In our school staff development meeting on Monday, one of the more experienced and wise teachers talked to us about Unit planning. As I am a greenhorn, much of my lesson planning has been finding a book and trying to come up with a project that would be beneficial. This has not necessarily been the most rewarding and productive method of planning.
The idea behind Understanding by Design is that you first must figure out the theme/overarching idea behind your unit, then fill in everything around that. For me, the biggest learning point was that I need to relate every single thing that we do in class to the main idea of the story. That can be small writing assignments, unit tests, papers, projects, etc...Everything that we do in my class should relate to the overall theme and lend itself to the answering of one of the essential questions.
It means a decent amount of work for me, but reworking my units is going to be incredibly beneficial for both my students and for myself.
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