. This assessment will evaluate not only psychomotor skill, but also cognitive and affective domain dispositions as well. Activities such as dance, rope skipping or gymnastics lend themselves to doing routines or choreographing dances instead of game play. Be sure to indicate what other students in the class are doing when this culminating performance is being assessed.

Make sure your test uses situations which are reliable for each student. Some of the best forms of assessment will link learning and assessment thus turning the evaluation into an instructional experience. A valid test must simulate as closely as possible game or competition conditions. Reliable tests will produce the same results regardless of when they are administered. Be cautious in using assessments involving multiple students as the skill of one student may affect that of another.

You will create a written test for this unit. The minimum length of the test is 10 multiple choice questions, 15 true/false questions, and then 10 points of other questions (suggestion: don’t just have students list the critical elements/teaching cues for the skills—these take a long time to grade). Be sure to include the answers for all questions.

9. References and Resources

Include a list of all the references you consulted (give the author, the title, publisher, and date) and any other resources you plan to use in the unit.

Standard of Presentation

Present your unit plan in the sequence (1 9) outlined above. It must be typed to be graded. Submit one copy to me and keep another for your reference.

Sources:

  1. Siedentop, D & Tannehill, D. (2000). Developing Teaching Skills in Physical Education. Mayfield Publishing Co.
  1. Siedentop, D., Mand, C., & Taggert, A. (1986). Physical Education: Curriculum and Teaching Strategies Grades 5 12. Mayfield Publishing Co.

You will receive up to 3 bonus points for a unit plan that is both grammatically correct and has correct spelling. For each error, 1/2 point will be deducted until the bonus points are exhausted.