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. 

Read and Research:

This is really more a part of the day-to-day for me rather than something specifically work-related.  Surprisingly enough, I’m NOT a huge fan of non-fiction; most of my casual reading is trashy sci-fi and fantasy.  I listen to NPR every day, however, and I do follow the New York Times – most of my material comes from Op-Ed articles.  I also get unit ideas from videos; last year I had an entire unit based on the KONY 2012 campaign, in which we analyzed the 30 minute advertisement to identify the intended audience, the major appeals used, the strength of the evidence, and attempted to asses WHY the campaign was so successful (it appealed to the market-minded, self-involved, fashion-conscious/consumption-oriented youth culture, it sold engagement with the campaign as an “identity”).

How do you facilitate discussion so that students are engaged and really thinking?

Good discussion, critical thinking, and enthusiastic engagement partly just naturally arise from solid unit design.  That, and of course, practicing your classroom skills by running the unit, and tweaking the thing again and again until it starts working.  Given that classroom discussion skills come with time (and I've addressed some of the basic elements of getting a discussion going in previous posts), start by finding a topic you love and you think there's a good chance the kids will be curious about.

Generally speaking, I look for a couple of key elements:

Content:

I try to find things that are beginning to be explored by news, radio, etc.  The more current (if a book’s just been published, or a racy article released, etc.), the easier it is to find a number of different resources for kids to work with.   I’m also always on the lookout for items about culture and society – trends that students may be aware of.  School-oriented articles can be a win if they’re targeted and deal with particular observations, but can be easy to overdo (kids zone out if every article is about college success being based on behavior, most schools failing to prepare students for school, grade-altering scandals, school-reform, standardized testing, etc.).  The trick is to focus on a single hook – an essential question that kids will be genuinely interested in exploring.

The Hook (Generating Interest and QUESTIONS):

This is key to making ANY unit work is just like the finishing touch needed for a rock-solid essay: a good hook.  If you don’t have a high-interest, mysterious and hopefully curiosity-inspiring activity to get kids sucked in, they won’t be hungry enough to chew through articles and heavy-duty analysis in search of answers.  For the obesity unit, I used a map from the CDC website.  Apart from giving a lovely graphic representation of data (a skill they need on the Science portion of many standardized tests!), the map is easily accessible, dramatic, and leads to more questions than answers:  

Why did obesity spread so quickly?  Why did Colorado hold out so long?  Why did obesity spread from the South and Midwest?  If it ISN’T a disease, why does it’s spread look so similar?  I follow the map up with more CDC graphs, these of youth increases in obesity and a breakdown in the increase in youth obesity by ethnic group.  The information personalizes what the map makes frighteningly apparent, and inspires further questions: why are Hispanic boys and African-American girls growing the most?  What factors are involved?  Is it environment?  Genes?  Have their diets changed, and why?

The key to the hook is to make it a mystery – one you resolutely REFUSE to give a concrete answer to.  Get THEM to ask the questions, and you’re halfway there; give them the means to find the answers and help them build the skills to find them, and you’re where you want to be.

Accessibility:

As long as an article or radio program doesn’t involve any really complex arguments or confusing/higher-order ideas, I can probably modify it to make it something kids can work their way through.  I tend to be wary of stuff that might be interesting to me, but is far too subtle or requires too much background knowledge to understand.  Politics, for instance, may be fascinating for adults, but most teens have a limited to nonexistent understanding of the relevant history and issues behind a given topic (Israel, for instance, or the complex situations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, etc.). 

Opinion:

Part and parcel of a course on rhetoric is opinion.  The trick, of course, is to teach the kids that real argument is not a fight or an unfounded assertion, but a thesis grounded in observation, research, and evidence.  One key thing I’m always hunting for, as a result, is a topic that has more than one opinion that has strong backing; if an issue is demonstrably one-sided, then it’s a non-starter.  The key to building academic independence and real engagement, I’ve found, is in constantly playing the devil’s advocate while presenting issues with real complexity; kids LOVE the idea that they have to figure out their OWN answers.

Research:

I try to include articles that deal with real-world research results and provide concrete evidence that students can analyze.  They are unused to logic (logos) as an approach to analysis, and dealing with real-world results and fact-based assertions is good training for budding critical thinkers.  Most students have very little to no knowledge of politics, history, social science – really any real-world information.  As a result, their opinions are primarily based upon assumptions, “conventional wisdom” (I use the phrase as in Freakonomics – unfounded collective agreements on reality based on hearsay and rumor, rather than fact), and media messages; thus, in order to get them to see the importance of broadening their knowledge (to inspire a real drive to learn, and an honest interest in non-fiction), I introduce materials that, as much as possible, surprise them by refuting what they assume to be true.  I particularly focus on human behavior and brain science, both because I’m interested in those topics and because students in 9^th grade find themselves endlessly fascinating – and thus are always engaged if you offer them real insights into the “whys” behind their own actions. 

To get specific, I conceived of the obesity unit after watching Food Inc. and Supersize Me.  I found Supersize Me a bit too sensationalist; I liked Food Inc. for being more moderate and research/fact-oriented in its approach.  Food Inc., on the other hand, was far less engaging for a high-school audience; the trick became how to modify the presentation and monitor students’ engagement with the material to focus them on listening for FACTS, not simply paying attention for the emotional or high-intensity moments (a theme in all my units is attempting to push kids to get INTERESTED in material, instead of expecting to be ENTERTAINED, and helping them understand that entertainment can be used as rhetoric on an un-trained audience whereas an educated and INTERESTED – mentally active and critical – audience is very hard to manipulate).

Secondary Sources:

After finding a decent topic and a starting article, I start hunting for material to supplement.  Some of the places I have had a lot of success include the New York Times (especially a section that includes multiple short opinion pieces on the same topic, called Room For Debate, and sometimes the new video section, called "Op-Docs"), Time.com, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, and the CDC (government statistics can generate interesting perspectives on social and cultural topics).  The Onion can be fun if you spend some time clarifying and specifically teaching satire, and I draw from some older texts to do so (including Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Judy Brady’s I Want a Wife).  Again, the key is to analyze both meaning AND opinion – op-ed writers tend to include both, without getting so complicated that they require a massive dose of preparation to present to a high-school audience.