Chapter 9: Constructing Units

Mr. Velásquez, a first-year history teacher at Eagle Middle School, was excited for his upcoming unit on the American Revolutionary War. A personal area of interest, his knowledge of the topic was deep, and during his time in his teacher preparation program and from discussions with his grade-level colleagues, he had gathered a variety of resources and activities that he felt would engage his students in actively learning about the topic. To prepare his unit, Mr. Velásquez developed separate lesson plans for each activity, added learning objectives and formative assessments, and considered opportunities for differentiation. One of his colleagues shared an SOL-aligned, end-of-unit test that Mr. Velásquez used to determine how well his students retained the information from this exciting, interactive unit. However, when Mr. Velásquez finished grading the end-of-unit assessments, he was shocked to see that most students did quite poorly on the assessment. A closer look at the individual questions indicated for Mr. Velásquez that some of the questions covered information he had never addressed in his lessons and asked students to engage in historical-thinking skills he had never taught during the unit.

This chapter will focus on not just a lesson template, but a new template that will include several lessons that link together.

Unit Plan Template

In Chapter 3, you learned that every state sets forth a series of educational standards meant to guide teachers’ instruction. For many states, this is the Common Core Standards of Learning. In Virginia, the standards teachers are expected to follow are the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs). Based on collaboration among educators, professionals in the field, and experts in content education, these standards delineate not only the content that needs to be taught, but also what skills or practices students need to engage in to fully understand the field of instruction. In other words, these standards provide a road map for teachers as they plan units of instruction and develop individual lesson plans.

In Chapter 3, we discussed how we can use state standards to write meaningful objectives for individual lessons. In this chapter, we broaden our lens to planning full units of instruction. In the sections that follow, we discuss what a unit of instruction entails and how backwards design can support teachers in developing strong, aligned units of instruction. We will conclude with five steps teachers can take to develop their own units using backward design.

What is a Unit of Instruction?

A unit of instruction is defined as a series of interconnected lesson plans designed to cover a major topic of instruction. For example, in a math class you might have a unit on parts of numbers, including fractions, decimals, and mixed numbers. In science, you might have a unit on the properties of water. Perhaps in art you teach a unit on contemporary art movements.

In Virginia, what should be taught in a unit is guided by the SOLs. Most SOLs are topically organized, so that any given SOL could be its own unit. For example, Math 4.8 (a fourth-grade math standard) includes four sub-bullets (a, b, c, and d) that are all related to the same topic, measurement. Thus, measurement would likely be a unit of instruction for your fourth-grade math class.

Occasionally you will find that parts of one SOL fit nicely into a unit with parts of another SOL. For example, in a 9th grade English language arts class, teachers might integrate instruction on using roots and affixes to determine meanings of words and phrases (SOL 9.3 a) into their unit on reading non-fiction texts (SOL 9.5). Similarly, in a 7th grade life science course, teachers might decide to teach all cell processes (e.g., mitosis/meiosis, cellular respiration, and photosynthesis) together, pulling from three different life science SOLs (i.e., LS 2, LS 3, and LS 4). Oftentimes, schools will provide a pacing guide to indicate what to teach and when, and it is in these pacing guides that you might find a combination of SOLs for a given unit. However, regardless of whether you are using a mix of SOLs or one SOL to guide your unit, it is critical that your standards be at the heart of your unit planning.

Getting Started with Unit Planning

It is easy to get caught up in identifying fun and engaging activities for your students when you first start planning your unit. Indeed, many teachers will begin developing units of instruction by identifying broad topics from the SOL and looking for fun activities to teach the topic, later determining how they will assess if students learned from those activities (usually with an end-of-unit test). These were the steps Mr. Velásquez took in our opening sequence: he broadly identified his topic (the Revolutionary War), started collecting a series of activities to teach the topic, and then located a unit test to assess learning at the conclusion of the unit.

Curating and including engaging learning activities, like designing houses to teach area and perimeter in math, extracting DNA from strawberries to teach genetics, and setting up a mock class democracy in social studies are all important and exciting parts of the learning process and should be included in your unit planning. Yet, if we start with the activities, and not with the standards, we run the risk of letting activities, rather than the standards, guide what content is covered in the unit.

