During my professional sequence II experience I have become very well acquainted with a little thing called a unit plan. I not only have to write one, but I have to write three. I have to write one for social studies, one for science, and one for language arts. Each unit plan must be done according to the IUP Unit Plan Format, and it must be done well.
When writing a unit plan it is more important to start out with goals for what you plan for your students to learn during the unit. If you don’t know what your goals are, then why are you writing the unit? You need to know what is the important information of the topic you are teaching, and what you want to accomplish during the unit.
Once you have your goals, you need to align them to the PA Academic Standards. Writing objectives for each standard will show how exactly your students will learn the information for that standard. Once you have your standards and objectives organized, then you can plan out all the lessons. A common mistake is that people will try to find fun activities on the information they need in their lesson and then just try to put those activities together. When you do this, your unit plan can often leave out a lot of the goals and standards that were important to the unit.
I’m not going to lie, writing all these unit plans has been an overwhelming task. Writing just one unit is a lot of work, but
add two more on top of that and you start to feel like you’re barely treading water. I like to think however, that after my experiences doing all of these I will become much better at it, and be more prepared for my future as a teacher.
I feel like the most important thing to remember when writing a unit plan is not to let yourself become frustrated and overwhelmed, because that only makes it so much harder to concentrate. Although the standards are important to align units to, thinking about writing a full unit plan, perfectly according to IUP’s format, is a bit intimidating. And three at one time has only added to the stress.
I think it’s much better to think of the unit in terms of your students. Instead of thinking of them on projects to be graded on, it is better to think of them as real lessons. How could I organize this information to make sense to my students, and what is the best way to help them learn? These are the most important questions! These are the questions that I need to ask myself in order to write a good unit plan… or in my case three!
Christa Lezanic 