Unit Plan Narrative (*Names changed for privacy)

One of my students from our summer placement made it clear that for him, the most
important thing was having a good role model to look up to. Most of the students I talked to
about this agreed, and said that their role models were either famous athletes or celebrities, or
were members of their own families. From this discussion, I began thinking about what I would
want my students to learn in my classroom about role models and how they shape our world.
This led me to think about how so many factors shape who we are and that we often do not stop
to think about what those factors might be. I chose the topic of identity as my desired result for
my future students because of the nature of my classroom subject and possible grade level of my
students. In an English class with ninth grade students, I think there is a great opportunity to use
literature as a way for students to get to know each other and get comfortable with my classroom.
Most ninth graders come from different middle schools and are starting ninth grade in a new
environment. In order to ease this transition, I hope to make my classroom a safe space for
community building so that each student will feel like they have the familiar faces of their
classmates to turn to, even when they interact with each other outside of my classroom. Most
ninth graders are also about fourteen years old and they would probably benefit from an
environment that fosters relationships with peers because this can be a time in life of high
anxiety and insecurity. The more students feel like they are valued and connected to others, the
more successful they will be. I wanted to teach something the first week that would make my
students interact with one another and understand that we are a community within my classroom.
What they bring from home and from past experiences are all valuable and they as students
should use those pieces of knowledge to help their learning in the classroom by making
connections. When I was a student, I wish my teachers had made this connection for me more so

than they did, because I often saw my home life and school life as two different worlds. Often
times, these worlds didnt match up completely, making for a manageable yet not completely
smooth transition between my worlds (Phelan et al.). As I was planning the weeklong unit and
the particular one-day lesson, I was thinking about what kind of questions I thought would be
valuable for students to explore on their own and also in a group of their peers that showed them
that they were valuable individuals and that their peers were also valuable.
Once I found my goals and desired results, I moved on to evidence of learning and how I
as a teacher would assess that my students absorbed what we have been studying. As I was
planning different assessments, I wanted to have a variety of low stress and high stress activities
that would assess their involvement and understanding of the material. The two assessments that
I see as higher stress are the group presentations and the personal narrative. The personal
narrative will be produced mostly at home, with in class mini lessons and peer editing sessions to
supplement the writing done outside of class. I planned for this to be only a draft in the first
week, because I think it is important that in writing, students have time to work on drafts and
receive feedback before submitting a final product. I also wanted this paper to be accompanied
by a cover letter that explained why the moment was so formative for the student. I think that
asking students to reflect on their lives and cultures is important, but it is also important to ask
them why it matters. The second major assessment is the group presentation. This summer we
have talked a lot about differentiation and the needs of different students in one classroom. This
has stuck with me because of how much we talked about it, but also because I am one of those
students who benefited from having projects that addressed different kinds of learning. I chose to
create a presentation that is oral, visual, auditory, and written because I want my students to
know their strengths and be allowed to use them. I also wanted to allow students to choose what

they wanted to do for the presentation (after giving basic guidelines) so that they as a group and
play off each others strengths and learn how to work together in this way. I think that each
student has something valuable that they being to the classroom but often times they are not
given the opportunity to showcase those strengths. I have always been a very shy person, and
although I have grown a bit in this area, it is still difficult for me to speak up in front of a class of
peers. With this in mind, I realize that this is one of the reasons why I am so sensitive to students
who are not outgoing in large groups and who need to have time in smaller groups to show off
their skills. In this presentation, the Multiple Intelligences that we learned about from Gardner
come into play. I have asked students to create a project that works with the different types of
intelligence that Gardner addresses in his website; "intrapersonal, interpersonal, spatial, bodilykinesthetic, linguistic, musical" etc. (Gardner). Not only will working in a group be beneficial for
some students, but it will also allow all students to learn how to work together and find out who
has what strengths to use for the presentation. Other than these two major assessments, my other
assessments are smaller and much lower stakes, such as the open note quiz, that check in with
students for comprehension and keep them accountable for what we are learning in class.
Finally, I began looking for texts and activities that would lend themselves well to the
goal of finding out who we are. For this section, I turned to our Ladson-Billings reading in order
to try and implement a more culturally relevant lesson plan. One thing that we talked about this
summer is the fact that students of color do not always connect to the material in class because
they dont see that it is relevant to them. Other explanations posit cultural difference (Erickson,
1987, 1993; Piestrup, 1973) as the reason for this failure and, as previously mentioned, locate
student failure in the cultural mismatch between students and the school (Ladson-Billings,
1995, p. 475). In the poems that that I chose for the project, I looked for authors that were

racially diverse in order to expose my students to a variety of authors that they may feel they can
better relate to. I also wanted them to be able to read literature that is influenced by different
cultures to show that what the student bring from their cultures is relevant even in school. One of
the poems was written by a Native American poet and in the poem, there are some words that my
students may not recognize, but that are part of the authors culture. I think this is a good
jumping off point to show students that they can bring what they know because what they know
is important. This also helps combat stereotype threat in the classroom. This summer we
discussed the fact that the stereotypes we hold for certain groups may affect performance of the
people who identify with those groups. I tried to plan my lesson in a way where each person
must participate fully in the material, while also introducing students to authors who my students
may or may not hold stereotypes about because of their race or cultural backgrounds. Steele tells
us that, the present analysis sees social structure and stereotypes as shaping the academic
identifies and performance outcomes of large segments of society (Steele, p. 614). I do not want
my students to hold onto stereotypes about certain groups of people and I hope that by exposing
them to various authors and various reflective questions, they will see that each person has the
potential to be a writer, a reader, or a good English student. There is not one type of person who
should be considered good at English, I want all my students to feel like that could be them if
they put in the effort required.
I also wanted my lesson to be something that would help students with their growth
mindsets, and stray away from the fixed mindsets. I am hoping that having a lot of reflective
questions and different ways of showing they have engaged with the text will help them
understand how important it is to put in their best effort and that they can grow and develop
through those questions. I think that the fixed mindset may be more prevalent in classrooms like

