states on the Internet). If we examine the New York State standards for English Language
Arts, you can see why I describe them as goals.
The English Language Arts Standard 1 is: “Students will read, write, listen, and speak for
information and understanding. As listeners and readers, students will collect data, facts,
and ideas; discover relationships, concepts, and generalizations; and use knowledge gener-
ated from oral, written, and electronically produced texts. As speakers and writers, they will
use oral and written language to acquire, interpret, apply, and transmit information.” But the
standards do not prescribe a specific calendar of lessons, instructional strategies, or transi-
tional learning outcomes. These are left to the professional discretion of teachers who indi-
vidually, and in conjunction with their subject area colleagues, must figure out the best ways
for their students to acquire and develop these skills over the course of a year. As long as
students perform satisfactorily on assessments, teachers are generally allowed wide latitude
to determine what and how they will teach. Because of the intimate relationship between
standards and assessments, we will return to this topic at greater detail in the chapter on as-
sessing student learning.
Most of my experience in secondary schools was as a social studies teacher, but I have
also taught reading, English, general science, shop, and business math, and I believe the
principles for successful planning are similar. In my social studies methods classes, I recom-
mend that teachers plan units, or packages of ten to twelve lessons at a time, and that they
start by “brainstorming” a list of both long-term (unit) and lesson-specific goals. I find it use-
ful to think in terms of four distinct types of goals—concepts, content, academic skills, and
social skills (see Fig. 3.1 for a framework for unit plan design).
·Conceptsare broad, overarching terms or principles that are continually reexamined
throughout a curriculum, like democracy in social studies, character development in Eng-
lish, standard temperature and pressure in chemistry, or congruence in geometry. They
also includemain ideasandunderstandingsthat are specific to a unit or an individual les-
son, for example, causal relationships in history or science, recognition of particular char-
acter traits in literature, or a rule for conjugating verbs in a foreign language class.
·Contentrefers to the factual information about a topic that will be considered during the
unit or lesson, for example, the result of a chemical reaction, the procedure for solving an
equation, the way a poet describes a person, or a sequence of events from the past.
·Academic skillsinclude activities such as thinking critically, writing expressively, speak-
ing clearly, and gathering and organizing information presented in different formats.64 CHAPTER 3
FIG. 3.1 Framework for unit plan design.
Topic: What will be taught on this day.
Goals: Where lesson fits into broader strategies for achieving standards, for example, pro-
mote literacy or critical thinking.
Concepts: Broad categories of fundamental ideas, for example, democracy, sequence,
communicative principle, causality.
Main Ideas: Specific ideas, relationships, or formulas examined in this lesson.
Content: Specific information examined in this lesson.
Academic and Social Skills: Subject-related skills developed in this lesson, for example,
problem-solving and social skills, e.g. cooperative learning, that will be emphasized.
Materials: Technology, activity sheets, and so on.