Unit Plan - First Time, But Not the Last Time

So much planning. It feels like this year, and the next few, are days of constant planning. For the past few weeks, the days have been filled with writing various lesson plans for labs and FFA conferences, and with our first adventures at the big obstacle - unit plans. Through writing this first unit plan and beginning to work on my others, I've learned that unit plans are almost a necessary evil - they are really helpful and great to write cohesive lesson plans from, but when you're just starting out they can be really intimidating, especially since we my not know exactly what it is we want to teach yet, or for how long, etc.

There are so many parts to a unit plan that add to its intimidation, the lesson titles and objectives, materials, unit goals, resources, academic (not just agricultural) standards, unit evaluations, not to mention all the adaptations, accommodations, enhancements and connections, but I think the hardest and most important part is at the top of my unit plan - the unit rationale. The rationale, the "why are you teaching this?," "why does it matter?," the justification of why that unit is part of your instruction.

Writing the rationale for my units can be both the easiest and hardest part of preparing the unit plans, but is the best resource for writing my lesson plans for that specific unit. For my first unit plan, I wrote my Intro to Ag Careers for my 8th Grade Agriculture Rotations. This unit is the first of three units all of my 8th graders will go through and it was difficult to write it at first because I'm only providing them with a brief intro on agriculture before we spend the rest of the unit focusing on career preparation and long-term planning. I had to constantly remind myself that this unit was for 8th graders so I could be careful to not teach over their heads, but I also wanted to point them in the right direction so they could pick the right high school classes (of course, preferably agriculture classes) to set them down the path towards the education and/or career path they choose.

After having my peers review my unit plan and talking it out with several people I feel pretty good about how my unit plan is right now. I didn't have too many revisions suggested by my peers, most had to do with being careful when writing lesson objectives. One suggested revision that I really appreciated was to provide details on each of my unit assessments. Having to really think through what each assessment is, how many points it counts towards in a student's final unit grade, and where it fits in each lesson was really helpful, and prompted me to make some changes to various assessments and lessons that I think really improved the clarity of my unit.

Or your unit plan...

Writing these unit plans is difficult but I can already tell after writing the first draft and then writing one of my lesson plans for this unit that the process becomes much easier. The connection is clear, now I just have to figure out how to write all the lesson plans for all my units, which can be a little difficult since I'm not teaching an entire course, which means I'm not deciding the final assessments or course objectives.

Unit Plans: 1 down, 14 more to go!

May the odds be ever in our favor.