One of our final projects in my Middle School Literacy course was

to create a unit plan you could potentially use in your classroom. Since
one of my areas of expertise is European History, I decided to create a
unit plan for any European History class: The Holocaust. The unit plan
contained three primary lessons concerning The Holocaust, while
students were reading the graphic novel Maus. The first lesson was
concerned with introducing The Holocaust and Maus to the students,
while the second lesson, having been taught several classes later,
contained a jigsaw strategy where the students would research a
particular topic from the novel and then teach the other students about
it. Finally, the students would be assessed in the final lesson of the unit
with a Socratic seminar in which certain students would be the
designated leaders of the seminar, while portions would be teacherled.
One of the Wisconsin Teacher Standards that fits this unit plan is
teachers are able to plan different kinds of lessons. Within this unit
plan I include a multitude of different literacy strategies, as well as
independent research skills and textual analysis of a complex text.
Ultimately the variety of different lessons are meant to give the
students a well-rounded and substantiated understanding of The
Holocaust.
This WTS holds a strong connection with one of the Alverno
abilities that I used for this lesson, diagnosis. This unit plan requires

the teacher to know exactly what their students are capable of and
gives the teacher a high goal to reach through the Socratic seminar.
The unit plan also allows the teacher freedom in assessing their
students comprehension of the subject matter. More than this, the
plan encourages the students to question not only the text, but als,
their students. By arranging my unit plan in this manner, I exhibited
another WTS through teachers understand that children learn
differently. By using multiple different strategies and lessons in the
unit plan, the teacher can modify areas to accommodate student
needs without compromising the subject material.
One of the primary frameworks that I used for the lesson came
from Paolo Freires critical pedagogy theory. Freires points that
explain that students are not vessels in which knowledge is simply
placed were particularly inspiring while I created this plan. Throughout
the plan I did not want the students to feel as if they were merely
being talked to or given information on lecture basis. Instead I sought
to create a plan that would encourage open discourse between
students and teachers on the subject and therefore, knowledge could
be gained from those natural interactions.