187. Unit Planning from Assessments

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In this episode, we’re exploring a backwards planning approach that breaks down the summative and formative assessment points of a unit and visually houses all of the lesson goals in the context of the Essential Question and the course priority standards. 

If you’re supporting teachers to develop their own standards-aligned units, this curriculum design approach may help! 

Why? 

This ASCD white paper summarizes McTighe & Wiggins’ Understanding by Design (UbD) framework for backwards planning. Simplified, it’s basically: What do you want students to achieve?; How will you know students have achieved these goals?; What learning experiences will best support them to get there? For more information on backwards planning, check out my blog post: Backwards Plan from the End of the School Year: The What.

Hattie’s research shows giving students feedback—this is really what any assessment, especially formative assessment is—has a large effect size at 0.70! So, intentionally building in regular points of clear feedback to students based on a skill(s) they’ve been working on is important.   

Another piece to consider is how we share feedback on assessments with students. Proficiency-based rubrics that focus on a handful of priority standards are my suggestion. Here’s why: Haystead and Marzano (2009) found teachers who repeatedly measured the growth of the same skills over time using proficiency-based rubrics noted a 34% gain in student achievement. In these classes, students learned more, experienced less stress, and had better teacher-student relationships. This approach also decreased inequitable “achievement” gaps (Crescendo Ed Group).


What?

I developed this for a group of teacher teams who had already selected their priority standards, developed a competency-based rubric, and drafted a unit Essential Question (EQ). The next step was to plan the assessments that would assess the rubric skills and help address the EQ. 

This is the visual I designed to show how all of the pieces were coming together to form a cohesive unit outline. 

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Step 1: Start with the guard rails: EQ and Priority Skills. 

I like selecting the priority standards first, since these are year-long and the EQ is unit-specific, but if an EQ generates excitement to plan, starting there is fine! 

For more on how to create a priority standards-based rubric, check out my podcast episode: Developing a Course-Long Rubric.

For more on developing an engaging EQ, check out this podcast episode: Crafting a Compelling Driving Question. 

Step 2: Determine the final project. 

Ensure you can use the full rubric—all or nearly all priority skills—to assess students’ work. I like to offer as much student choice and voice as possible here in terms of product (e.g., podcast, documentary, essay, presentation) and content sub-specialization (i.e., Which topic could they deeply dive into? or With which lens could they analyze the unit content?).  

For an example, check out my 5-minute YouTube video: Unit Planning Deep Dive: Standards-Aligned Projects. 

Step 3: Choose the length of the unit and cadence of formative assessments.

Longer units enable more depth, so in the template linked below, I’ve included an 8-week and 10-week template. I recommend a more “formal” formative assessment happens about once a week in which students receive specific feedback on at least one line of the rubric. I like standard weekly activities, so Feedback Fridays could be a nice use of that cadence. It also sets standard expectations for students. 

Step 4: Fill in the formatives. 

What should students be able to do at the end of each week? What format will each assessment take? Each assessment should be able to be assessed using at least one line of the course-long priority standards rubric. Flag the skill (rubric line) in your planning, so you can make sure you’re building all skills over the course of the unit evenly or strategically (e.g., you may have skills that build on each other or appear in an arc like inquiry activities.) 

Step 5: Fill in the lessons. 

Determine what you will teach each day to build students’ content knowledge and skills over the unit, ensuring they are prepared for each assessment when they get there. 

I use quick phrases for big lesson ideas when outlining my unit in a template like this. Details can come later! 


Final Tip

There is no one right way to plan. Find the planning strategy that works best for your teachers’ brains and go with that. As long as the key ideas of backwards planning and competency-based assessment are present and the unit is coherent and interesting, all is well! 



To help you start coaching your teachers to unit plan from assessments, I’m sharing my Assessment-Driven Unit Outline with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 187 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

TRANSCRIPT
​​0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons
Hello everyone, welcome to episode 187 of the Time for Teachership podcast. Today we're going to talk through and share a planning, a unit planning approach, where you backwards plan from your assessments. I know I've shared many unit building approaches in this podcast so far. Just want to give you one more in case perhaps some of the previous approaches feel like there's too many steps or it doesn't work with my brain Always happy to share another one. So here we go. We're exploring a backwards planning approach that breaks down the summative and formative assessment points of a unit and then it's going to visually house all of the lesson goals in the context of the essential question and the course priority standards. So we really, truly have all the pieces there in this visual way that really leans into the backwards planning approach. So if you're supporting teachers to develop their own standards aligned unit, or if you are a teacher developing your own, this curriculum design approach may help. So let's look at the why first. Let's look at the research. 

