InTASC Standard 7: The teacher plans instruction that supports every student in meeting rigorous learning goals by drawing upon knowledge of content areas, curriculum, cross-disciplinary skills, and pedagogy, as well as knowledge of learners and the community context.
Unit Planning
Unit Planning is the next stage of the process, in which I outline essential questions, determine assessment methods, develop student-friendly versions of the criteria, and scaffold daily learning targets. During the unit planning process, I solidify my theme, select anchor texts that appropriately related to the power standard being addressed, and develop cross-curricular activities that further enhance the content covered.
Because I teach thematically, unit planning is where I feel I can be most inventive, and take more risks as a teacher. Traditionally, pre-kindergarten students cover holiday-oriented themes, such as pumpkins in the fall, fairytales around Christmas, and farm animals in the spring near Easter. However, unit planning allows me the breadth to design units that are also culturally responsive to students’ backgrounds and relevant to their everyday lives. Students cover topics such as sustainable practices (recycling, farming, nutrition), advocacy (civil rights, individuals with exceptionalities), and the world (other cultures, geography, languages), which align to our class core values and big goals.
Additionally, during the development of my unit, I begin to hash out possible learning centers and aligned activities that reinforce the content being covered. Whole group instruction is centered around core mathematics and English standards, so learning centers provide additional daily opportunities for me to refine my pedagogy in a small group and one-on-one setting. Thematic centers include content in science, history, geography, and technology that are otherwise skipped over in the pressure cooker of high-stakes testing. Crafting thematic centers also provides students with opportunities for real-world application of skills and a chance to see the content “in motion”, so to speak. Once a theme is developed and center ideas are drafted, I then “tag” the unit plan with possible TSG objectives that align to the given activity, which serves as another chance for formative assessment.
One essential component of my unit plan is the identification of supports and accommodations provided to my students with exceptionalities. Using my anchor texts, and the criteria for the standards, I can intentionally provide and prepare materials to intervene in the moment. Anticipating possible difficulties ensures that I cater my instruction not only to individual student’s needs, but also that instruction provides students the opportunity to engage in different modalities. The supplementary materials help students connect the skill to the content, and provide a high level of consistency over a unit, or even multiple units, so students can be successful.
Unit planning is the essential step that ensures the standards, related content, and my instruction are connected in a meaningful, sensible way.
Table of Contents
Pre-Kindergarten PLC Meeting Record
Professional Learning Communities (PLC) are just one facet of my school’s emphasis on job-embedded professional development, and teacher support. Grade-level aligned PLC meetings are teacher facilitated, and structured around the design of instructional programs targeted around a common student need, and the analysis of the student work as a product of that instruction.
My Pre-Kindergarten PLC uses our TSG documentation as an anchor work to frame our conversations and development around. While each team member uses the same standards and curriculum, we develop our thematic units and activities autonomously. Therefore, summative checkpoints such as those quarterly checkpoints mandated by TSG provide the ideal common assessment for us to evaluate, and draft next steps form.
During PLC meetings, each teacher organizes her student work, samples, profiles, etc. into high, medium, and low categories, which acts as a manageable way to gauge which students meet the established criteria, those who are close to achieving proficiency, and those students who would benefit from interventions for the given skill. For each category, teachers provide reflections on instructional practices that led to these results. Then collaboratively, my team drafts specific strategies for each group of students, in order to push their understanding to the next level.
The PLC meeting record, shown to the left, shows the collaboration around student work, specifically TSG documentation in the area of mathematics. Each teacher is responsible for analyzing the samples and determining the highest area of need. As a team, we noticed that students struggled with ‘subitizing’, so the agreed upon action step was for each teacher to use dot and object representations during word problems, a skill students were already familiar with, in order to provide additional opportunities for students to practice the subitizing skill.
The development of interventions and instructional next steps uses the established criteria for the standard as a framework. For instance, for a student whose work was labeled as “medium” missed one descriptor in the criteria (i.e. uses complete oral responses when answering the question). In order to support that student’s growth within the standard, I develop classroom practices that target this identified need. My team members also contribute ideas, and as a team, we create multiple intervention tools to greater impact all of our students.
Pre-Kindergarten: Unit Plan
Unit planning is an essential step in my preparation process for implementing a cohesive instructional theme. Unit planning allows me to see the “whole picture” of the theme, and strategically make connections between big ideas, and the content. It also gives me an opportunity to edit; dense themes can last for weeks, so it is imperative that I hone into only essential topics and ideas. This editing helps me focus my instruction on topics that are more relevant and interesting to my students.
