How to Plan a Unit of Instruction | Cult of Pedagogy

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For the next four posts, I’m going back to basics, giving you a practical overview of the planning process behind effective instruction. Planning a unit of instruction can be a daunting task, and what I want to do here is offer a step-by-step process that you can follow every time you need to build a unit. You could also use it if you have a unit that never quite worked for you and you want to re-do it from scratch.

This week we’ll start with the big picture: the process I use for planning a full unit of instruction. Next week, I’ll zoom in and share how I design a unit assessment plan that includes diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments. In the third post, we’ll build the individual daily lesson plans. And finally, in week four, I’ll share my process for differentiating instruction.

While these four posts will obviously be helpful to new and pre-service teachers, I’d argue they’re just as valuable for experienced teachers. They’ll reinforce the things you’re already doing well while helping you strengthen areas that may have slipped over time. As an experienced teacher myself, I never stopped being curious about how other people approached lesson planning.

Notice I’m using the phrase “my process.” I want to be clear that what I’m sharing is a method I’ve arrived at over years of teaching and studying instructional practice, but it’s certainly not the only way to do these things. It’s been shaped by plenty of trial and error, along with more than a decade of researching effective teaching, reading widely, and interviewing classroom teachers and education experts through my work at Cult of Pedagogy, and I think it could help lots of teachers write solid, effective unit plans with confidence.

I’m putting out this series as an introduction to my new online course, Mastering the Lesson Plan. These four posts and companion podcast episodes will give you the big picture, but the course takes a much deeper dive into each step of the process and gives you practical tools you can use to plan stronger instruction. I’ll share more details about it at the end of this post.

Defining our Terms: Standards, Curriculum, Unit

Before we even get into the steps, let’s define our terms so we’re all on the same page. If you’re experienced, this will be a review, but it will be helpful for the new folks.

Let’s suppose I want to teach an eight-week community education course called Cooking Fundamentals. This would be for any adult who wants to learn how to cook for themselves independently. Nothing fancy, just the basics. My first step would be to figure out what I want to teach. I would set five broad goals for the course:

By the end of this course, students will be able to…

1. Practice safe food handling and kitchen safety.
2. Use essential kitchen tools, appliances, and cooking techniques.
3. Prepare meals by following and adapting recipes.
4. Plan nutritionally balanced meals.
5. Shop for and manage meals within a budget.

Because this is my own made-up course, I get to create these goals myself. If I’m working in a school system, those goals would usually be given to me in the form of state or local standards. So from here on out, I will refer to these as the standards for my course.

Each one of those five broad standards could be broken down into many smaller topics and skills. For example, the second standard — using essential kitchen tools, appliances, and cooking techniques — could contain a pretty big list of 15 to 30 different tools and appliances, then another long list of skills needed to use them and another list of cooking techniques. 

If this sounds like a lot, it is. Imagine each of those five goals as a heading in a chart, then picture a long list of knowledge and skills under each one. Here’s what that might look like with just the first two columns filled:

This chart is the equivalent of the huge standards documents that many teachers are required to teach from.

But standards are just the goals. They don’t tell us how to actually reach them. That’s what a curriculum is for. A curriculum organizes and sequences all the stuff in those big charts into units — clusters of knowledge and skills that make sense to teach together. A unit is a collection of individual lessons that might last a few days or a few weeks. Over the course of a semester, for example, a teacher might teach 5 to 10 different units.

Sometimes teachers are given a ready-made curriculum that includes everything from textbooks and materials to a full sequence of scripted lessons. In those cases, most of the planning has already been done. Other teachers have much more control over how they plan instruction — the curriculum might outline how the topics are grouped or how to sequence them over the year, but it might not supply complete units made up of individual lessons. 

In this series, we’re imagining a situation where the teacher has to plan a unit of instruction. 

So go back to this hypothetical chart of all the things I need to teach in my cooking class to reach those five goals, with all the subtopics underneath. I could organize this material into units in lots of different ways; for example, I could do thematic units where each unit is built around a different meal, like breakfast, and then I would weave bits of knowledge and skills from all five standards into lessons about how to make that meal. 

For my example, I think I’ll do it another way. I’ll organize them into six units: food safety, kitchen tools and appliances, food prep and cooking techniques, everyday meal preparation, nutrition, and grocery shopping and budgeting.

Now that I have my six units organized by topic, I’ll use the unit on food safety to demonstrate the rest of the planning process. Of all the units, I think it will be the shortest, and that will make it easiest to grasp as an example.

A 3-Step Process for Unit Design

The approach I’ll be sharing here is known as backward design, which was popularized by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in their 1991 book Understanding by Design. It’s been a long time since I read the book, so some of my terms and the particulars of my approach may be slightly different from theirs, but I want to give credit to where I originally learned this method.

