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Now we move on to the action part of unit planning. A useful strategy is backwards design - begin with the end in mind. Consider what the learning goals are for the unit, and then plan accordingly; identify learning experiences, resources, and teaching strategies.
Identify what you would like students to be able to know, understand and do. This will include the topics and skills from the framework, understanding the key and related concepts, knowledge about the global exploration, understanding the statement of inquiry and inquiry questions, as well as practising the selected ATL skills and other skills required to meet the unit’s objectives.
Connect a product or activity that would be reasonable evidence for the identified outcome. How will you know the students have grasped content, concepts and context? What do you want to see or hear for them to demonstrate proficiency? By creating a product, answering a specific question, leading a presentation, completing an exploratory task, contributing to a group activity, able to approach an open ended problem, a certain level of mastery in a quiz/test etc.
Design an engaging learning experience which supports understanding. What will the teacher deliver, what will students do and what else will be happening in the classroom? Investigating with manipulatives, group discussions, instructional video, designing, interactive lecturing, research and note-taking, guided explorations, playing a game, hearing from an expert etc. At this point you may want to start attaching relevant online and physical resources - just ensure they align to your learning goals.
Keep the approaches to teaching (collaborative, concept-driven, contextualised, differentiated, informed by assessment, inquiry-based) in mind when planning.
You may choose to organise lesson by lesson, but be flexible when teaching as some experiences may need to be extended or removed. Let’s consider our MYP1 unit 5, and draft what the learning experiences and resources may look like for the first few lessons.
SOI: Sustainable designs which optimise space can be formed using approximations.
Inquiry questions:
Factual: What are different ways to approximate?
Conceptual: How does approximation impact accuracy?
Debatable: In business, should profitability be a priority over sustainability when designing products?
Content: perimeter, area, volume, circles
Objectives: B, C, D
Summative assessments:
Criteria B - investigating how the perimeter of a pattern develops depending on which regular polygon started it
Criteria C and D - students have to measure dimensions of a chocolate box (cuboid) and asked to redesign a cylindrical container with the same volume but smaller surface area.
ATL skills:
Draw reasonable conclusions and generalizations (critical thinking).
Use memory techniques to develop long-term memory (information literacy).
Create novel solutions to authentic problems (creative thinking).
Here is a lesson plan template you can consider using to further develop your learning experience, and a complete example of it in action can be found here.