already provide a pacing guide or scope and sequence. Such a document may or may not be useful in planning for standards-based instruction. If it was developed with a traditional, content-driven approach, it may not help. Consider that any such document should serve the students’ needs, not the other way around. The teacher may need to revise any documents that do not approach sequencing of instruction from a standards-based approach before the teacher can use them for planning standards-based instruction.
Once the sequencing process is complete, the teacher has a general plan for the year. The next step is to look at specific units of study and plan how to share this journey with the students.
Creating the Unit Plan
When designing a unit plan, teachers must provide students with a series of scaf-folded learning opportunities based on the proficiency scale’s learning progression. Understanding that progression is key to creating an effective unit plan. Also essential to the unit design is a focus on priority standards. The priority standard and its associated proficiency scale provide both the teacher and his or her students with the sequence of learning that will guide student growth.
Early in the unit, the focus should be on establishing a solid foundation of the prerequisite knowledge and skills for the priority standard. Focus will then shift to moving past those basics, identifying learning targets that represent the steps in achieving proficiency on the priority standard. At some point in the unit, the teacher will present students with the opportunity to operate both at and beyond the standard. The proficiency scale clearly presents this progression of learning. Obviously, instruction and learning activities will be different at higher and higher levels of the proficiency scale. Students require more direct instruction as they deal with basic knowledge and skills, and they can handle more independent learning opportunities as they achieve and exceed proficiency.
Moving students to and beyond the standard is an important consideration when planning a unit. In a traditional system, teachers facing large amounts of content often feel bound by having to move forward to “cover the content” or “make it through the textbook.” In a standards-based system, where the focus moves from covering content to developing student knowledge and abilities as the standards guide, the teacher’s task is to help every student reach proficiency on every priority standard. Teachers must find how every student can reach proficiency on the priority standards. By carefully selecting priority standards and spending the instructional time to help students reach proficiency and beyond, teachers will provide their students with a deep understanding of the important material. Some content will have to go to make room for this kind of instruction, but the result will be deeper-thinking students who appreciate what they have learned.
Types of Lessons
In order to link the proficiency scale with requisite instructional strategies to operationalize this learning progression, it is useful to identify several different types of lessons students will experience throughout the unit. Marzano’s (2017) The New Art and Science of Teaching is the basis of the descriptions of lesson types here. Marzano (2017) identifies four types of lessons and associated activities.
1. Direct instruction (DI) lessons: When students experience new content, teachers often use instructional strategies that they might describe as direct instruction. In direct instruction lessons, teachers will do many of the things good teachers have been doing for years when they share new content with their students: they identify the important information, chunk the content, provide opportunities for students to process that content, and process the information. Teachers are often in front of the class and leading students through the content by directly presenting it in a direct instruction lesson.
2. Practicing and deepening (PD) lessons: Once students have a good grasp on the new content, teachers ask them to engage in activities that deepen their understanding and abilities with that content. Instructional strategies in practicing and deepening lessons are different than when introducing new content and asking students to engage in high-level critical thinking. A few examples include examining similarities and differences, examining errors in reasoning, or using structured practice sessions.
3. Knowledge application (KA) lessons: Lessons at this level require students to apply their deep understanding of the knowledge or skills that the priority standard requires in ways that direct instruction lessons or practicing and deepening lessons aren’t normally asking. At this level, the teacher’s role shifts to facilitator of the learning, and students often work independently on activities such as problem solving, creating and defending claims, investigating, conducting experimental inquiry, and the like.
4. Strategies that appear in all (All) lessons: Teachers use some important instructional strategies at every level of instruction. These include strategies such as previewing, highlighting critical information, reviewing, revising knowledge, reflecting on learning, using purposeful homework, elaborating on information, and organizing students to interact. While these strategies may be less likely to define a particular type of lesson in the sequence of developing understanding and ability in the standards, they will be present in the plan.
Figure 1.4 links Marzano’s (2017) four types of lessons with the levels of a proficiency scale.
Source: Marzano, 2017.
Figure 1.4: Lesson types and the proficiency scale.
Although there are exceptions to the relationship this chart depicts, direct instruction lessons, dealing as they do with new content, will occur most often when teachers are dealing with score 2.0 content, and with the initial instruction to score 3.0 content. Once students arrive at score 3.0, teachers move quickly away from direct instruction lessons to practicing and deepening lessons, since these lessons advance the level of rigorous understanding students have of the knowledge and skills that the standards require. Finally, although teachers don’t share content labeled as score 4.0 (by definition, score 4.0 has students operating beyond what is taught in class), students have multiple opportunities to demonstrate ability at score 4.0 by experiencing knowledge application lessons, featuring instructional activities that are often student-driven and that require students to apply their deep understanding of score 3.0 content in unique circumstances they have not encountered before.
Sequence of Lessons in the Unit
In linking the proficiency scale to a unit plan, teachers will sequence the type of lessons and their associated content to gradually move students along the learning progression depicted in the proficiency scale. Early on in the unit, students will need work at level 2.0 on the proficiency scale in order to understand and process new information. Eventually, the teacher moves them to level 3.0 activities and offers the opportunity for them to work beyond level 3.0. This provides a logical sequence of activities connected to the learning progression found in the proficiency scale, and that means students are working toward, and possibly beyond, proficiency on a priority standard. Consider the eighth-grade ELA teacher who is working with a standard on identifying theme or central idea of a literary or informational text. One important task for the teacher to consider as she begins the process of creating a unit plan for a priority standard is to consider what proficiency means for the standard. After some thought, the teacher may produce—or have given to her—a proficiency scale for this standard as follows (figure 1.5).
Source: Adapted from Marzano, Yanoski, Hoegh, & Simms, 2013, p. 89.Source for standards: Adapted from National Governors Association
