ELLEN
BERG
Diary #25
Rethinking Units to Create More Immediacy
I have been rethinking the whole way I do units.
In the past few years I have been writing units that span nearly a full quarter. Each unit included many learning objectives, smaller assignments that helped students learn content along the way, and a large, final assessment at the end of the quarter. I have been pretty proud of my units because of the time and practice allotted to my students to master concepts before formal assessment. If you had asked me a month ago, I would have told you I would never teach another way. But the thing about teaching I have found is to never say never. Faced with only five weeks to complete my fairy tale unit, I had to revamp the unit to fit into the smaller space of time.In five weeks my students completed two projects. One, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, was to work with a partner to identify five characteristics of fairy tales, develop a definition of a fairy tale, and present using PowerPoint.
While the results for some were poor (largely because of off task behavior), the overall motivation, attitude, and thoughtfulness of my students increased dramatically. No one was asking me, "What PowerPoint presentation?" like other students had asked me, "What magazine article?" in the previous unit. It seemed this project was more important to them.
The second project which we just finished last Friday was to rewrite a fairy tale of the students' choice from the evil character's point of view. We read several examples including The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieza and "Interview", a poem by Sara Henderson Hay that presents Cinderella's stepmother's point of view. Students had two weeks to write, revise, and type their stories. As a bonus, we sent in each student's story to Barry Lane's writing contest for recycled fairy tales. With this project I had very little problem with students being off task at any point, and all but maybe five students turned their stories in on time. I have not begun to assess them, but after reading through several of the stories during the past week, I am encouraged. I witnessed once again a positive attitude about the task, and students seemed very mindful of the scoring guide and task deadline.Creating more task immediacy
With the results I have been getting, I have to give pause to reflect upon the whys. Why are my students more focused? Why are they more likely to turn in their work? Why are they more interested and excited?
I think the shorter project time has a lot to do with the results I am getting. Middle school students seem to be in a time vacuum; without the immediacy of a task deadline to guide them, I think they are more apt to procrastinate. Our students live in the here and now, not in the hazy, distant end of quarter. I have decided this realization does not mean I have to give up my longer projects; to the contrary, I think as long as I create intermediate deadlines with tangible products that will be assessed on the way to the larger assessments at the end of the unit, I can create the same sense of urgency and importance as with these smaller units. It is a matter of breaking down the task into manageable parts. A second reason I think the past two projects have been so successful is because I have made a conscious effort to start first with what my students need to know in a backwards design sort of approach. I have tried to do this with my larger units, but using Grant Wiggins' process on a smaller task helped me understand the process a little better, producing better results in task design. The recycled fairy tale task was designed in response to my students' struggle with point of view, both in class and on a variety of district and state assessments. It felt good to be responsive to my kids, to remember I am teaching kids, not curriculum. Just when I think I have task design mastered, I find I have much left to learn.
