How to Create a Unit Plan

Creating any part of a curriculum from scratch is a challenge! Unit plans are no different. Changing standards, multiple preps, and a too-short planning period are not a recipe for success. However, creating a unit plan will save you time in the long run. Let’s create a unit plan that helps students learn the course material while also saving your sanity.

What exactly is a unit plan?

A scope and sequence will provide a big picture look at the entirety of the year and the progression in which standards will be taught (grab ours here); the unit plan is the zooming in and grouping of lessons that have topics, skills, and themes in common. A unit plan can consists of:

1. Standards
2. Mathematical practices or process standards
3. Teaching strategies and models to be incorporated
4. Assessments

But bonus points if it also includes:

• Vocabulary
• Big Ideas
• Common Misconceptions
• Essential Questions
• Pacing calendar

What are the benefits of having a unit plan?

Creating a unit plan will help you front load the work. On the Food Network, Ina Garten has all the ingredients chopped, measured, and ready to be cooked. When I cook, something gets burned. What is the difference here? Prep work!  A unit plan is like cutting the veggies, measuring the portions, and preheating the oven.  It makes for the actual lesson planning to be faster and more efficient.  

Benefits of a unit planning include:

• Content gets adequate time upfront
• Gives direction for planning time
• Prevents standards from being left off or forgotten
• Plan for spiraling in content
• Clear direction for assessments
• Provides a varied approach to activities and teaching strategies

How to Create a Unit Plan

Sometimes school districts will provide a detailed unit plan, but other times they provide something more vague, like the title of a unit and the number of days you have to teach the content within the unit.  I have found unit plans to be incredibly effective in maximizing my planning and scaffolding the learning for my students.

1. Break Down the Standards

Start by reading the standards and breaking down the various skills and concepts.  Some districts require these to be written as “I Can” statements and used as daily objectives. Even if you are not required to have them, it’s a great idea to post them and share the daily objective with your students throughout the lesson.  The idea here is to describe what a student can do by the end of a lesson.

Remember that one standard does not equal one daily objective. For example, let’s take the 7.G.5 standard that says “Use facts about supplementary, complementary, vertical, and adjacent angles in a multi-step problem to write and solve simple equations for an unknown angle in a figure.” In our curriculum, four daily objectives are taught to cover this single standard. Here is one of those daily objectives: “In this lesson, students will identify different types of angles and use complementary and supplemental angles to write and solve equations.”

If you are reading a standard and thinking “what does that mean?” then I will bring you to our next step…

2. Plan Backwards using Your Summative Assessment

If your district provides a scope and sequence, it is possible that they also provide a summative assessment (or a benchmark). If you don’t have a summative assessment provided, I would search for or write questions that are similar in rigor to what students would find on your states’ end of year assessment. Typically you can find the standards coded on the previously assessed state exams. 

If you have All Access, the formative and summative assessments are provided, so simply read through and complete the assessment(s) to get a feel for the level of rigor in which the standards need to be taught.

3.  Scaffold the skills from basic to complex

At this point, I grab a calendar and a pencil and begin putting skills on paper. Consider what skills have been learned in prior years and where gaps may exist, so that you can place emphasis and additional time on those areas.  Make note of lessons that may be more difficult so that you allow adequate opportunities for students to become familiar with the content.  Our All Access Unit Overviews include a section with the prior year’s aligned standards. 

If you want an editable calendar to start brainstorming, download our free unit pacing sheet!

4.  Incorporate Mathematical Practices

At this point, I really like to look at the different objectives and skills and brainstorm how I can incorporate the mathematical practices (in Texas we call them process standards) through activities.  This might mean stations where students are analyzing for the error or a lab on constructing triangles.

5. Investigate New Strategies

Regardless of how many years you have been teaching, spend some time investigating strategies for instructing the specific math skills in your unit. It wasn’t until I taught 6th grade for the third time that I started teaching multiplying fractions and dividing fractions with models. It is never too late to improve your teaching! Not only will this benefit your students’ content knowledge, but it may lead you to increase (or decrease) the number of days allotted for each skill.

In our All Access Unit Overviews, there is a section that provides a video reference to the key skills included in the unit. Watch the videos to see if there are additional ways to teach the material.

Writing a unit plan can be done, but if you are an All Access member, Unit Overviews have been written for you! You can spend your time internalizing the content on the overview to prepare for your upcoming unit instead of starting from scratch. 

Remember that unit plans are plans. They are not written in stone and can be adjusted in real time. How do you write a unit plan?

Maneuvering the Middle has been publishing blog posts for 10 years. This post was originally published in 2015 and has been updated for accuracy and relevancy.