Tuning Up a Curriculum Unit by Focusing on the Content

In this Journal of Staff Development article, professional development guru Jon Saphier suggests a 15-minute protocol for getting a teacher or teacher team to focus on the deeper purposes of a curriculum unit. The key, says Saphier, is to analyze the content students are meant to understand before getting into the activities, materials, student groupings, and behavior management. By digging deeply into the content, the teacher can reflect on the big ideas, the sequence, hierarchy, and relationships among them, the prior knowledge required to do the tasks assigned, what will be difficult for students, and what the big take-aways should be for students. Here some guiding questions for teachers or teacher teams:

• What content will you be focusing on?
• What are the most important things you want students to understand?
• Can you explain them in kid-friendly language?
• What would students need to know from their own experience in order to be ready to move forward?
• How would you break down this concept into parts?
• Which part of this concept do you think students need to understand first?
• How will you present the objectives to the class?
• Say it out loud just as if you were talking to the class.
• How will you present the content information? On the board? SmartBoard?
• How will you know if students understand? Will you have an assessment?
• If you were to go around and interview students at the end of the unit, what would you want them to say to show they really understand?
• Okay, now what are you going to have students do?

“When practiced in 15-minute conversations with peers, coaches, or administrators, content analysis quickly becomes a habit of mind that individual teachers internalize,” says Saphier. “The reward is intellectual satisfaction as well as better student learning.” 

Here are the big ideas and student outcomes for a middle-school unit plan on the human respiratory system that resulted from one of these conversations:

The big ideas:

• Every cell in the body, not just the muscles, needs oxygen. That includes bone marrow, hair, everything.
• When oxygen arrives at a cell, the chemical reactions within the cell release energy. In other words, oxygen is absolutely necessary for all cells to grow and muscles to move.
• The bloodstream is the highway that carries oxygen to the cells.
• We also have to get rid of the carbon dioxide that is produced by this release of energy. If we didn’t, we’d die.
• Respiration is a process for getting oxygen into the body so the oxygen can do its work as well as getting rid of waste products. It’s a lot more than what we call “breathing.” 

Students will be able to:

• Describe the mechanism by which oxygen enters the body and the pathways it follows;
• Explain the magic moment when oxygen crosses cell membranes (the alveoli) into capillaries and thus is transported through the bloodstream/circulatory system;
• Explain the process by which oxygen does its work in the body;
• Explain how the respiratory system expels items the body needs to get rid of (carbon dioxide and water).

“15 Minutes to a Transformed Lesson” by Jon Saphier in Journal of Staff Development, August 2013 (Vol. 34, #4, p. 56-59), www.learningforward.org; a video of a teacher conversation can be viewed at http://bit.ly/17k1kj0; Saphier can be reached at jonsaphier@comcast.net. 

From the Marshall Memo #497