The backward design model of instructional planning, introduced in Chapter 2, recognizes this and challenges the traditional model of instructional planning, arguing that to fully align learning with expectations, we need to start with a detailed review of what the learning goals are for the unit (i.e., standards-based objectives), then determine how we will know if students met those goals (i.e., assessment), then identify what activities we can engage our students in so that they can meet the learning goals as exemplified through the assessments (Wiggins & McTighe, 2011; see Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1: Unit Planning with Traditional and Backward Design Models

On the surface, the difference between traditional planning and backward planning might look like a small change in sequence: in traditional planning, assessments are created at the end, whereas in backwards design, your assessments are created before developing your lessons. While this is certainly true, planning by backward design at its core requires much more, including a close look at what the learning goals are for each unit, and consideration of how instruction and assessment can be tightly aligned to those goals throughout the unit.

To exemplify these distinctions, let’s take a look at the difference between traditional and backward design unit planning approaches using a fifth-grade science unit on Earth’s energy resources. This unit follows Science SOL 5.9 and covers renewable and nonrenewable energy sources and energy conservation.

A Traditional Approach to Unit Planning

In a traditional approach to unit planning, a teacher might begin by reviewing the SOL and curriculum framework for the main topics of instruction. In doing so, the teacher might note two main topics in the standard: renewable and nonrenewable resources (including their benefits and limitations and how they are used in the home or school), and energy consumption and conservation.

Using this information, the teacher might lecture, show videos, and have the students read about the different forms of renewable and non-renewable energy sources in their textbooks, and then lead students in a discussion about how these resources are used in the home and school to power students’ daily activities. Borrowing an activity suggested by a colleague, the teacher might ask students to choose one resource to research and present to their classmates, focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of the energy source. From there, the teacher might project a graph showing energy consumption in the United States over the last century and point out how energy consumption has been growing. Then, the teacher might challenge students to brainstorm ways they could reduce their own energy consumption at home or at school, with examples of current technology that might support their actions. The unit might conclude with a multiple choice and free-response test where students (1) identify the different forms of energy based on provided benefits and limitations, and (2) identify three ways they could reduce their energy use at home and why it is important to do so.

On the surface, this unit of instruction might appear to be sound and in alignment with the SOLs. Indeed, it has covered the two main topics the teacher identified at the outset of planning. However, a closer look at the unit through backward design highlights many shortcomings.

Let’s start with the learning goals. The teacher of this unit used the SOLs and curriculum framework to identify major content topics that needed to be covered in the unit. In other words, in broad strokes the teacher identified the “what” of this unit, and then proceeded to develop lessons around those “whats.” What the teacher failed to do, however, was to attend to the “how” of the standard. For example, while the teacher did ask students to identify the benefits and limitations of energy resources, the teacher never asked students to compare them (bullet one under the Essential Knowledge and Practices in above), which requires a higher level of thinking. Similarly, though the teacher engaged students in a discussion about how energy sources are used to power the home and school, students never had the opportunity to “research the origin of the identified energy, including how long it takes to form, and classify it as either a renewable or nonrenewable source” (bullet two). Further, the teacher analyzed and interpreted data showing human consumption of energy over the last century, but the students never did, and neither the teacher nor the students conjectured what might happen if the identified trend continued (bullet three). Similar claims can be made for the rest of the expectations outlined in the curriculum framework. The teacher’s focus on content over process was echoed on the assessment which, while it aligned well with the instruction, similarly missed the mark for assessing if students were truly meeting the expectations of the standard.

You might be wondering, why do these incongruencies matter? Didn’t the teacher cover the material outlined in the SOL? Yes, the teacher did. But these inconsistencies matter because, while the teacher covered most of the content outlined in the SOL, it was done in a way that required minimal thinking from the students. All of the activities were low on the Bloom’s taxonomy scale and most required regurgitation of ideas, despite the higher-level thinking opportunities outlined in the curriculum framework. This type of instruction perpetuates what Zaretta Hammond (2015) terms “dependent learners,” that is, learners who are dependent on the teacher to do the higher-order thinking processes necessary for success in school, and who struggle to self-start or problem solve when faced with a challenge. As a result, not only were these lessons misaligned with the expectations of the state standards, but they also put students at a learning disadvantage that could affect them long after they leave the classroom.

A Backwards Design Approach to Unit Planning

So, what’s the alternative? Let’s now consider what this unit might have looked like from a Backward Design perspective.

