Dialogue #2: Unit Planning Cont'd - Assessment

How would I build a progression towards a culminating project/assessment?

Invariably, I want two types of physical assignments out of students: annotated, analyzed, and well-understood core texts, and a coherent, complete, well-structured essay (hopefully, with some individual insight or thought, depending on the student).  Rhetorical analysis begins with structured questions that guide students through the process explicitly, then gradually involves new concepts, and finally slowly removes supports.  

Since this post is already a bit huge, please feel free to ask if you'd like me to go into detail about each of the skills I list below.  Ultimately, I think core skills for any course should be able to be broken down to a list of around 10~15 foundational procedures kids need to be able to perform reliably ON THEIR OWN.  Content is all well and good, but practicing academic skills until they're intuitive will allow students to access content on their own, ultimately, and in 9th grade, there is nothing more crucial than close-reading, structured writing, discussion, and note-taking skills.

Dialogue #2: Unit Planning

While reflecting on that lesson, I asked myself a series of questions: How would I develop a unit of study? How do I even begin to think about what lesson to start with? How would I build a progression towards a culminating project/assessment? What would prove to me that my students have learned what they needed to learn? How do I assess whether I’ve done my job? Despite having designed lessons for my program, I still struggle with these questions. Then I began to think about the obesity unit. How did you decide on that unit? How did you introduce it? How do you facilitate discussion so that students are engaged and really thinking? I love the idea of an obesity unit as well as a narcissism unit because I think it’s accessible for students, but I don’t really know how I would even begin to design such units.

Wow - you're tackling quite a lot there.  I'll try to parse that out and handle each question.

How would I develop a unit of study? How do I even begin to think about what lesson to start with?

I think the best advice for planning lessons is the same advice I was always given when writing: “write what you know.”  I tend to plan lessons around concepts, ideas, debates, and issues that I’ve heard or read something about, seem relevant and interesting to students, and have related materials I think students could access.  I read a lot of news articles and listen to radio material regularly, and so things that could potentially work in class come to my attention without having to stumble out of my regular routine.

Start from what interests YOU.  I’m able to lead discussions and explain examples about the topics we’ve handled in class because I’m interested in and passionate about them – I wouldn’t TRY if I weren’t!  Also, my lessons may seem polished and well-planned (or at least well-executed, as I would NEVER identify planning as one of my strengths!), but that mostly comes from having played with the various topics, materials, strategies, and structures I now use in class regularly for a number of years.

I’ll try to address your question about approaching planning for you by walking through my process. 

Dialogue #2: Discussion, Lesson Structure, and Error-Focused Practice

For the evidence selection discussion, I thought that I had an idea of what I wanted the students to learn, but when they began to ask me questions I realized that I wasn’t comfortable with the material at all; I didn’t know how to explain it to them! During your lesson, you took the discussion in directions that I wouldn’t have thought of using explanations that I hadn’t thought about. I liked those explanations over my own but when I tried to implement them the way you did, I simply couldn’t. I felt myself mentally and physically tensing up. I was afraid; I didn’t want to fail the students.

Discussion may be one of the most difficult, but also most productive, skills that I’ve developed as an educator. 

Dialogue #2: Planning, Practice, and Depth of Instruction

Co-planning with you has been a big learning experience – I have a hard time with thinking on the fly in front of the class. I think this is because I have yet to develop those set of skills we always talk about. I like to have some structure to fall back on because I honestly don’t know how to keep a lesson going without it. I also should have been more honest with myself – and with you – about my comfort level with the content.

Co-planning with you has been a HUGE lesson for me, as well, and again I offer my sincere apologies for failing to think through your needs as a student for this week’s lesson.  I’ve come to a place in my practice where I have what sometimes feels like an instinct for my own lessons and pacing; as you’ve seen, I make a lot of adjustments on the fly and freely shift up lesson structure daily, sometimes from period to period and sometimes even in the middle of the lesson.  

I teach STUDENTS more than I teach CONTENT, and that tends to mean I’m very interactive – I do a lot of room comprehension checks, and if things aren’t going well, I have a few different ways in which I’ll modify to meet what the room seems to need.  There are ways in which this approach is very weak – the same lesson very rarely looks the same way twice, and I often have a hard time articulating why.  In many ways, it’s one of the reasons I thought this blog might be useful for BOTH of us – I wanted to be pushed to articulate my rationale for my strategies, and I also wanted you to have a forum where you could really pin me down about how and why I teach the way I do.

Dialogue #2: Accountability and Mastery-Based Grading

These past few weeks have been extremely eye opening, especially after teaching my first lesson. I struggled a lot this week in terms of planning and implementation of lessons. A couple of weeks ago, we talked a lot about teaching students life skills. Mainly, holding students accountable for their actions.

“If you're not teaching them that they need to be aware of their own actions, responsible for them, and trying - they don't have to be succeeding, mind you, but just TRYING - to fix what they're doing wrong, then NOBODY WILL CARE OR HELP THEM. That's the truth” (Low). 

My experience with this age group is that they’re transitioning from child to adolescent; they have yet to realize that their actions have consequences. I have always cut the students some slack because in my mind, they are still learning to be adults, which takes time. I do a lot of handholding and our conversations have made me realize that I’m just enabling them, and that enabling ultimately hinders their development. Because of this, I really wanted to emphasize a strict deadline for assignments while creating lesson plans. I had to set aside my desire to be liked by students and consider what they needed; regardless of whether it was something they wanted. But how do I hold students accountable for basic, life skills such as labeling assignments correctly and turning them in on time without giving them constant failing grades? Should content understanding outweigh the ability to follow directions? Obviously not, but how do you make it count?

It’s fine to be a bit lenient in your first year – it’s hard not to be.  Everyone who commits to the profession, with few exceptions, tends to do so because they’re fond of kids; otherwise, there are few reasons to pursue the career.  I find the mastery-based grading strategy of separating assignments into “practice” and “performance” assignments a useful strategy.  Our school mandates a 70/30 percentage point weight category for practice and performance assignments, and for me, that’s a perfect split for 9^th grade.