Planning a whole unit can be overwhelming. You have standards to cover, assessments to create, lessons to plan, and about a thousand decisions to make along the way. And if you don’t have a clear process for putting all those pieces together, it’s easy to just start planning lessons and hope they eventually add up to something coherent.

This week, I’m going back to basics with a practical, step-by-step look at how I plan a unit of instruction. I’ll walk you through the three-part process I use to move from a set of standards to clear learning objectives, a final assessment, and a sequence of lessons designed to get students where they need to go.

This is the first in a four-part Back to Basics series on instructional planning. Over the next few weeks, we’ll zoom in on assessment design, building daily lessons, and differentiation. I'm putting out this series as an introduction to my online course, Mastering the Lesson Plan, which will be ready by the end of this month. Whether you’re brand-new to teaching or you’ve been doing this for years, I hope the series gives you a useful framework for thinking through your own planning process.

How to Plan a Unit of Instruction 

Have a good week!  

Jenn

Equity Resource to Check Out

Teachers and communities spend a lot of their own money trying to fill gaps in school funding, but most of those gaps need bigger, more systemic solutions. A 2027 education funding bill recently approved by the House Appropriations Committee would cut nearly $2 billion from Title I, which sends funding to schools serving high numbers of students from low-income families. You can read more about the proposal here, then head to the NEA Action Center, where you can quickly contact your members of Congress and ask them to oppose these cuts. It only takes a few minutes, and it’s one way to support under-resourced schools without asking individual people to make up the difference themselves.