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or 3, and only with a small class size (up to around 12 students maximum) as much of
the way I set up the lessons depends on being able to monitor individual students
relatively closely. I chose the American Revolution as a thematic topic for the purposes
of this assignment but if I were actually implementing a reading comprehension unit I
would work with another of my students teachers to align with a topic they were also
currently working on or had worked on very recently so that my students would be better
able to make connections and use background knowledge. I also chose to focus on
comprehension for the specific purpose of understanding informational texts because
these texts tend to be more difficult for ELLs to understand, have higher levels of
academic and complex language and information, and are more commonly used in
History, Science, and Math text booksas opposed to narrative texts found in many
English classes.
Students would be given a reading comprehension pre-test on the first day that
follows the same formatshort passage followed by 10 multiple choice comprehension
questionsas the final test and many of the practice readings throughout the unit. This
ensures that students are familiar with the format of the test and that I monitor their
growth through comparing performances from the beginning of the unit through to the
end. I would also be using various exit slips to hone in on more specific skills, for
example: completion of KWL charts, questions, or completed sentence frames. I would
be including all of these assessments into each students individual portfolio to show
their growth. Then of course there would also be temperature checks along the way in
the form of in-class student responses, such as correctly pointing to requested text
features, responses to in-class examples, discussions, etc.
The first standard I chose was Employ the full range of research-based
comprehension strategies, including making connections, determining importance,
questioning, making inferences, summarizing, and monitoring for comprehension. This
could quickly and easily use a Google Image search to find visual support for any new
words, concepts, people, etcetera that students were not familiar with. In fact, in and of
themselves I see discussions as being an opportunity for differentiation because they
allow me to see where my students confusions are and adapt to them in the moment,
adding and changing supports as needed.
Reflection:
At first creating this unit plan was a little difficult because I knew that I wanted to
teach my students reading comprehension strategies but there are so many aspects to
reading comprehension that it was difficult to narrow it down to a cohesive unit. I think
this may be slightly easier in a real classroom because I would already have a general
idea of what specific strategies I needed to target and what my students would already
know that I might not then have to spend time on. For example, maybe in an actual
classroom I would know that my students dont need to be taught text features but need
to focus more on identifying main ideas and dont know much at all about using context
clues to help with vocabulary identificationsomething I didnt include in this plan at all.
I found myself very definitely falling into the magpie tendency because this was
not just one single lesson and creating my own everything for the entire unit would have
been enormously time intensive. I had worked with ELLs before on reading
comprehension using the Mr. Nussbaum resources that I used in this unit and found
them to be very useful as a diagnostic tool, as well as a great discussion starter on what
got confusing in the reading.
As a whole, I liked the UbD format. It seemed to me like an extension of the
backwards design method of lesson planning that we have been taught to use before,
just on a much larger scale. I found myself needing to make a concept map of my ideas
and skipping around a lot in order to keep everything straight and it actually took a lot
more time than I had originally thought that it would. The biggest struggle was coming up
with a general sequence, but once that was accomplished it was much easier to fill in the
blanks, so to speak, on the day-to-day activities.