Helpful Guide to Unit Plan Format*

This unit-lesson plan format follows the so-called backward design approach to planning, much of which
is specific to Understanding by Design (UbD) (2004). The plan progresses backward in that it begins with the
end in minddesired results is 1st stage (ILOs in our format); assessment is 2nd stage; and teaching & learning
activities is 3rd stage (UbD, p. 25). These stages are not necessarily fixed in this order, as you may find yourself
going back and forth between the stages. The intent of the UbD is to focus on enduring understandings and skills
through focused curriculum and assessment.

It is important to understand that our format is for both unit and lesson planning. A unit plan covers
learning for two or more related lessons, usually several. A lesson plan covers learning on one topicoften
one period on one day. Our format taken as a whole is designed to facilitate the planning of a unit and the
individual lessons that make up the unit. As suggested above, learning needs to be sequenced and cumulative if it
is to be significant. As UbD points out, big ideas, essential questions, enduring understandings, and skills are
too complex and multifaceted to be satisfactorily addressed within a single lesson. For example, essential
questions are meant to be revisited over time, not answered by the end of a class period (p. 26). The objectives
(ILOs) of a unit provide the context for each lesson. In addition to UbD, our unit-lesson plan format borrows
strategies and headings from Sydney Walkers book Teaching Meaning in Artmaking (2001), following the work
of Heidi Hayes Jacobs, in particular the use of a big idea. Though big ideas are mentioned in UbD, the use of a
single big idea for a unit is central to Walkers approach.

In our approach to curriculum development in art and visual culture, it is as important to consider critical
issues that underscore your unit format and provide criticality to the big idea and essential questions. The purpose
is to encourage students to become critical thinkers and observers of their environment and the world. This is
highlighted by visual art, including contemporary and alternative forms of art, and visual culture, including media
representation, advertising, and graphics. A growing responsibility of art education is in teaching students to be
critical visual consumers by exploring visual imagery in all its forms and throughout multi-cultures.

Finally, headings and strategies were created for this unit-lesson plan format to integrate the above
characteristics and to improve the format overall. The purpose of a unit in our approach is to explore meanings
associated with a big idea and critical issue through art and visual culture, whether by means of artmaking or
other art and culture disciplines. Because big-idea meanings are broader than art itself, the understandings,
knowledge, skills, and dispositions associated with them have applications wider or bigger than art or artistic
behavior per se (e.g., emotion) or are ordinarily understood to belong to a category different from art or artistic
behavior (e.g., mathematics). Thus a unit exploring a big idea through art and visual culture will include questions
and learning that are broader than art to include (although not limited to) socio-cultural learning, social and
emotional learning, and humanities. When developing ILOs, it is necessary to stay true to the big idea/issue first
and considering learning beyond the subject matter and in keeping with the art for life philosophy. What does this
unit teach us about life? It is the job of the essential questions and sub-questions to insure that the students art
and visual culture competencies develop toward exploring meanings related to the big idea and critical issue.

* Adapted from Robert Russells Unit-Lesson Plan Guide.

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Format Headings with Explanations

Relevant Standards are established goals (UbD) directly relevant to and assessed in the unit. Most obviously,
these relevant standards will include art/visual culture goals. The State Standards for art education are one guide
to include, but should NOT drive the curriculum. They also can include established goals relevant to other
learning being coordinated or integrated with art in the unit.

Big Idea is the overarching, life-relevant concept specific to a unit. The big idea is a concept denoted by a single
word or term that is non-declarative, implying no truth value (e.g., the big idea power is neither true nor false).
Big ideas are highly complex concepts, whether positive (e.g., happiness) or negative (e.g., poverty) the
accounting of or resolution of which is, perhaps, unending and often contentious. Examples of big ideas can be
found in Walkers book on pp. 2, 140-141.

Critical Issues can be similar to Big Ideas in that they provide overarching, life-relevant concepts that frame the
unit. Critical Issues, however, imply matters as problems or difficulties that are unsettled or in a state of
controversy or disagreement. By considering Big Ideas as Critical Issues, controversies become the context of the
curriculum unit. The learning outcomes, then, are usually not definitive but lead to further questions. This inquiry-
based approach to education can instill in students a sense of exploration and inquisition that can lead to critical
thinking, an ultimate goal of contemporary art in general and certainly current art education practices.

