Unit Plan Overview

The following unit plan is adapted from the seventh grade English class that I have worked with this semester. In this unit, students used short films from the “Girl Rising” campaign as their mentor texts. These videos are scripted recreations of real girls’ struggle to participate in education due to natural disasters, child labor, and poverty. Students engaged in textual analysis of these narratives and had practice citing multiple forms of evidence from text and video. This unit combined literary analysis and creative work and gave students experience in connecting to texts on a more personal level compared to past units. This unit also offered students time to work both collaboratively and independently.

My plan breaks down this unit into a very basic outline to show the necessary components and activities. However, because this is a unique unit in that it includes both analysis and creation, there is meant to be flexibility within the plan to adapt to students’ interest and needs. This unit plan follows a style that Tomlinson and McTighe call "planned and improvisational" (2006, 89). With an understanding of the class' learning goals and how they learn, I planned while leaving room for adaptation and alteration based on progress. For instance, during the collaborative group work portion, many of the students expressed that they would prefer to have more time to work on building and practicing their presentations as a group before moving back to whole group discussions.

Additionally, the content of the “Girl Rising” videos necessitate discussion of important societal forces, such as racism, sexism, and violence. For many students, these discussions were personal and relevant. As the unit progressed, my cooperating teacher and I began to consider the ways in which equity and empathy were being employed in our lessons. Following the principles of a culturally relevant pedagogy, we dedicated more class time to working through these forces through discussion and building students' strength in the practice of empathy (Ladson Billings 2014). These were honest and extremely beneficial conversations that could not have been predicted within the formal unit plan. The element of empathy building through textual analysis and discussion developed as the unit plan was put into action. As Malik Muhammad writes, "participants get an opportunity to have voice and bonding, where we get to see the humanity in each other... in this space, moral authority and empathy rule over titles [and] age" (2019, 122). Within this unit, we aimed to have students engage with one another and with subjects of their texts with consideration for the humanity they all share. I think this is a testament to the extent of any unit plan. As educators, we may plan the aspects of a unit we must complete, but we can never dictate exactly how any lesson or unit will go. There is value in allowing flexibility in learning.