During the unit planning process, I answer several questions that help me reflect on what I want my students to learn and do. Teasing out these details creates an outline of how I scaffold the skill for my students, and break it down into purposeful, manageable chunks. Each chunk aligns to a descriptor in the criteria of the standard, or skill. This step of “chunking” helps me better pinpoint any misunderstandings when they arise, and I develop individualized instruction targeted to the descriptor and the student.
Further, the unit-plan serves as an organizational tool to coordinate the cross-curricular activities and learning centers for a given theme. After establishing the power standard and skills being addressed, I gradually build in theme-related content into the daily structures of my class, such as read a-louds, snack, and the take-home activity calendar, which is mailed on a monthly basis. These aspects reinforce the content in subtle, real-world ways so students can begin to form ‘text to world’ connections of their own.
This unit plan is broken down into three stages: Desired Results, Assessment/Evidence, and Unit Planning, for the thematic unit of "Fairytales". The standards and essential questions center around characters in fiction stories. The subsequent assessment and TSG evidence collected, then, also aims to monitor student responses to story development and inquiries. The last piece, unit planning, outline selected auxiliary texts, and supplementary activities students engage in outside of whole-group instruction.
Each unit plan represents a large piece of my classroom instruction for the year, as I try to allocate two to three weeks to each theme. This structure gives my students the time to emerge themselves in the theme provides multiple opportunities to practice a given skill, while applying their knowledge of the content in learning centers and real-world relevant projects. The unit plan is unique to my classroom, as I intentionally select themes and cross-curricular activities with my students’ needs and interests in mind.
The picture to the left shows the final product of an application-based project related to our Fairytale unit plan. Following a week of study of various versions of the Gingerbread man tale, students mix and bake their own gingerbread cookies. Students apply their textual knowledge and use various materials to create their own interpretation of the main character.
The images above illustrate various ways that thematic content is interpreted and embedded throughout a unit. During the Fairytales unit, students engage in a "Gingerbread Man Hunt", as seen above left. My students follow clues around campus that engage them in problem solving and reasoning skills so they can locate the Gingerbread Man, providing a parallel to the story they've read. Students also explore and visit other familiar texts in authentic settings, such as during centers. The student, above right, listens to a version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, during the course of the Fairytale unit.
Pre-Kindergarten-Cross Curricular Activities
One important aspect of planning and instruction in the early childhood setting is the establishment of cross-curricular activities. In Pre-Kindergarten, a majority of my instructional minutes are spent in “student-initiated activity”. Therefore, it behooves me to be very intentional about the design of my learning centers, and daily routines, in order to maximize opportunities for teachable moments and meaningful exchanges.
One way I include content into my daily classroom routine is by incorporating thematic elements into “non-core” time, including morning meeting, tickets out the door, and transition periods. Students are exposed to subtle images and items in their classroom environment, which encourages oral language development and vocabulary building. Exposure to these elements connects what they've learned and heard through text into a reality.
Additionally, I select physical materials that reinforce the theme whenever possible. Particularly in mathematics, I utilize a variety of thematic manipulatives, and rotate them frequently in order to maintain a novel quality. The opportunity to manipulate content-based items not only reinforces the unit of study, but also serves my students’ sensory needs of tactile engagement.
This document is a culmination of daily morning and transition work that incorporates the theme, Fairytales. As I work through a unit, I gradually add materials to the slideshow, so that students can ignite their prior knowledge or we visit a previous lesson. As my PLC identified, students across the grade level struggled with skill of “subitizing” in math, and first-sound isolation in foundational skills. This document incorporates space-themed clip art, media, and manipulatives while addressing those deficits.
(Above Left) Students engage with the the unit's theme across content content areas, including mathematics, drama and snack. The storyboard shown above right is used in the dramatic play center, where students use puppets to re-enact their own versions of the familiar text. The storyboard provides a visual anchor for students, and acts as a tactile prompt for students who need a nonverbal cue.
(Above Right) This image shows a student working to sort edible building materials into the appropriate house, as designated on the snack mat. Students not only apply their textual understanding, but practice counting items, sorting, and quantifying skills.
Once I have drafted a unit plan and accompanying materials for my chosen theme, I can proceed to designing weekly and daily lesson plans in more detail.