Arch-Frenemy for the 2011-2012 School Year: Unit and Lesson Planning

So, you would think, based on my very idealistic, very powerfully stated, very passionate and certain-sounding proclamations about why English class is important, that I'd be a really excellent lesson and unit planner. Not so. I'm actually very bad at it. In fact, I feel pretty stupid for the first time in a very, very long time.

This Tuesday, I was in one of my University of Pittsburgh classes, and we were planning our lessons and coming up with unit foci for Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust. Now, this was challenging enough for me since I wasn't crazy about the book. But more so because I still don't get this backward planning thing. If you're not an education student, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. But conceptually focused units that focus around an inquiry-based question like "What counts as American Lit? What does it mean to be American? How does Pain lead to Growth?" or something like that--these are pretty weak examples, but I'm thinking on my feet here! Anyways, I totally understand the theory--you teach with end goals in mind. You know from the beginning generally what you want to accomplish and how you're going to determine whether you've accomplished it or not (summative assessment), and the lesson plans map out how you get there. Each lesson should have learning goals and a way to measure if students have met them, and the activities should facilitate their successful completion of the formative assessment, which should prepare them for the summative assessment, which should measure the depth of their inquiry into the unit's focus question. It all sounds fairly simple and straitforward. Really, it almost seems like common sense, right? Wrong.

Where does grammar fit into that? I know you could have a unit on literacy, something like "How can using language in different ways work differently," and you could talk about audience and grammar in relationship to one another. And in this unit, writing would fit in well, and close readings of other literary texts looking more for technique than for content. But what if you're teaching within a curriculum, and it doesn't allow you to plan your own units per se, so you have to fit grammar into a unit on a piece of literature. How on earth can you expect grammar learning goals (on the lesson level) to reflect the conceptual focus of the unit? I guess maybe they don't have to, because you could think of them as writing improvement strategies which will help students with their summative assessments. And what about IEP assessments and benchmarks? how do I make time for these in my tightly-structured inquiry-driven highly-cognitively-demanding backwardly-designed units? Do the IEP kids just have to figure out ways to make things up? Is there ever any space for downtime? Free writing? SSR (sustained silent reading)? These are things we're being directed against, but which I think are super valuable, if not essential, to students who are trying to learn, but also trying to survive adolescence.

It's hard to put out hypotheticals, and I don't want to alienate any non-educators who are reading this blog, because I need all the potential sources of feedback I can get. Suffice it to say, I still don't see how I'm supposed to balance everything I'm learning and turn it into a coherent unit plan with these dainty, structured, perfectly synthesized little lesson components. I sound like I'm being sarcastic, but that's totally how it feels--like unit and lesson planning with UBD is just way too structured and neat and tidy to allow space for everything I want students to get from my class--it's so narrow! And it really seems contrary to the inquiry-based learning idea. But any far-reaching planning seems contrary to inquiry-based learning. I honestly probably don't know what I'm talking about. And by now, my professors are probably rolling their eyes (mentally, of course) because I still don't get it, and I'm still asking the same questions over and over; my MT sure doesn't care, because to her, UBD is just some new educational trend, and is no better or worse than diary mapping for unit planning; and I don't know if my supervisor is really that concerned about the planning aspect of things--I think she's more there just to check in on my classroom presence, presentation, withitness, etc. So I don't know where to go for answers. And Smagorinsky (he's an educational theorist who we read quite a bit of in our program, and he talks A LOT about backward planning) just leers at me from the pages, scowling self-importantly, so pleased with himself that what he proposes makes no practical sense to me. So, here I sit, making myself feel more and more stupid with every stupid sentence I write to even try and explain how I'm struggling. Hopefully, things get better. And better still, hopefully it doesn't take until my second year in the field for everything to come together for me!

Where're we Headed?

Today, and this week, I've been troubled by questions about curriculum. And this is another one of those now-familiar tales of the disparity between what I'm learning at Pitt and what I'm seeing at my placement. Trying to negotiate this disparity is beginning to seem like an unavoidable but quite challenging center to my preservice teacher training.

Let me start with a brief discussion of what I'm learning at Pitt. It all sounds really great and reasonable and smart and consistent, and I think I really like it so far. As far as planning/curriculum, we're learning how to plan unity using backward design. Basically, the unit (perhaps even the course) is guided by an investigative question like "What is a nation?" or "What is/are the American dream(s)?" Thinking about that guiding question, you plan your summative assessment for the course/unit, and you plan activities and texts for engagement that will help students to investigate the question guiding the unit/course. Each lesson, too, has learning goals of its own that help students work towards the unit question, and formative assessments that work towards the summative assessment. (broadly and simply: formative=assessment as you go, summative=assessment when you're done, though they're perhaps significantly more complex than these simple definitions can account for). So you might use three texts that describe three different versions of the American dream, ask students to articulate/critique/discuss the representations as you go, then ask them to describe their idea of the American dream, in comparison with the representations in the text.