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
Essential Questions are questions related to the big idea/issue with no simple correct answers. They are
designed to provoke & sustain student inquiry, while focusing student learning based on the big idea/issue.
Addressing foundational concepts, they raise important questions; naturally and appropriately recur; and stimulate
vital, ongoing rethinking of prior learning.
There are two types of essential questions: overarching questions & topical questions. Overarching
questions point beyond the particulars of the unit to the big idea and connect to other topics & contexts.
Practically speaking, topics, events, or texts specific to the unit are not typically mentioned in framing of these
overarching questions. For example, What is culture? is an overarching question for any unit on a specific
aspect of culture. Topical questions are subject-and-topic-specific. They guide the exploration of the big idea/issue
in relation to the units particular understandings, knowledge, and skills. Those in this category can be
broader/other-than-art.
Essential questions should include both overarching and topical questions but they need not be explicitly
identified as such, simply combined in a logical order.

UbD gives the following examples of essential art questions:

Overarching:
In what ways does art reflect culture as well as shape it?
How do artists choose tools, techniques, and materials to express their ideas?
Topical:
What do masks and their use reveal about the culture?
What tools, techniques, and materials are used in creating masks from different cultures?

Additional criteria for essential questions include:

They are few in number (2-5).
They are worded in language the students can understand, yet engaging as possible for the age group.
They are logically sequenced.

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INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) are unit-specific learning achievements/outcomes or objectives (in
contrast to tasks/processes). They are related to the issue/big idea and guided by essential questions. ILOs include
Understandings, Knowledge, and Skills. The 3-Circle Audit below visually represents the priority of each of these
categories in the learning process, from Understandings at the center to Skills in the periphery.

Skills

Under-
standings

Knowledge

1. Understandings
Understandings relate to the big idea and are derived from or aligned with the Relevant Standards. They are
clearly connected to the issue/big idea through the essential questions, and one or more understandings should
correspond one-to-one with essential questions. Like essential questions, understandings are both overarching (to
promote transfer of the big idea) and topical (specific enough to focus teaching, learning, and assessment).
Understandings are generalizations derived from inquiry. As generalizations they should not be stated too
vaguely. For example, Culture is a complex concept involving many different factors is too global to provide
useful and transferable insights into important ideas.
Understandings are inferences not facts. As such, they can violate common sense and conventional wisdom,
and are prone to misunderstanding by students (UbD, p, 115). Therefore, they cannot be covered; they must be
uncovered. As a teacher, one should anticipate students possible misunderstandings as part of planning.
Though not facts, understandings are enduring inferences or insights, thus presumably are true, at least for a
particular era, group, or discipline. They are also written as sentences, which as declarations imply truth value.
Contrast this with issues/big ideas.
Although understandings imply truth value, you should be careful to avoid stating them as truisms. Truisms
are statements that are true by definition (e.g., triangles have three sides) or state the obvious (e.g., musicians
work with sounds to create music).

Students should understand that Understanding is a challenging concept to consider in education, but is at the
heart of our goal as educators, and therefore placed at the center of the 3-Circle Audit. By beginning with student
understandings, the lesser important learning outcomes (such as the how tos) are placed at the periphery
instead of the center, where understandings belong.

i.e. Students should understand the role of big ideas/issues in driving curriculum goals and intended
learning outcomes. This statement implies that you, as students, should understand the role of big ideas/issues in
curriculum development, which I might assess by your ability to select a big idea or issue that is aligned with your
curriculum unit. In this case, your skill at developing a unit plan will allow me to assess your understanding of big
ideas/issues.

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2. Knowledge
Knowledge refers to information needed to meet the Relevant Standards and enable the intended
understanding. Included are vocabulary, terminology, definitions, critical details, important events & people,
sequences, and timelines.
The more students know about and have experience with the big idea/issue or unit-specific topic explored
the less literal and superficial is the students understandings and artwork expressing them likely to be. So, for
example, if the big idea is poverty, information about the War on Poverty might be taught, and students can
exchange their life experiences of being poor or being poor in one way or another. This exchange would be
described under teaching and learning activities and assessed for understandings and knowledge that may emerge
during or at the end of the unit, perhaps evident in student artwork. This learning may not be anticipated and may
not appear in the unit plan, itself.

