Unit Progress

I feel as if my unit is progressing fairly well. So far, I have been able to make several big decisions regarding what will be going into my unit and what the students will be coming away with. I’ll start by talking about my framework of power. I decided to create my unit around the ideas of power and corruption, since those were the big themes (to me) from the Shakespeare play I was assigned (Julius Caesar). With that as my starting point, I started to generate my essential questions in a way that would be applicable, accessible, and interesting to the students.

I then began work-shopping my ideas for what texts I should be using. I made decisions about my texts based on the different ways I could potentially use them to examine power dynamics, but also to look at corruption in government (again to really tie in Julius Caesar). I felt great about my text choices because I was able to link all the texts together in meaningful and scaffolding ways, weaving the texts around my key text, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This text is the most rich and diverse of my choices and includes a multitude of different examinations of what power is and what it means.

From that point I have been able to let my creative teaching brain generate tons of ideas for activities and assessments. I settled on the idea of concluding my unit with a Multi-Genre project, so with that in mind, I began to create a unit map/schedule based on how I wanted the MG project to evolve and develop throughout the unit. I decided on working on different elements each week for the MG project would help scaffold this large unit assessment over a ten week period so that the students would not feel lost or overwhelmed. With that idea in mind, I then developed my week by week plan by coupling the items of the MG project that we would be work-shopping that week with a reading that is an example of what the students would be creating. This way all of our activities would tie into one another in a way that would scaffold the whole unit, building up to our final unit assessment.

So far, this is what I have. I developed a rough sketch of my MG project and its qualifications, and overall, I feel confident moving forward with what I have. Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions for my plan!