So there is an ASCD white paper that summarizes Antigua Wiggins' understanding by design framework. You may have been calling this UBD for short. This is backwards planning and simplified. Basically, what it summarizes it to is what do you want students to achieve Right? What's the end goal? How will you know students have achieved these goals Right? How are you going to assess it? What learning experiences will best support them to get there? What are your lessons going to be? And you can read more on the on the white paper. I have linked to that in my blog post. Feel free, but I think these are the three big goals. So what does that mean? When we are planning, we need to make sure we have an end goal. So, like what are the skills they are developing? What can they do? How will we know what are the assessments in place and what learning experiences are going to help them build those skills so they can do the final assessment and feel successful and not overly challenged right? So what's the learning journey? What are the lesson level activities? 

I also want to bring in Hattie's research here. So John Hattie's research on effect sizes shows that giving students feedback and this is really what any assessment, especially formative assessment, is has a large effect size at about 0.70. So this is considered very high in terms of effect sizes, meaning that intentionally building regular points of clear feedback, ie formative assessments to students based on those skills that they've been working on is a really clear stamp of check for understanding in terms of their development. You can kind of level set their understanding of where they're at with your assessment of where they're at and it informs, ultimately, their ability to self-assess, it informs their progress and their next step. It makes them feel like there is a path forward where they will be able to achieve all the things that you want them to and hope for them right. 

Another piece of information to consider is how we share that feedback on assessments with our students and so, in terms of what it literally is that we are doing with students, the paper that they receive, for example, proficiency-based rubrics that focus on just a handful right. I've heard them called the Fab Five of priority standards. That's my suggestion. So here's the research on that. Hayes and Marzano found that teachers who repeatedly measured the growth of the same skills over time Again five is great Using the proficiency-based rubrics, where we talk about levels of proficiency and lay it out for students very clearly in student understandable, accessible language. Right here is meeting the standards, exceeding the standards, approaching the standards, whatever the categories, are Folks who use that. 

Teachers who used that measurement of the same skills over time, using proficiency-based rubric, noted a 34% gain in student achievement in these classes, more than their peers in classrooms that did not use this right. So that far surpasses I mean by like a third more, like 130%, you know. Whatever that is huge. So in these classes students really were learning more, they had the information, they retained the information longer, but they also experienced less stress in the classroom, which I find really important, given that we are experiencing or observing very high reports of student stress, anxiety, depression, all of the things, particularly COVID and beyond, but even before. So it was markedly higher than years prior and that students in those classrooms where that type of feedback and assessment was happening had better teacher-student relationships. So again, I think that's probably contributing right to the decreased stress or decreased anxiety around things and feeling more successful. Is that relationships might be even a mediator. I'm not saying they are, I have not looked at that research angle but this approach, it really is equitable in nature because one of the things that the research also found is that it decreased the inequitable quote achievement gaps which were, you know, racialized, economized, like all the things, and so noting that this is truly an equitable move to think about, assessing in this way to think about backwards, planning in this way, with intentional assessment and an opportunity to share feedback with students. That builds their skills, decreases their stress, increases equity in your school and ultimately fosters really great student-teacher relationships. 

Okay, given all of that context, let's go ahead and look at, like, what are we actually talking about? For you know, maybe, what form might I give a teacher that I'm coaching to help them plan in this way? So I developed this for a group of teacher teams who had already selected their priority standards, developed the competency-based rubric which we just spoke to in that Hazel and Marzano research and drafted their unit essential questions. So I do think that it's important that we first do those pieces and if you're looking for information or how to's on how to do this, check out my previous curriculum design series in the past podcast episodes of Time for Teachership. Okay, so once we have a clear understanding of what are my top five priority standards, build out that competency or proficiency-based rubric. What are the different levels of proficiency? What does that look like for each standard? I have kind of a one-pager that I can use for any assessment for the whole year. 

And then, when we look at the unit level, the big first step is to think what is that exciting, compelling, essential question where every lesson in that unit will tie back to and give students information on how to respond to that essential question. Once we have that and again there are past episodes on how to do that well the next step is to plan the assessment that would assess the rubric skills and help address the essential question. So you're thinking about what do they need to be able to demonstrate in terms of skills and what content do they need to be able to respond to that essential question? So we're thinking skills and content, which is usually how we plan. 

So I designed a visual that I will link in the blog post for this episode to really demonstrate how all these pieces were coming together to form a cohesive unit outline. So I will describe this to you if you are driving, if you are able to grab the blog post. This is linked at lindsaybathlionscom slash blog, slash 187. But we have along the top. We have a rectangle on top which says essential question and a rectangle on the bottom which says comprehensive priority skills rubric. So again, these two pieces are foundational At this point in the planning. Once you get the template I'm sharing with you today. Those should be done and we should know the essential question and we should know the priority skills as well as have a rubric with details of the proficiency. 