Similar to the traditional perspective, the teacher would start with the SOLs and curriculum framework. However, in addition to identifying the overarching topics to cover, the teacher would take a deep dive into the nuances of the standard, including how students should engage with the content. From this analysis, the teacher would identify the learning goals for the unit, developing Understand, Know, and Do objectives. These objectives would capture not only what students need to know, but what they must do and understand in the unit to fully meet the stated expectations.

From here, the teacher would consider how to assess the students. Because the standards and corresponding objectives require more than just memorization and regurgitation, the teacher would likely find that a multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank assessment would fall short of effectively assessing the students. Instead, the teacher might develop an assessment that asks students to use a graphic organizer to compare and contrast two energy resources of their choice and then to develop an argument with evidence about which resource the school should use to power its energy needs. Then, the assessment might ask students to analyze a graph of the local area’s energy consumption and write a public service announcement making practical suggestions for reducing energy consumption in the area.

With the assessments created, the teacher would then brainstorm how to prepare the students to successfully meet the objectives and complete the assessment through student-centered lessons. To do so, the teacher might skip the lecture, videos, and textbook readings and instead split the class into jigsaw groups. Each group would research one form of energy that could be used to power the school’s lights and electronics. Once research is complete, new groups would form with one student representing each energy form. Students would teach their peers about their energy source, then work as a group to (1) classify each energy source as renewable or nonrenewable and (2) compare the benefits and limitations of each group of energy sources (Essential Knowledge and Skills bullet points one and two).

Next, the teacher might provide a variety of graphs and charts with data showing energy consumption globally and nationally and ask students to develop an argument using evidence about the world’s and nation’s energy consumption trends. Students would make predictions about what the graph might look like in the coming years if trends persist, and what it might look like if the nation and world took immediate action in the form of energy consumption reduction (bullet point three). Students would do an energy audit of their home or school (i.e., determine to what extent they are using energy), and then brainstorm as a class how to reduce their energy consumption, including researching technologies that might support these efforts. They would develop plans to reduce their energy consumption and enact them for one week, reflecting afterwards on the experience (bullets four and five).

As you can see, approaching this unit with backwards design not only ensures tighter alignment to the standards, but also engages students in higher-order, content-specific learning practices. Students are comparing and contrasting, developing arguments from evidence, extending patterns, identifying trends, and applying learning for meaningful purposes. This is the kind of learning we want to see in our classrooms.

So How Do I Create a Unit Using Backward Design?

Imagine you are in your first year of teaching and are developing your first unit for the year. What might this look like with backward design? Let’s take a look at five steps you can follow to support your unit plan development.

Step One: Start with Your Standards

Or perhaps more pointedly, start with your curriculum framework (if your content area has one). As we discussed in Chapter 2, the SOLs are broad. If we only use the SOLs to guide our instruction, we will by default need to take on a more demanding role in determining what and how to teach, setting us up for possible misalignment. Luckily, the SOLs provide resource guides in the form of curriculum frameworks that highlight in much greater detail not only what to teach (i.e., the factual and conceptual knowledge), but also how to teach it, or more accurately, how students should learn and engage with the content.

Let’s take a closer look at the curriculum framework for an English language arts unit on media literacy, English language arts SOL 7.3. A broad sweep of the unit indicates that the SOL focuses on students’ abilities to be knowledgeable consumers and creators of media. In particular, per the SOL, students need to (a) identify persuasive/informative techniques used in media; (b) distinguish between fact and opinion, and between evidence and inference; (c) describe how word choice, visual images, and sound convey a viewpoint; (d) compare and contrast the effectiveness of techniques in auditory, visual, and written media messages; and (e) craft and publish audience-specific media messages.

While the SOLs serve as a good starting place, a closer look at the essential knowledge, skills, and practices in the curriculum framework highlights in greater detail how students should meet these expectations and to what extent. For example, the framework outlines a series of persuasive techniques (7.3a) that students need to know (at a minimum), which can serve as a rudder for guiding teacher instruction. The curriculum framework also highlights precursory skills and knowledge students will need to meet SOL expectations. For example, in order for students to compare and contrast the effectiveness of persuasive/informative techniques (7.3d), the framework suggests that students need to first identify elements of media literacy (i.e., authorship, format, audience, etc.), something not explicitly addressed in the SOL verbiage alone. Thus, a close inspection of not only the SOLs, but the curriculum framework, can ensure that students are given the opportunity to engage with the content to the extent and in the ways expected by the state standards.

