Chapter 7

Planning Classroom Units

1. A. A meaningful learning experience- bind students into a closer community.
B. Improve teachers curriculum-planning skills(Choosing significant curriculum
themes, enduring understandings and modes of knowledge)
C. Join planning would bring primary and intermediate teachers in closer contact so
they would share their insights and skills.
2. Designing and adapting units is probably the most significant component of your
curriculum planning. Even more than in yearly or daily planning, you must consider
your intents carefully and establish how you will go about accomplishing them.
3. You must keep asking yourself, where am I taking my students?
4. An integral unit
a. Has internal unity ( teacher direct all though and activity toward a unifying
theme.)
b. Has external consistency(it explicitly intends to attain some of the overall aims of
the school and, where applicable, the goals of subject discipline)
c. Include pertinent and meaningful aspects of reality that are relate to, and may
even go beyond, the main discipline focus of the unit.(An integral unit is that it
includes significant, natural inter-relations that exist between its central concepts and
aspects of reality that may go beyond its main focus.)
Footstep 7-1
Nine steps in designing A unit
1) consider the suitability of a proposed topic
2) Brainstorm ideas, possible using a panning chart or web diagram
3)Formulate your unit focus.
4)Design, balance, and sequence learning activities. Include a motivational
introductory activity and a culminating summative one.
5) Review linkages with state or provincial standards and/or curriculum guides,
adding or revising learning activities accordingly.
6) Plan a schedule.
7) select your resource.
8) Plan student assessment.
9) Review the effectiveness of your unit.
1. Consider the significance and relevance of a Topic
1) A unit on light may highlight wave theory as an important concept.
2) A unit on government may emphasize justice as its key concept.
3) A unit on World War II may focus on the problem of how to prevent war and its
related atrocities.
4) A unit on Africa may highlight issue such a poverty and malnutrition.
5) A unit on contemporary music may involve concepts such as rhythm, tempo, and
dynamics while also underscoring how music both reflects and shapes culture and its
value.
6)A unit on geometry may stress the concepts of axioms, postulates, and proof.
Footstep 7-2
2. Brainstorm Ideas
1) Make a web
2) Work out your worldview for the topic
3 Consider which aspects of reality are part of the topic and issues.
3. Formulate Your Unit Focus
1) Thematic Statement
 A. The basic values, dispositions, and commitments that you want to foster.
B. The enduring understandings, major concepts, and key skills that you want
students to acquire.
2) Guiding questions
A. Help students to enduring understanding
3) Intended Learning Outcomes(objectives)
A. ILOs provides direction and balance for your choice of learning activities, your
selection of resources, and your means of student assessment.
B. Curriculum planning is not a linear process, and that as your thinking process,
you will come back to and revise both your thematic statement and your ILOs.
C. Learning outcomes include: Content outcomes, Ability outcomes, value and
disposition outcomes, Expressive-creative outcomes
4. Design and Choose Learning Activities
1 Five columns to describe activities: A. Intended learning. B. Learning
activities. C. Assessment. D. Resources. E. Linkage with government performance
standards or outcomes.
5. Incorporate Government Standards
6. Plan a schedule
7. Select resources
8. Plan students assessment
1) Make assessment of student learning an integral part of your unit design.
2) Emphasize formative assessment feedback.
3) As much as possible, align learning outcomes, learning activities, student products,
and assessment strategies.
4) Use varied assessment strategies.
5) Use state standardized tests as only one of a broad array of assessment strategies.
6) Remember that not all intended learning outcomes can be assessed immediately.
Also, learning activities may have outcomes that are unintended.
9. Review the Effectiveness of Your Unit.
Reflection:
This chapter teach how to as a effectively teacher in class. Teacher should design
their classes and activities. Sometime, if teacher do not plan their class well, they will
make students get struggling and lost the interesting for this class. Every activity,
teacher should prepare well before class.