Now the middle really speaks to the rest. So, while the essential question is what content we're teaching, or related to what content we're teaching, and the comprehensive priority skills rubric is what skills we are teaching or assessing students on, in the middle you can imagine several kind of circles leading up to a big kind of star I'm not quite sure how to describe this as a visual star with many points. So that's kind of like a really big circle or really that's the summative All along the way. Those circles leading up to the big star are smaller formative assessments and this answers the question thinking about that UBD framework, how do you know that students know the content and the skills right on the top and the bottom rectangles? So what we're going to do is these are kind of thinking about the guardrails of the unit, right? We have our essential question, we have our priority skills and, again, these are going to be year-long priority skills. You can actually reuse this over and over. The essential question is going to be unit-specific, right? So if you would like more information on how to develop any of those. I've actually linked to those previous episodes and blog posts in this blog, so feel free to go ahead and grab the information there. 

Now the next step after we've figured out the guardrails, the EQ, the priority standards, we need to figure out what is that final summative assessment. So what I would first do is make sure whatever ideas you have whether you're kind of doing a brainstorm dump, talking with a group, looking at what maybe other folks do however, you're getting that inspiration. Your mental checklist here should be that you can use that full rubric of all, or nearly all, priority standards for the course, for the year, to be able to assess students' work. So I should see, for example, if I'm using a social studies rubric that's claim, evidence, reasoning, written expression or clear communication, some sort of like. Does your, are the words that you wrote down like organized and can I understand them right? Some people would call these conventions whatever. 

If those are my four for the year, I want to make sure that my task has something to do with developing an argument, because then I could say, okay, there's a claim, there's evidence, there's reasoning, and I wrote it down. Argument, because then I could say, okay, there's a claim, there's evidence, there's reasoning, and I wrote it down, so I have clear written expression. So I have actually covered all four skills and I can assess all four skills in this particular assessment. So make sure you can do that and I really like to offer as much student choice and voice as possible here Gives you room for that co-creation, that student excitement, student ownership of the product. So the product can vary, but the prompt itself is going to be the same, right? 

So you might say the essential question is and I am just going off the top here of my head, so it's not a great one, but like I always use, like safety or freedom, so does the United States in 2024 enable residents to have more safety or more freedom? Right? And then so they would have to choose one side of that argument and then develop out their argument Now how they demonstrate. That could be a podcast, it could be a documentary where they're interviewing different people and their responses to that question. It could be bringing in clips, right. Whatever documentary consists of, it could be writing a traditional essay, it could be putting something into a PowerPoint, it could be a visual art collage or series where they explain in the captions exactly what their argument is. 

It could also be that they sub-specialize. So in that specific example, maybe they sub-specialize into like, okay, in 2024, when, at the beginning of the year or the end of the year, 2024 compared to another time point in history, compared to another country currently or in history, what about the people? Right, for whom? Right, who has more safety and more freedom? Right, if we're talking about incarcerated populations, like they're going to have a very different story than folks who are not experiencing incarceration. So I mean, I think just being able to invite students to sub-specialize or take a particular lens to the overall topic that all students are covering really gets them excited. And so when you develop the final project, I'm thinking more that you're developing the prompt and it might just be answer the essential question, and then you have some product options or you have students kind of create their own ideas for product options as well as keeping the essential question or the summative prompt broad enough that they can say I want to sub-specialize in, like different areas, and there's room for them to do that. 

If you would like some examples of how to plan your unit, that is, standards aligned, I do have a YouTube video that I will link to this episode's blog post. Okay, step number three. So just a reminder we have put on the guardrails of the EQ and the priority standards, we've determined the final project and now we need to figure out the formatives. So at this point we want to choose how long the unit is going to last how many weeks, for example and the cadence of formative assessment. So how often are you going to assess? I think longer units enable more depth here. So in the template that I will link in this blog post as your freebie, I've included an eight-week and a 10-week template option. You can certainly adjust from here, but I do like the depth that this involves and it enables you to kind of average around one unit per quarter, which is nice in terms of assessments, you will have one summative assessment per report card if you are a quarter-based school in terms of report card issuing. 

Now I recommend a more formal formative assessment happens, I would say, about once a week. I think that's a good blend of being able to truly kind of quote-unquote grade or assess or give feedback to students as the teacher, right, but then also have students get it more frequently than like every two weeks, right. They need to know where they're at and have that feedback more regularly. So I don't think this needs to be the entire rubric. I think you want to determine, as the teacher, or you want to coach people, to determine, if you're coaching teachers to build this out what feedback they're going to get. So if I am building up to a four-line rubric right, let's use that example again of claim evidence, reasoning and written expression then I might say one week I am making sure that students get feedback on their claim, and the next week I'm making sure they get feedback on their evidence reasoning, and then the fourth week maybe we're doing some written expression, some conventions work, whatever. So that might be a cadence that you use. 