Step Two: Write Your Objectives

Once you know in greater detail what your standards are, the next step is to write your objectives (yes, for the entire unit!). Remember, objectives are students’ learning goals: what should they be able to understand, know, and do by the end of this unit? In order to truly align those goals with the expectations outlined in the standards, we need to ensure our objectives are tightly aligned to the curriculum framework. To exemplify this, let’s go back to our English language arts unit on media literacy and consider how we might develop objectives for this unit.

Perhaps the easiest place to start when developing unit-wide objectives is with your Do objectives. As discussed in Chapter 3, Do objectives are the discipline-specific skills, social skills, production skills, and processes students need to engage in to show mastery of the SOL. Do objectives are often the easiest to write because they are frequently spelled out in the curriculum framework. For example, for our unit on media literacy, our Do objectives might look like the following:

I can–

• deconstruct and analyze the elements of a variety of media
• identify elements of media literacy, including authorship, format, audience, content, and purpose
• recognize that production elements in media are composed based on audience and purpose to create specific effects
• identify persuasive techniques in the media
• analyze a media text message considering what techniques have been used and the purpose and impact of each
• recognize and identify opinions in the media
• recognize and identify facts in the media
• analyze media messages for facts, opinions, persuasive message, word choice, and viewpoints
• create and publish media messages, aimed at a variety of audiences with different purposes.

Note the direct alignment between these objectives and what the curriculum framework outlines as essential knowledge, skills, and practices. While ultimately you might tweak these objectives slightly based on the context of a lesson (i.e., for a lesson using a popular video game ad you might write “I will be able to deconstruct and analyze media elements in a video game ad”), using the expectations outlined in the essential knowledge, skills, and practices of the curriculum framework will ensure alignment and make sure that your students are engaging in all parts of the content in the ways dictated by the standards.

For some content areas, such as social studies, the practices and skills are captured in their own SOL, usually the first SOL of the grade’s standards. For content areas like these, teachers need to be more intentional about marrying the practices outlined in the first SOL with the content in the remaining SOLs to develop their Do objectives. For example, second-grade social studies SOL 2.3 requires students to compare the past and present lives and contributions of three American Indian cultures (the Powhatan, the Lakota, and the Pueblo). The curriculum framework for Standard 2.3 outlines the essential knowledge students should gain from the standard (i.e., each tribe’s culture, contributions, and change over time) but does not specify how students should learn and engage with this content. Thus, teachers must go to the first SOL to identify what practices might align with this unit. In this case, teachers might choose to have students compare and contrast people, places, or events in American history (SOL 2.1e) and make connections between past and present (SOL 2.1g). As a result, two Do objectives for this unit might be, “I will compare and contrast the cultures of the Pueblo, Lakota, and Powhatan tribes” and “I will make connections between the people and culture of the Powhatan tribe in the past and in the present.”

Once you have identified your Do objectives, your Know objectives will closely follow. As described in Chapter 3, Know objectives cover what we most often think of as the “content,” that is, the facts, names, dates, places, information, and vocabulary of a unit. Your Know objectives will be tightly aligned with Do objectives. To help in identifying these Know objectives, you might ask yourself, what would my students need to know in order to do the activities outlined in the Do objectives? Generally speaking, you can find this information in the curriculum framework.

Let’s head back to our media literacy unit. Our first two Do objectives ask students to deconstruct and analyze the elements of a variety of media and identify elements of media literacy. Quite obviously, in order for students to do this, they will need to know what the elements of media literacy are, including (according to the curriculum framework) authorship, format, audience, content, and purpose. Thus, a Know objective for this unit could be: Students will know elements of media literacy, including authorship, format, audience, content, and purpose. Similarly, Do objectives four and five ask students to identify persuasive techniques in the media and analyze a media text message considering what techniques have been used and the purpose and impact of each. In order to achieve these Do objectives, students will need to know what persuasive techniques are and the purpose and impact of each. Thus, two additional Know objectives for this unit might be, “students will know persuasive techniques commonly found in media” and “students will know the purpose and impact of a variety of persuasive techniques commonly found in media.” Often objectives will be framed with “I will know..” when they are shared with students during a unit, instead of“students will…” What these exact persuasive techniques the students should know can also be found in the curriculum framework, for the teacher’s reference.