science and math where there seems to be one right answer that you either get or dont get, but I
want to be aware that it my happen in and English classroom as well and that I need to work
against it if it does. I hope to present my class as a co-learning process, where not only can I
teach them, but they can also teach me and their peers. In Dwecks article, we read that students
do not actually benefit from being called smart and that those with a fixed mindset are more
likely to give up when something is difficult. Some people believe that intelligence is a static
trait; some students are smart and some are not, and thats that. Or they have a growth mind-set,
in which they believe that intelligence can be developed by various means (Dweck, 2010, p.
26). I want my students to feel challenged in my classroom, but I do not want them to feel
overwhelmed or incompetent. I want them to believe that they can all grow in their learning and
that asking questions or making mistakes does not mean they are not intelligent.
Another of the readings from our class that really stuck with me all summer was
Habermans Pedagogy of Poverty. Certain lines from the article, such as whenever students
are involved with explanations of human differences, good teaching is going on or whenever
students are involved in reflecting on their own lives and how they have come to believe and feel
as they do, good teaching is going on (Haberman, 1991, p. 8-10) made me think about what I
wanted my students to talk about in my classroom. I wanted my students working with real life
experiences and with big picture questions that would keep them actively involved in my
classroom. I think this is the text that made me think the most about what my classroom should
look like and what I thought good teaching, and good learning, would look like. Not only did this
article do a great job of outlining what I do not want my classroom to look like, it also outlines
what my classroom should look like and often times I found myself reading a line and saying I
could or want to do that in my classroom!.

As much as I can teach my students the rules of grammar or the vocabulary definitions
they may see on the SATs, their true and long lasting learning will come from the moments when
they had to explore a question that sparked their interest. When I think back to my high school
days, I barely remember any definitions of SAT vocabulary words, but I remember the projects
that let me learn from my peers and use my creative side to express my learning. Certain lessons
stand out to me because my teachers made an effort to make them differentiated. Holden
Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye is known to be a complex character, yet I can explain the
way his mind works and how that affects the novels perspective because my teacher asked us to
do a project on Holdens personality connected to a modern song that we felt fit who he was.
Years later, that lesson has stuck with me in ways that many other more traditional lessons did
not. Hopefully, I have written out a lesson plan that will make students think about the material
they are learning in new ways and that because of this, the understandings they take from the
lessons will stick with them for years to come.
One day during our summer placement, we had a visit from the beloved Penn High
School* teacher Ms. Smith*. Over the course of the summer program, we heard our students
mention her name over and over again, always stating that she was the teacher that cared the
most and made them work their hardest. When she came into our class, she told us that she came
because she wanted to check on her students, even though they had just graduated high school
and she was on her summer break. Right away, it was evident that she was a teacher who didnt
shy away from letting her students know that she was around for them. She mentioned going to
graduation parties and baby showers in order to support and connect with her students. She
talked about the importance of getting know all of your students names as soon as possible and
greeting them at the door as a way to check in with them daily. I appreciated her visit because

she provided us with quite a few important pieces of advice on how to connect with students and
push them to work. I want my classroom to provide this same sense of caring and security, so
that students will be completely ready to learn instead of being concerned about other things
happening in the classroom. This is why I chose to have a lot of activities that are centered
around getting to know each other and creating a close-knit community. As much as I am excited
to work with literature and have my students fall in love with English, I first want to make sure
that we work on building relationships that will foster learning.
I am concerned that I am trying to fit a lot of information and activities into one week,
and I am hoping they are age/grade appropriate. My initial questions and themes I wanted to
share with my students could be expanded into a year long unit with more specific subunits
(choices, role models, etc.) and so I am concerned that my daily essential questions are much too
broad and that we wont be able to address them properly. I struggled to find the right balance of
activities that fit into one day, especially because I started getting many exciting ideas, but the
time was still very limited. I anticipate this being my biggest struggle as I move forward, because
I realize that there is so much I want my students to explore, but only so much time for them to
do so in my classroom. My question, then, is whether or not the planning Ive done makes sense
for the time I will be allotted in the classroom, which I guess is best answered by trying out the
lesson plan and seeing how it works. One thing I have heard over and over again this summer is
that teachers need to be flexible and that sometimes, we have to make decisions in the moment
while a lesson is unfolding. This is something that I think will come with practice, but I hope that
it is a skill I develop well because I know it will be very helpful in the classroom.

Works Cited
Dweck, C. (2010). Mind-Sets and Equitable Education. Principal Leadership, 10(5), 26-29.
Gardner, H. (n.d.). Multiple Intelligences Oasis - Howard Gardner's Official MI Site. Retrieved
August 11, 2015, from http://multipleintelligencesoasis.org
Haberman, M. (2010). The Pedagogy of Poverty versus Good Teaching. Phi Delta Kappan, 8187.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American
Educational Research Journal, 465-491.
Phelan, P., Davidson, A., & Cao, H. (n.d.). Students' Multiple Worlds: Negotiating the
Boundaries of Family, Peer, and School Cultures. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 224250.
Steele, C. (n.d.). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance.
American Psychologist, 613-629.