Hello team.

Thank you for your work on building up the lesson plans in ways we discussed during our conference. The unit as a whole has some promising attributes, but it falls flat when it comes to the clarity around desired outcomes and the performance task as tied to those desired outcomes and to the individual lesson activities, objectives, and materials. We discussed ways you might have rounded out the performance task during our online conference, but somehow that did not happen in the revisions and finalization of the unit plan. Below are my detailed notes for the team as I worked through the unit plan and then some individual notes for each of you on your own lesson plan and materials. Many comments are around areas for improvement – intended to spur your thinking and foster your curiosity and continued study, growth, experimentation in the classroom, and development as you move into your careers in the ESL field. I wish you the very best with everything and am always just an email (or Tweet) away if you have questions.

Sincerely,

Julie

Notes on the Unit Plan for the Team:

Very nice description of students’ assets in the pre-planning portion of the unit plan. This helps me better “see” and understand this class of learners. I am unsure about the numbers and levels of students in the class, however. In one place your plan states there are 8 beginners, 8 intermediate, and 8 advanced students. In response to a later question, you state there are 8 intermediate and 12 advanced students. Then, in a later question, you say there are 4 beginners, 8 intermediate, and 8 advanced. What is the actual number of students and their overall proficiency levels? Some of these responses total 20, some 24. In another question it is stated that there are 20 students, 11 males and 9 females. Editing and continuity in your written plan is very important, so that assessors and colleagues do not have to guess or make their own choices in terms of picturing the class as they read the plans. Just another small note about finalizing work and handing in what is finalized and professional: it’s clear there were some formatting issues and that extra columns appeared in the section about the unit standards. It would have been great for someone to take the time to delete those extra columns and widen the existing boxes being used for content and language objectives. You could also have switched from a portrait orientation to a landscape orientation for the presentation of the project. These things would have made it much more readable and easy to work with – something to consider as you prepare unit and lesson plans for your employers in the future.

Good selection of two key ESL standards to drive the lesson. The content standards, while interesting, are too numerous and thus, unfocused.   Two maximum would be an optimal number for a unit of study, as stated on the template. I do like the focused content understanding statements in the next section of the unit plan. What are the two state standards that tie most directly to those statements? That would have been a great way to narrow down and select the content standards. Also, where is immigration in these content understandings and state standards? That is the key content in the lessons and is the theme that runs throughout the lessons, yet it is not mentioned in this unit plan in any of the statements about desired outcomes.

In the performance task section of the unit plan, I run into a bit of a problem in that the art and the big idea for the unit disappear. What happened? We discussed during our meeting in early December ways of blending the work with the art and images around immigration and the interview to create one larger essay about immigration that is infused by the studies of art, Obama’s speech, sample narratives, an interview with a relative, all of it. The product presented, however, is a simple summary of interview notes. This could have been a formative assessment, work assigned in class or as homework. I have trouble seeing how it is the summative performance task for the entire unit which includes so much more than one interview with a relative. Furthermore, the content understandings that you expressed in the performance task section of the template, do not directly tie and express the earlier statements of content understandings in the unit plan (those stated just after the targeted unit standards). Something has been lost. Likewise, the standards listed in the performance task are not measured by the product you present. The visual arts components are entirely missing – sure it is assigned as a homework assignment on day 6, but really more as an after-thought than an integrated aspect of the unit that helps move students to understanding the big idea for the unit. Finally, the rubric is very general – only one target language form is listed. This is problematic in a unit designed for ELLs, where language should be primary and clearly visible at all times. There is mention of presentation and use of art in the rubric, but nowhere else is that noted – it is not part of the description of the Perfomance Task description and it is not shown in the model response. These inconsistencies and this incompleteness in your final product are really troubling. These are things that you should have worked through as a team and edited closely as a team. These are things I remember discussing with you as a team in December, making it all the more troubling that the energy was not put into revising the performance task and really carefully designing the unit and lessons with a UbD approach – starting with the end in mind and planning backwards from that clear, measurable outcome tied to carefully selected standards and reflecting the unit’s big idea and the linguistic, academic, and content learning needs of this diverse group of ELLs in this 6th grade Social Studies class.

As for the lessons, as individual lesson plans, they are good. They have many of the components we read about and discussed as best practices in ESL instruction and materials design. There are even links between lessons and some that stretch over the span of the 6 days. The big problem arises in that the Performance Task only relates to lessons 5 & 6 directly. Much of the content learning in lessons 1-4 and even some of the language learning from previous lessons is lost when it comes to the desired outcomes and the end product for the unit. So, although there is some good work done in individual lesson plans, there is nothing binding it all together into a meaningful unit of study.

Nice ideas for museum, community, and home connections in the post-lesson plan part of the template. I wonder how you might utilize each of those opportunities to deepen content learning around the visual arts and around immigration. I wonder also how you might use them to highlight and practice the many language targets in the lessons that comprise this unit (immigration related vocabulary, past tense verbs, pronouns indicating point of view, sequencing words, question formation with wh- words). So many opportunities and such rich resources, but how will they be used to deepen content learning and language development?