Finally, you will need to write your Understand objectives. These are the big ideas of the unit, and are usually small in number (maybe between one and four for the whole unit, depending on the size and length of the unit). In some content areas, the curriculum framework outlines the big ideas for you. For example, in science curriculum frameworks you will find a “central idea” that highlights the main takeaways and can be easily transformed into Understand objectives. In the English language arts standards, the big ideas are outlined in the Enduring Understandings column and are already written as understand objectives. However, it is important that you critically read these objectives to ensure that they truly are big picture. For example, for our media literacy unit, one of the bullet points under the Enduring Understandings is that students will understand that evidence is fact and a valid inference is the interpretation of fact. This would fit better as a Know objective because it is focused on a definitional understanding of these two key words, fact and inference. Thus, for this unit, our understand objectives would be:

Students will understand that:

• all media messages are intentionally constructed to impact a specific audience
• persuasive language and connotations convey viewpoint
• understand that the effectiveness of any media message is determined by the impact on the intended audience.

In some cases, the big ideas of an SOL might not be explicitly written out, or a unit is comprised of numerous parts of different SOLs. In these cases, you will need to identify the big ideas and Understand objectives on your own. A guiding question to help you might be, what is the overarching takeaway with which I want my students to leave the unit? This should be bigger than a fact, definition, or practice. It should be an overall theme for the unit.

As you create your lessons in later steps, the objectives you develop at this stage of unit planning will be the objectives you use for your lessons. Note that some objectives will take more than one lesson to cover. For example, students likely won’t be able to learn and master all elements of media literacy in one class. Thus, you might use the same objectives to guide multiple lessons. What is important, however, is that your lesson objectives mirror your unit objectives, so that you can ensure you are aligning your instruction with overall SOL expectations.

Step Three: Develop Your Assessments

Now that you have identified your objectives for the unit, it’s time to consider how you will assess your students’ mastery of these objectives. These assessments will come in two forms: formative and summative assessments. As discussed in Chapter 5, formative assessments are the ongoing assessments that occur during lessons to give the teacher and student insight into the student’s progress towards achieving the learning objectives. These can include formal (e.g., quizzes, exit tickets, rough drafts) or informal (e.g., questions during small group discussion, quick reviews using dry erase boards) assessments. Summative assessments are the assessments that usually occur at the end of the unit or at the conclusion of instruction on a particular topic and are meant to assess students’ overall mastery of the concepts and skills outlined in the standard.

One of the biggest missteps teachers make when developing their unit assessments is aligning assessments only with the Know objectives. That is, they create assessments that test students on the content, but not necessarily in the ways outlined in the unit’s Do objectives and required by the curriculum framework. Thus, in order to ensure assessments are capturing the breadth of the SOL, it is important to directly align assessments to all of your objectives, not just your Know objectives. For example, if the curriculum framework (and your aligned Do objective) requires that students create and interpret a model or diagram of an energy transformation (Science SOL 6.4d), asking students to answer a multiple choice question about an energy transformation is not going to fully assess your objective. Rather, students would need to develop and interpret their own model or diagram of an energy transformation. As a result, traditional forms of assessment alone, such as multiple choice tests, might not be the best assessment to truly determine students’ mastery of the objectives.

To exemplify alignment between assessments and objectives, let’s revisit our English language arts unit on media literacy and consider what a summative assessment might look like. For this unit, students need to be able to critically interpret and analyze media messages, and then develop their own media using the same techniques they analyzed in other media sources. Thus, there might be two summative assessments for this unit. The first might ask students to select a media of their choice (e.g., a written and audiovisual advertisement, a magazine or news article, etc.) and analyze it for the elements of media literacy (e.g., authorship, format, audience, content, and purpose), persuasive techniques, and facts (evidence and inference) and opinions. Then, students might write a paragraph summarizing why they think these things were included and how they might impact the audience. For the second summative assessment, students might vote on a relevant issue they want to write about in their school and develop two public service announcements (PSA) using the persuasive techniques they learned: one aimed at fellow students, and one aimed at teachers and administrators. Students would detail in a paragraph for each PSA why they chose the techniques they did, how they used word choice, visuals, and sound to reach their audience, and how their audience directed their creative decisions.

