Introduction

A unit plan sets out your goals and pacing for specific “slices” of the school year. It is a

plan that sets out your learning goals into a coherent set of lessons.

Why a Unit Plan?

Unit planning provides you with a sense of direction and organization that helps you and

your students achieve significant academic gains within a particular time period. More

specifically, creating a plan to reach short-term goals has the following benefits:

• A unit plan forces you to make decisions about what to teach and how to teach it.

• After taking the time to develop a unit plan, you are less likely to be side-tracked by

objectives, lessons, or activities that do not advance your ultimate quest for

academic achievement.

• A unit plan keeps you on pace to reach your unit (and ultimately long-term) goals.

• Your unit plan should be referred to with almost daily. Given the limited number of

weeks, days, and lessons in a unit, each moment becomes more precious, forcing

you to pace yourself appropriately in order to meet your end goals.

• A unit plan provides an opportunity to stimulate student interest through

overarching content that is relevant to students. When you design your unit plan,

consider what content will engage your students given their interests and

backgrounds.

Creating Unit Plans

To create a unit plan that meets the above purposes and provides you with daily

instructional guidance, many effective teachers use the following series of eight

interdependent steps:

I. Develop your unit vision

II. Create your summative unit assessment

III. Translate your learning goals into lesson objectives

IV. Sequence your content and scaffold your lesson objectives

V. Schedule your objectives on the school calendar

VI. Create your beginning-of-unit diagnostic tool

VII. Create a tracking system for your objectives

VIII. Continually adjust your plan

Note that these steps represent a backwards-planning framework. This process should not

be thought of, however, as a “checklist” or as a series of discrete, linear steps to unit

planning. Many of the actions are interrelated and will need to be reused or revisited at

multiple stages in the planning process.