​​​​Jason Wakeman​

My planning and preparation has been primarily influenced by Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design. In that text, Wiggins and McTighe suggest that teachers are designers. Like architects they must use available tools and resources to in order to achieve some chosen purpose. For teachers, the purposes we need to reach are the standards, understandings, and abilities we want our students to reach. Our tools are educational experiences: lessons, tasks, activities, assessments, and more. 

 

When planning I try to keep a designers mindset. I work backwards starting with the end goal I want to reach. Generally this means identifying key focus standards that I want to reach by the end of the unit. Working in the Boise School District, this process was made much easier since the district curriculum outlines a scope and sequence for sophomore English which includes quarterly focus standards. Taking these I then identify a culminating project, some performance task I can use as a primary summitive assessment for those standards. The task needs to demonstrate not only the knowledge required by the standards, but also skills and a

 

Once I have this culminating project in mind, my job becomes much clearer and more purposeful. The rest of the unit is a matter of scaffolding my students towards that final task. I can break the task down into its constituent parts and design lessons and assignments to develop each. I can add in multiple opportunities to practice those skills throughout the unit. By the end of the unit, my students have a clear idea of what it is they are supposed to do and how to do it.

 

To the right you can see the unit my lead teacher, Anna Daley, designed for our sophomores' second quarter. Below is the unit I designed for our fourth quarter. Both units follow the process I outlined above. The first designed around a literary analysis paper for Their Eyes Were Watching god, the second is designed around an expository issue paper, in which students describe a debated issue and alternative arguments on that issue. Both units frontload the primary skills necessary for the task--literary analysis and argument analysis respectively. Each also includes a mid-unit essay meant to mirror the culminating process. Finally, they both conclude with a long period dedicated to writing and workshopping the culminating projects themselves.