(I think you can also work on particular skills through the unit, too, like crafting persuasive writing, so you would incorporate different elements of persuasive writing into the activities you use for each text, maybe you'd stage a debate between characters from one+ texts, and then as a unit assessment, you'd ask students to persuade you (or each other, or someone else) that their American dream is somehow best. We haven't explicitly worked on this aspect of unit planning yet, but I suspect it might be coming)

According to my mentor teacher, what I'm doing at Pitt and what my placement school tries to do is called understanding by design, or backward planning. However, what my placement is doing is somewhat different. Their units, instead of being focused on guiding questions, are built around state standards that are selected to go along w/ each unit. Each grade has a standard curriculum that the departments developed in conjunction with the textbook, and they go through each of the state standards and select texts/textbook activities that address those standards and structure their units in this way. My mentor teacher explained that this type of unit planning is, indeed, "teaching to the test," but that because the school I'm placed in has failed to make annual yearly progress for so many consecutive years, she says that they have little option but to teach to the test, because students need to pass the test, and if they're not passing, teachers need to be able to demonstrate that they taught from a standards-based, aligned curriculum so that they cannot be held accountable for students' failure on the tests.

That's not to say that my Pitt classes don't ask us to incorporate PA state standards. Every lesson plan we do addresses at least one, usually more, state standards, but we don't plan "to the standards," we more like plan with the standards "in mind," addressing them as we address the strategies and the investigative questions we're trying to cover.

To be honest, attempting to negotiate these two perhaps-similar-but-significantly-different approaches to unit planning is fairly exhausting and stressful. I totally understand my mentor teacher's and my placement school's attitude, even though I really don't agree with it. In our accountability-obsessed educational climate, it's really easy to become focused on covering the broad range of topics on the test--teachers and administrators understand that their schools and their jobs depend on test scores, so naturally that's what ends up being emphasized. Even if a noble, self-sacrificing teacher were to say, "Forget the tests, I'm going to educate my students the best way I know how, and if I'm successful, they will be able to do well on the tests." She's not doing her students any favors if her lack of an "aligned" curriculum gets her fired when the school fails to make AYP, and she's not around to self-sacrifice for pedagogical ideals any more, anyways. So I see this in part as a real problem with standards-based assessment. My mentor teacher told me it comes down to a choice; "You either dig an inch deep and a mile wide and try and cover as many texts as possible and use all the strategies and standards, or you dig a mile deep and an inch wide and really deeply and richly investigate a few texts/standards." The suggestion was not only that the former was preferable, but that it was the school's only option in this educational climate.

My classes and professors at Pitt, I'm sure, would not want me to be discouraged in this way. They would ask me--I think--to construct curricular units that are inquiry-driven and student- (or learning-) centered, but that also addressed state standards as I went. And I know there are ways in which this is possible--we've seen them done, in the examples our theorists lay out for us. But many of the preservice teachers in my program, as well as the teachers I've interacted with at my placement, are stuck with pre-fabricated one-size-fits-all curricula that prescribe texts to use and skills to use with those texts and activities/resources that work to achieve those standards/skills. I know that even within the tightest curricula, there's room for modifying activities, texts, etc to account for unique groups of students etc, but I think that requires even more creativity than planning one's own unit does, because it requires a lot of delicate work and tremendous insight and knowledge. I don't know that I even feel prepared to create my own units--I'm not even half-way through the program, so I'm sure the skills will come, but the fact remains that, at this point, I can't imagine planning units that are effective and inquiry based and not prescriptive and restrictive--much less to preform the exponentially more challenging task of trying to fit a pre-fabricated unit to fit my needs and, most importantly, the needs of my very different students.

This challenge, which I'll certainly have to face in the future as an entry-level teacher, says nothing of the challenge I currently face. How do I fit my lessons into my mentor teacher's curriculum? She simply doesn't use a lot of the strategies Pitt is asking me to use; can I ask her to when we're co-planning lessons? Or would that be totally an imposition on the unit she's designing with a very particular and calculated goal in mind? Will the shape of the class totally change when I "take over" in the Spring? Is that fair to the students, who will suffer from whip lash, being jostled from a class structured based on one pedagogical approach to one with a seemingly totally different approach? Will it adversely affect the school, or my mentor teacher, by robbing them of their overtly and explicitly "aligned curriculum?" I'm already running into issues, because the couple of small activities that I've conducted that, in my classroom, would be the foundation for building a unity, have been basically treated as tangents, footnotes, asides from the class, which is taught totally differently. Already, after only a couple of lessons, there's a disconnect between "her" classroom and "my" classroom (which, obviously, is still her classroom, but is also, in a way, Pitt's classroom, because Pitt is the institution telling me what to do/implement at my placement). Are the students already suffering? How much will they suffer over the course of the year?

I'm really at a loss about this. Even planning a unit based on a guiding question seems potentially overly-limiting to me, so planning within a prescribed curriculum seems that much more limiting and frustrating, and being asked to modify that prescribed curriculum to meet the standards Pitt is setting for a high-leverage-practice-based classroom is even that much more challenging. What do I do? I feel like I have no authority over ANY of these competing forces, so how do I work them all together for my good as a developing teacher and for her/my students' good?

Super challenging stuff that I am REALLY struggling with! Would LOVE feedback on these issues!