Students should know/think/question The term know, think, question was expanded beyond the UbD to
know category in order to encourage critical thinking beyond facts and figures. To begin with, what should
students know by participating in this unit? Based on this new knowledge, what might students think about the
information? What, then, might students begin to question as a component of this new knowledge and critical
thinking? i.e. Students should know that the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko often utilizes technology and
architecture to reveal human pain in public formats. Students should think about multiple controversies associated
with his art. Students should question the impact if his work on the participants who are revealing themselves.
This process of understanding, knowing, thinking, and questioning allows for a natural progression in learning
that accounts for students own emotional, personal, and intellectual responses to new ideas and might instill in
students a stronger sense of self or instill in students a desire to create change (i.e social reconstruction).

i.e. Students should know where Understanding, Knowledge, and Skills are placed in the 3-Circle Audit.
Students should think about multiple ways of approaching a curriculum unit based on this process to meet
the needs of their students. Students should question the relevance of their unit plans for the students lives.

3. Skills
Skills refer to student abilities needed to meet goals or standards and to enable students to develop
Understandings related to those goals/standards. They also serve as a mechanism for assessing students
understanding by considering how a student can apply their understanding to real-world issues (i.e. performance-
based assessment).

Students should be able to This category takes into account the new abilities learned through this unit. This
might include artmaking abilities, such as firing clay pieces, or critical thinking abilities, such as the ability to see
an advertisement and question the social implications of it.

i.e. Students should be able to develop a Unit Plan with accompanying Lesson Plans based on a selected Big
Idea/Issue.

ASSESSMENT
Assessment is the process of collecting and evaluating evidence that enables the teacher or student to infer
the extent to which the units ILOs are being acquired. The goalis to obtain valid, reliable, credible, and useful
evidence. The mantra is to think like an assessor, not an activity designer. There should be a tight alignment
between the desired results we seek (ILOs) and the evidence we plan to collect. (UbD, p. 136) UbD offers the
following ways to design assessment that is valid, credible, and useful:
o Students are asked to exhibit their learning through authentic performance tasks
o Appropriate criterion-based rubrics are used to judge students products and performances
o A variety of appropriate assessment formats are provided as additional evidence of learning

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o Students are encouraged to self-assess

o
Assessment takes two general forms, formative and summative, the former at the start of and during unit learning
and the latter at the end of unit learning.

Formative procedures & criteria

Formative procedures for collecting evidence are carried out before and during the learning process. They
include, for example, pre-tests, informal checks for understanding, observations, dialogues, and pop-quizzes.
Criteria employed during formative assessment enables the teacher to infer students progress toward achieving
the ILOs and to make any needed corrections along the way before student learning takes its unit-end shape.
When writing only a unit-plan the formative procedures & criteria are summarized. When writing
individual lesson plans they are specific to each lesson and elaborated on, thus differ from lesson to lesson.
Summative procedures & criteria (below) are always end-of-unit, thus not lesson-specific.

Summative procedures & criteria

Summative procedures for collecting end-of-process evidence are several. They include:
1. Performance Tasks yielding one or more tangible products (e.g., artworks, portfolios, exhibits,
reflective journals, papers, self-assessments) and performances (e.g., crits, peer reviews & response
groups, demonstrations, oral reports);
2. Academic Prompts include student oral/written responses to open-ended questions with no single best
answer or strategy and typically requiring a defense. For example, How do todays digital media
enable contemporary artists to express themselves?
3. Tests are typically paper-and-pencil in form, e.g., multiple-choice and fill-in-the blank.

Criteria employed during summative assessment enables the teacher to infer students unit-end achievements of
the ILOs.

LEARNING ACTIVITIES (to include teacher presentation, student participation and activities, and teacher
guidance)
Teaching & Learning Activities are instructional strategies and learning experiences needed for students
to achieve the units ILOs and to equip them for the performances of learning in assessment.
UbD suggests the following elements for planning teaching & learning activities that are effective and
engaging. The acronym WHERE TO summarizes these elements:

How will the activities

W Let students know Where the unit is going? What is expected? Where are the students coming from?
H Hook students and Hold their interest?
E Equip students, help them Experience and Explore the Issue/Big Idea?
R Provide opportunities to Rethink and Revise their understandings, art, and work?
E Allow students to Evaluate their work and that of others?
T Be Tailored to the different needs, interests, and abilities of all learners?
O Be Organized to sustain engagement?