A Lesson in Progression (Hey, I made a rhyme!)

As I had expected, this project has been a great deal of work. I have been pushing myself to think deeply about all the choices I have been making to ensure that my practices are sound and that my choices reflect my unit goals and objectives. The backwards design element has been a huge enhancer of my decision making because it forces you to see account for the long term, and without that perspective, I can see how unit construction could be confusing, unorganized, and have many pitfalls. At this point, I have greatly developed my 10-week unit calendar to try and account for everything I want to include in my unit.  I started this by structuring the objectives in the lesson week by week; trying to set a pace for learning that was achievable but also rigorous.  I then began to further decompose the process by thinking about how much time each week would be spent addressing the different areas that I want to include in my lesson. For example, how much time each week will we read aloud? How many chances for group work are there? How much time is needed for scaffolding? How many days a week will the students be making progress on their Multi genre projects?

All of these factors were tough to intertwine without trying a variety of options. I eventually settled on using each Friday in the unit to address a specific kind of writing to help supplement the student’s ability to complete the MG project. I then thought about having to scaffold each of the sytles of writing, so I tried to pair frontloading for the style with actually engaging in that particular medium (i.e. using a poem we are reading in class that examines power dynamics to set up what it means to write poetry). So basically this eliminated two whole days of instruction per week.

I knew I wanted to include at least one day a week in which we engage in reading aloud our Unit text, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I knew that to motivate my students to complete all of the reading for each week, I had to give them time to engage with the text in class, to prevent people from getting lost, falling behind, or losing sight of our overall goals. I combined the readings with chances to write, doing worksheets or some other activity to enhance the read alouds. So again, another day per week taken up by this activity.

This left me with two days a week basically to structure the rest of my unit. I decided to use these days to work with our texts, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in comparing what is going on in the story (plot developments, theme, mood, tone, power struggles) to another text of some sort (the kind of texts we would be modeling our MG project pieces off of). This became a helpful time saver and a check mark that students are able to take the ideas and concepts from different texts and synthesize or contrast them with Oscar Wao. This basically left one day a week for me to use where it was needed, on a week to week basis.

I structured the end of my unit around working on our MG projects and wrapping up all other loose ends. I also tried to apply my lesson to the challenges of the real world by trying to account for days off of school or make-up work days by building a buffer week into my unit. This week will still be structured and rigorous, but if I needed more time to tie up loose ends or reteach a concept, then I would have the time to do it and not be forced to move on before students mastered the material.

I have set my objectives for each of the five ELA categories, but other than that, this is all the progress I have made. My next step is to really work to structure and set a rubric for the MG project, which I honestly think will be the most challenging portion, since accounting for projects that will take many different forms is tough to try to grade or categorize for grading.