Week #5: Enduring Ideas - Unit and Lesson Planning

This week we discussed techniques for unit planning using a unit and concept based flow-chart.  The thought pattern for the planning starts with the broad concepts and overall goals and works down to the specific day-by-day lessons, activities, and assessments.

An example of the physical flow chart

discussed in this article.

An example of this planning technique would be to begin with the entire unit or class theme – for our example lets use Photography.  The next step in this process is creating your lessons, projects, or products.  In this case let’s plan a lesson in shutter speed, a lesson in selective focus, a landscape lesson, a portrait lesson, and a conceptual lesson.  From this point we plan each lesson in greater detail.

In the landscape lesson, for example, we would then plan our key concepts.  We would want our students to understand how to create compelling landscape photographs using the rule of thirds and either landscape or portrait orientation.  These would be our key concepts for the lesson: picture making, rule of thirds, and landscape versus portrait orientation.  As a result of these concepts our essential questions might be something like:  “How can I use the rule of thirds to create a powerful composition?” Or “How can I change the way viewers look at a scene using different formats or orientations?”

Next we can plan the objectives for our lesson.  In this case, the students will produce three final landscape photographs illustrating the rule of thirds, landscape orientation, and portrait orientation.  We can also add standards to our lesson at this point, fitting the objectives we have set.

Lastly we would plan each individual day of the lesson in question.  Each day is meant to have a lesson, activity, and formative assessment.  For our example lesson we could spend the first day introducing landscape photography, discuss landscape photographers from art history, and introduce camera techniques like using a tripod.  The activity on this day could simply be having students practice with cameras and tripods – taking photographs around the room or school.  The formative assessment for this day would be the images they produce.  The teacher would look at these images to make sure students understood how to take a properly exposed, level, focused photo. 

The next day’s lesson could be the introduction of most of our key concepts.  We could have students sketch landscapes, as well as practice photographing them for the activity.  After firming up the lesson this way the teacher could formatively assess students understanding by speaking to them about their images and their ideas for the project.

The third day might be have a shorter instructional period, simply recapitulating the concepts and techniques introduced in the past two lessons.  The activity would be students working on their images around the school.  The formative assessment in this case would be the teacher checking to make sure students are making progress during this “work day.”

At the end of the lesson we need to plan a summative assessment to test the overall learning of the students.  Luckily the summative assessment in this case would simply be the images the students produce as their final work.  If their work illustrates the concepts, meets teacher expectations, and shows thoughtful or purposeful creation then it can be judged a success.