You can certainly assess and give feedback more often, but I think this is kind of the target, knowing that teachers are very busy and have to grade a lot of things. So weekly activities are great. I like building it into my schedule as well in terms of the student lens, of when students get to actually engage with that feedback, perhaps take action based on that feedback within the class and not making it something they have to take it home to do or leave it up to them to decide when and where they're doing it. So I like to do something like feedback Fridays or, you know, workshop Fridays. I used to use Fridays, but you can use Wednesdays, you can do alliteration, whatever you think works best. But I think that weekly activities that are embedded, you're not teaching a new lesson, but we're really giving students the skill building opportunity to review their feedback and take action based on it. Perhaps conference with the teacher, that could be a nice use of that weekly cadence and it sets that standard expectation for our students so they know that space to talk with a teacher or to get feedback specifically on their work is happening. 

All right, step four we've kind of figured out the outline of the formatives but we want to fill it in. So what should students be able to do at the end of each week? So, again, thinking about that skill, thinking about the content they should know each week, building up to be assessed, using, as I said, one line of that course long priority standards rubric. And I want you to, or coach teachers to flag the skill which is the rubric line in the planning so you make sure you're building all of them over the course of the unit either evenly, like we talked about, with like one per week. So if we have four standards for the summative that we're assessing, you know one week is standard one, two, three, four or strategically, so you might have skills build on each other or appear in an arc, that kind of continue. So you might actually do something like this. 

Let's say we have week one, claim, week two, evidence, week three, reasoning, and then we're going to go back to claim evidence, reasoning again. So we've done six weeks and now in the seventh week we're just introducing writing conventions, right, and then we might even have like a okay, I'm going to do your evidence with reasoning, I'm going to give you both at once. I'm going to give you a prompt that enables you to do both of those things and I'm going to see your evidence with reasoning. I'm going to give you both at once. I'm going to give you a prompt that enables you to do both of those things and I'm going to see how your evidence and your analysis are connected, because they are very interconnected as standards, right, and so you can kind of like play with it and build students up, right. Alternatively, you could say okay, claim, write a claim, claim evidence. Okay, now claim evidence reasoning. You could do multiple standards each week. You could also have students practice each standard each week, but you're just giving feedback on one of those pieces or your teachers are just giving feedback on one of those pieces. So just kind of saying that there's many ways to do this, but we want to be intentional, that we do cover all of the standards we're eventually assessing and we do give students at least one time point during the unit where we're giving them feedback on it and letting them do something with that feedback to grow that skill. 

Okay, number five this is where you fill in the lessons. So you're going to determine at this point what you will teach each day to build students content, knowledge and skills over the unit. So this is where teachers are really planning out the preparation students will have coming into the assessment. I usually plan really lightly here, so I will use a quick phrase for a big lesson idea when outlining my unit in this template, for example, that I'm sharing with you. Details can always come later. 

So that means if I'm saying, okay, we need to really like, explore possible claims, or we are going to look at what makes a good claim, we're going to look at mentor texts or something. Then I would just write mentor texts in my outline at this point. I'm not going to find my mentor text right now. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of Googling and finding some great mentor text. That's going to take me way too long and it's a different set of skills than outlining and planning. So you want to keep it real light touch here. Key phrases, key ideas we will go back and fill in the details later. That's a completely different mindset that you want to be in. It's a completely different skill set. So if we're bouncing back and forth, this is going to take way longer and people are going to be frustrated when your teachers are filling this out. If you're a coach like you, don't want to breathe the frustration. You want to build the. Yes, this is possible, we can do this, and so really stay on that high level. Just a word or phrase to indicate the general skill or content that you're building there. As a final tip. 

So we went through all five steps here. There is no one right way to plan. There are so many options for you and so this is one way if you want to adapt this way or go back in the podcast library here and find a different way, find a way that I haven't talked about at all, totally something that will work for you. Whatever your brain wants you to do, I think go with that, right? So if you have some teachers who are really excited to plan in one way and some teachers who are excited in another, great, and then you just set the parameters for, for example, you have to have these components, but they can come in any order and you can build them out in any way and your visual presentation of all this on one page can be very different, right? 

So the key ideas are backwards planning. 

We wanna start at the end. We wanna go to the beginning Again. If you wanna start with the essential question or something instead of the priority standards, that's fine, but we do, as we're planning out the formative assessments and the lessons, we do need to have the summative in mind. We do need to have kind of an idea first. Even if it's not the format, it's like the question they're going to answer, right, which could again be the essential question, which is fine if you're starting there. For that reason, as long as that key idea of backwards planning is in place in some way, and as long as competency based assessment is present and the unit is overall pretty coherent and interesting, I think all is well, great, go for it. So we've talked through a lot of our steps. If you would like to actually get the template that I was kind of talking through that you may use, you can grab it for free at the blog post for this episode. It's called an Assessment Driven Unit Outline and it is located at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 187. Until next time, everybody. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page

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