The key feature of backward design is that you begin by creating a high-quality final assessment — a summative assessment — then work backward to plan the lessons that will prepare students for it. Before I learned this approach, I did the opposite: I planned my daily lessons first (sometimes the night before I taught them) then created a final assessment based on whatever I had taught. Backward design starts with clarifying your objectives and how you’ll measure them, so every lesson is intentionally aligned with the goals of the unit. 

Sometimes when people first hear about backward design, they ask whether this is “teaching to the test.” This is something we generally think of as a bad thing, because it implies that there is some arbitrary test that we have no control over and we are merely training our students to perform on that with no regard for their learning. 

With backward design done well, we are technically “teaching to the test,” yes, but that “test” is a well-designed assessment we created ourselves of a set of high-quality learning objectives. In other words, it’s a good test — so planning lessons to engineer student success on that test is not a bad thing. It’s a way to ensure that learning is actually happening. In fact, the “test” may not even be a test — it could be a presentation, a product, a project, or a combination of assessments, but we’ll get into that in the next post.

For now, let’s go to the first step, which is to set objectives for the unit.

Step 1: Set Objectives 

Once you’ve identified the standards your unit will address, your first step is to write a set of measurable learning objectives for those standards. 

For an objective to be measurable, it needs to describe the student doing something observable, not a mental process. When a student learns or understands something, that is happening inside their heads; we need to have them do something to show that learning. 

• Not measurable: Students will learn about safe food handling. 
• Measurable: Students will describe safe food handling practices. 

For this unit, I’m going to imagine the knowledge and skills that might appear in that section of the chart under “Practice safe food handling and kitchen safety.” I’m imagining that this will be a very short unit — 3-4 days tops, so I’m only focusing on the food handling part. This means I’d set aside the kitchen safety stuff for later. With that in mind, I would write these four measurable objectives for my unit:

By the end of this unit, students will be able to…

1. Explain how unsafe food-handling practices can lead to foodborne illness.
2. Describe the basic principles of safe food handling.
3. Apply safe food-handling practices while preparing, cooking, and storing food.
4. Evaluate food-handling situations, identify unsafe practices, and recommend safer alternatives.

If you look at the chart that I started with, the one with all the specific standards under the broad goal of “Practice safe food handling and kitchen safety,” you’d see that the wording of these objectives is exactly the same as the standards in the chart. It’s pretty common for standards to be written in measurable language, which means they can often be used as instructional objectives in their original form. Sometimes they need to be broken down into smaller, more specific objectives, but many times you can simply select the standards that fit your unit and use them as they are.

Before moving on to the next step, I also recommend you write a title for the unit and an essential question, an open-ended, thought-provoking question that frames the “big picture” thinking behind a unit. While these two steps aren’t absolutely necessary, I think they keep the unit centered on a meaningful purpose rather than a collection of topics.

For this unit, my title will be “Safe Food Handling” and the essential question will be “How do your choices in the kitchen affect the safety of the food you prepare?”

Step 2: Design the Assessment

Now that I have clear objectives for my unit, the next step is to think about what it would look like for students to show they have met those objectives. If students have really mastered this knowledge and these skills, how would I know? Would they need to perform well on a test? Create some kind of product? Demonstrate a set of skills in a physical way or through some kind of performance? Or would it be enough for them to just explain how they might do that without physically doing it? Beyond the classroom, what would I want my students to be able to do in their own lives with this knowledge and skills?

Questions like these should shape my final assessment, not “What topics did I cover in the unit, and how can I test for those?”

In next week’s post, I’ll walk through the process of developing my assessment plan in more detail. But I’ll give you a little preview now: Because it’s a short unit, the final assessment can’t be too time-consuming. So I’m going to create an open response test that presents students with a few scenarios that describe people preparing food; in each one, the person might make a few food safety mistakes. Students have to identify the mistakes, explain why they are a problem, and describe what they would do differently. I think this would be a good way to measure whether my students can take what they’ve learned in the unit and apply it to new and varied cooking situations. 

I also will be doing an end-of-course assessment where students will be cooking, and food safety practices will be a part of how I’ll evaluate them, but that’s going to be much later in the course. For this individual unit, I’m going to use this open response test. 

In the next post, we’ll go more in-depth on that assessment plan. But let’s move on to the final step of the unit design. 

Step 3: Plan the Lessons

Once I have clear objectives and a plan for how to measure them at the end of the unit, my final step is figuring out what to do to get students ready for that assessment. This is where I’ll plan the daily lessons, the learning activities that will equip students with the knowledge and skills described in my unit objectives.

In the third post of this series, I’ll describe my process for building daily lesson plans that lead to success on the summative assessment. Until then, you can begin working with the idea of this three-step framework as you think about your instruction: Start by clarifying what students need to learn, decide how you’ll measure whether they’ve learned it at the end, and then design lessons that move them toward that final outcome.

Mastering the Lesson Plan is our self-paced online course that will teach you how to build solid, engaging lesson plans and sequence them into comprehensive units of instruction. Whether you’re a brand-new teacher or you just want to tighten up on the fundamentals, this course will give you a clear, practical process for planning instruction from start to finish.