Finally, when I read the central focus in your planning commentary, I see that there is no alignment to the standards identified around visual arts or the unit’s big idea. As it stands, the visual arts components and the hands-on artistic creation as homework at the end of the unit (not even shown or assessed in the Performance Task model) are simply add-ons to a unit that is more about asking and answering questions than about anything else. What a lost opportunity! There is so much going on in terms of reading images and interpreting visual representations throughout the lessons, as tied to target language forms such as formulating questions, using target vocabulary, etc., but then that is all lost in the actual desired outcomes and final product for the unit. All of the elements are there – it just didn’t coalesce. Much of that, I fear, is because the Performance Task and the desired outcomes were not well designed or articulated for the team, as noted earlier. Although individual lesson plans have many positive components, the entire unit falls short in terms of solid language development and content learning. Students will not be able to explain the big idea for the unit as it was never explained or discussed in the lessons. Students will not walk away with any concrete understandings about immigration that could tie into their Social Studies curriculum (the heart of this class). Students will have developed various language skills, but not a set of related vocabulary, grammatical forms, and sentence structures that relate to their Social Studies curriculum or even to the types of academic writing they will be asked to do as middle school students. Rather, there are many pieces of language learning that happened in individual lessons, but with no synthesizing task asking them to make use of those pieces, they are lost. This does not represent a successful integration of content and language in a unit as a whole.

I appreciate all of the time and thought that went into the planning commentary. You do show the threads connecting individual lessons, and they are real and definitely visible to me as I examine the lessons (as I noted in an earlier statement). The main thread, however, that is missing is the link from all of the lessons back to the unit’s big idea and to an appropriate performance task that draws from the learning in each of the 6 days. Why look at so many images, listen to speeches, read narratives, if only to tell the story of one relative in isolation from that very rich context that was created in the 6 lessons? Students could likely have completed the performance task with support from only lessons 5 & 6, so why did you develop lessons 1-4? And yet, there is such great content and such deep learning that happens in lessons 1-4, but there is no way to share that content knowledge and language learning in the Performance Task, a simple personal narrative. As noted above, we did discuss this when we met online and I suggested an essay that would be more expository and would synthesize all of that learning. Such a sad, missed opportunity for these ELL students. They can do more than write personal narratives. Your 6 lessons prepared them for more and then asked so little of them in the end!

I think that as a team you might have struggled to agree on desired outcomes and an appropriate performance task before you began lesson planning. Then, perhaps, the lesson plans grew and took on lives of their own, and you might have been left trying to pull it all back together in the end. Maybe? I’m not sure what the struggles were exactly, though this was what I noticed when we conferenced and why I kept drawing attention back to and giving suggestions around the performance task and the target standards and outcomes. Hold this in mind as you work with UbD unit planning in the future, as you collaborate with colleagues in your schools, and as you continue your work to be the best content and language teachers you can be.

JAMES:

Nice content objective and decent language objective. The language objective is missing 2 key components, however: modality (answering orally or in writing?) and language function (description, analysis, persuasion…).

Outstanding collection of art images for this lesson. I really appreciate the time you put into finding those images – a variety of perspectives, faces, styles. Nice prompts for this lesson.

Good introduction of language focus in Do Now. Simple, fun, will get students ready to work with those question forms. I like that the language aspect is highlighted in the objectives for students, also, but what about the content? Why isn’t the content goal also made clear to students at the start of the lesson? Similarly, the guided practice does give more practice with the target language form, which is great! What about intro to the content, however? Given that this is a Social Studies class, I would expect some direct reference to content before students jump into the independent practice and face content for the first time. It doesn’t need to be much, as this is an exploratory and inquiry-based lesson, but at least a statement of the theme and the goals related to visual arts and social studies standards or immigration themes would be helpful for students who need to contextualize their learning.

Excellent check for understanding before moving into the independent practice and nice differentiation of the activities for students as related to their grasp of the target language forms.

The design of the independent practice activity is very interesting and quite fun. It helps students work with targeted language and also introduces the unit topics via images. Nice start to the unit. I wonder, though, if students will hold onto this questioning language for 5 days and still have it accessible for their interview portion of the unit. What might have been a closing exercise (exit ticket, quiz, journal write) and a homework assignment that could reinforce and cement this learning while also creating a record of the lesson for students to refer to at a later date when they need the language form again in the unit? Also, where is the synthesis of or instruction around the content introduced in the lesson? Even in a more inquiry-driven lesson, the teacher generally asks for students to share what they noticed in terms of the content or does some kind of summation or synthesis activity with students to get a sense of what they noticed and learned about the content as they worked with the images. The topic of immigration – a central theme in the unit – has not been mentioned at all in the lesson, nor are there any statements about the idea that art records and communicates the human experience. Where is the visible integration of content and language learning? Why keep the content a secret from students?

Overall, there are some positive aspects to this lesson plan and there is a clear focus on language. A bit of revision to make the content more visible would really help this lesson fit well into this unit of study for this 6th grade social studies ESL class.