How I formulate a unit

It's all well and good to know that you have a topical unit, but then you think about teaching on Monday and realize that you have no plans, no direction and no idea what you're doing when the bell rings. So I thought I'd post on what I do when I start thinking about the direction of a unit.

The first thing I do is identify where the holes in my knowledge are. For this particular unit, I knew that I knew absolutely nothing about magic, so I purchased a book on magic, and then I read it. I let what I read guide me to the next step.

What was my end goal? What do I want students to understand? I determined that I wanted my kids to know how the Romans saw magic and magicians and why, and that I wanted them to understand how we see magic and why.


I thought about texts I knew contained magic. The Apuleius and Quintilian quotes I got out of the book I read. I knew that the Golden Ass contains much magic, so I read through sections of that, and I know there's a great scene with Circe in the Odyssey. I also know that Hyginus wrote a (quite short) version of the Odyssey in Latin, so I went and found that scene and narrowed it to a section that the kids would (a) find interesting and (b) find relevant. I highlighted all the phrases and words that my students don't know.

I considered that in order to be able to effectively process and read, students need a visual vocabulary, so I began to think about where in pop culture we see magic. I knew there was a scene in Fantasia, that David Blaine bamboozles people, and that Hocus Pocus is about magic. So I spent about an hour trolling YouTube looking for clips from those and watching the ones that were short enough to viably show in class.

I ended up with Mickey Mouse in Fantasia enchanting brooms (doesn't that just sound like Clue?), David Blaine bamboozling Harrison Ford, and the witches in Hocus Pocus turning Thackeray Binks into a cat.

Then I went to my list of vocab, watched those three video selections, and figured out how I could make those selections work for me. I noted which vocabulary I could teach through the videos and which ones I needed to teach in another way. I prioritized the vocab, made short lists of words I thought I could effectively teach together. I made a list of activities I could do with videos that would promote acquisition of the structures I wanted them to know and be familiar with before they read the texts they were going to read. I thought about what kinds of reading activities could prepare them for reading an original text without modifying the original text. And then I started building my unit.

I should note that I build as I teach - I in no way have my day-by-day unit planned out before I begin teaching. I follow the lead of my class. Sometimes interesting things come up, and we do that. Sometimes I look at what I'm doing and realize it isn't working so change it, or realize that there's another cool thing I can do, so we detour to that. My day-to-day sometimes flies by the seat of its pants. I think about these major points in my unit mostly so I have somewhere I'm going, not so that I have a daily list of Stuff We Will Do. Others need or want that, or are organized enough for it. More power to them. :)

Someone asked me what my curriculum looked like and, to paraphrase, I told him that it looked like whatever it needed to look like to support my kids' acquisition.