Stepping Stones Chapter 7

Outline
I. Nine Steps in Planning Classroom Units
- Consider the Significance and Relevance of a Topic
- Brainstorm Ideas
- Formulate Unit Focus
a. Thematic Statement
b. Guiding Questions
c. Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
- Design, balance, and sequence learning activities
- Review linkages with standards or curriculum guide, adding or revising
learning activities accordingly.
- Plan a schedule
- Select ressources
- Plan students assessment
- Review the effectiveness of the Unit
II. Adapting Units for Your Classroom

Notes
- Unit is a portion of the curriculum that focuses on the particular theme. The theme could
center on the topic and its concepts.
- The students should experience integrated and subject-focused curriculum if the teacher
plans the unit to be integrated. An integral unit is:
a. Has integral unity, means the teacher you direct all thought and activity toward a
unifying theme.
b. Has external consistency, means the teacher explicitly intends to attain some of the
overall aims of the school with applicable goals of subject discipline(s).
c. Included meaningful aspects of reality that are related to the main discipline focus
- Nine Steps in Planning Classroom Units
a. Consider the Significance and Relevance of a Topic. A topic has to be suitable for a
particular grade level.
b. Brainstorm Ideas.
- Make a Web: begin by making a web diagram of the concepts and subtopics of
the theme. To show relationship among relevant ideas and topics.
- Workout your worldview
- Consider which aspects of reality are part of the topic and issues (unit focus, key
values, skills, activities in the appropriate cells.
c. Formulate Unit Focus
- Thematic Statement: describe overall goals.
1. Basic values, dispositions, and commitment that you want to foster.
2. Enduring understandings (help students make sense of what they have
learned and enable them to explain, interpret, and apply the key concepts) ,
major concepts, and key skills that you want students to acquire.
 - Guiding Questions, should engage the learners (questions at the students
level, post it in the classroom, and help the students to personalize it).
- Intended Learning outcomes (ILOs)
1. Insist on precise, prespecified standards by which you measure
whether students have attained each outcome.
2. Identify the desired results of classroom learning
3. Reconsider and alter your ILOs as planning progresses. Nevertheless,
if the thematic statement provides the compass direction
4. Help you see and work toward your destination
5. Include ILO to each category
- Content Outcomes: set out the subject matter and concepts that
students need to learn to understand the part of Gods creation
dealt with the unit.
- Ability Outcomes: indicate the abilities and skills students learn
and develop in the unit (problem solving, analyzing and
evaluating issues and situations, literacy and numeracy skills,
psychomotor abilities.
- Value and disposition outcomes: unit's purpose and worth to
affect your students' attitudes and responses, specify what you
hope your students will learn to value and how they will act on
what they learn.
- Expressive- creative Outcomes: Worthwhile learning can take
place during expressive -creative experiences even when you
cannot stipulate or anticipate.
d. Design and Choose Learning Activities
- Ensure that the activities fit the intents of a thematic statement and the
detailed learning outcomes.
- Suit the intended audience and form a balanced unity.
- Ideas to Guide the Learning Activities;
1. Contribute to thematic statement and ILOs
2. Help meaningful learning
3. Include a range of pedagogical strategies
4. Higher level of thinking but attainable level of achievement
5. Culminating activities that review the main themes
6. Resources are available
- The unit ends with one or two concluding activities in which students:
1. Consider a final overview of the unit
2. Give a thoughtful personal response
3. Complete a task that enables the teacher to make a final assessment

e. Incorporate Government Standard

f. Plan a Schedule. Without a planned timeline, units tend to take more time than
you intended.
g. Select Resources.
 h. Plan Student Assessment
- Gather the information about the students learning
- Evaluate the effectiveness of your teaching strategies
- Draw conclusion and make decision about future approaches
- Key points to improve the use of assessment:
1. Make assessment an integral part of unit design
2. Emphasize formative assessment and feedback
3. Align the learning outcomes, learning activities, student products, and
assessment strategies.
4. Used varied assessment strategies.
i. Review the Effectiveness of Your Unit Plan
- Adapting Units by determining the framework and direction.
a. Developing unit is time-consuming and thus you design it 2 or 3 per year and
continually develop it.

Reflection
The chapter that mainly focuses on the unit planning, helped me to think through about
the process making the unit plan itself. I like to prepare things ahead. However, I seldom
check what I have made and it shows ineffectiveness. I could have looked back at it and
review it for the sake of making myself sure with what am I going to tell the students.