You will notice an absence of more traditional assessment forms in the summative assessments detailed above. That is not to say that those forms of assessment should never be used. Indeed, a quick fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice quiz could be a quick and easy way to determine if students know the meaning of the different persuasive techniques covered in the unit, a prerequisite for actually identifying them in media. However, used in isolation, these types of assessments rarely invite the higher-order thinking needed for students to truly engage in the content as intended by the standards and outlined in the objectives.

Step Four: Identify Instructional Activities and Resources

The fun part of unit planning comes as you begin to curate a series of activities to engage students in learning the content and practices required in the standards. When identifying the activities that will best suit your unit, it is important to keep in the forefront of your mind what the goals are for the unit (i.e., the learning objectives), and how students will be assessed on those objectives. For example, if students are expected to analyze a piece of media for persuasive techniques on the summative assessment, they need practice engaging in this practice during lesson activities. Lecturing on the different persuasive techniques with examples and then asking students to define each technique is not, on its own, a suitable form of instruction. Similarly, if a third-grade math SOL requires students to create and solve single-step and multistep practical problems, it is critical that they engage in both practices (i.e., creating and solving) prior to being asked to do so on the assessment. In other words, it is critical that lesson activities engage students in both the knowledge and practices outlined in the objectives and assessed on the summative assessments to ensure students are fully prepared to show their mastery of the objectives.

With the unit objectives firmly in mind, there are many places teachers can go to collect lesson ideas. One of the most reliable places to start is with practitioner journals published by content-specific national teacher organizations (see Figure 9.2). The articles in these journals contain peer-reviewed articles detailing creative, standards-aligned ways to teach different topics in your focal content area.

Colleagues who teach your same grade level are another excellent and readily available resource, particularly because they are working with the same standards and in the same context that you are. Teachers will also search the internet for ideas and resources, which can be an effective way to generate new ideas. However, particularly with internet searches, it is critical that you check the accuracy of the materials and consider how the activities and resources should be adapted to meet the unique circumstances of your classroom and the objectives outlined in your standards. Not every lesson you receive from a colleague or find on the internet is a good one for your classroom.

Finally, it is at this part of unit planning that teachers can (and must) be intentional about identifying activities and resources that support and engage a diversity of learners. That is, as you identify resources and lesson activities that might meet your objectives, it is equally important to consider how these activities meet the needs and build on the assets of the students in your classroom. What kinds of resources are you using? Whose stories are they telling? Are the activities or resources relevant to students from all walks of life, or to only some? Is there diversity in the types of activities that are being included, and are the activities accessible to all types of learners, regardless of English language proficiency, learning differences, or physical disabilities? These questions are critical to ensuring you are developing lessons that support the learning of all students, and are most easily addressed at the unit level. Figure 9.2 offers resources that can be useful when planning units in different content areas.

Figure 9.2: Practitioner Journals by Content Area

Step Five: Develop Your Lesson Plans

By the time you reach Step Five, you will have everything you need to craft a well-aligned, student-centered sequence of lesson plans that will meet your unit objectives. The challenge at this step is to determine how to divide up your unit objectives into meaningful lessons that fit the time frame you have to teach a given lesson. Your school’s pacing guide will be helpful here, as will conversations with colleagues who have experience teaching the content.

As you divide up your unit objectives, you will want to make sure that every lesson has at least one Understand, one Know, and one Do objective. Do objectives are usually the most helpful for driving lessons, since they often require the use of knowledge generated in the Know objectives. Thus, when splitting your objectives into lessons, it can be helpful to start there. Because Understand objectives are big-picture and therefore few in number, you will likely repeat those across lessons. In some cases, the same might be true for some Knows and Dos, especially those that capture a significant amount of content. For example, in our unit on media literacy, we would likely be addressing our know and do objectives related to persuasive techniques over multiple lessons, simply changing the technique for each lesson.

As you finalize your lessons, it is important to look back through your unit to ensure that every objective is assessed and engaged with during instruction. A backwards planning design is only as powerful as the fidelity with which it is implemented, so a final alignment check can go a long way to creating an effectively standards-aligned, engaging, and rigorous unit.

References

Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching & the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2011). The Understanding by Design guide to creating high-quality units. ASCD.