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Unit designs give teachers an overarching view of the learning goals, tasks and assessments needed to impact learning. The aim of pacing guides is to provide teachers with the general topics and length of time necessary to be spent on learning goals in order to help teachers stay on track. However, do pacing guides really help teachers? The reality and research of pacing guides are that these provide more pressure for teachers and make them feel even more overwhelmed before ever starting the course or unit. Very importantly, they fail to include the depth of tasks and learning for students, the most important focus and stakeholder in education. Therefore, the very critical question here is, are pacing guides truly benefiting teachers and students? The disadvantages of pacing guides Pacing guides focus extensively on the time that learning goals, objectives and topics should be taught instead of the rigor and depth of tasks. Generally, pacing guides only have learning goals numbers and brief topics which provide little clarity to teachers. When focusing on curriculum guidance, teachers and students need to be aware of the overarching unit, learning goals aligned to the tasks and assessments to have clarity of what is being taught in order for learning to be profound and meaningful. A set of numbers and brief words do not provide clarity and depth for teachers or students. While pacing guides are used in conjunction with other curricular guides, let’s face it, pacing guides typically serve as a gauge of a teacher’s effectiveness, rather than to support the implementation of authentic and rigorous tasks. This is evident in many organizations, where teachers are reported and get in trouble for not keeping up with the pacing guides. While pacing guides are said to be created to help teachers, research states that these are more stressful than beneficial guides. Not only do teachers feel overwhelmed by a time allocation document that very often consists of multiple pages, but also by the fact that they still have to find or create tasks, assessments, and student engagement activities as these are generally not provided in a pacing guide. In creating pacing guides, focus is spent on itemizing the time allotted for learning goals to be completed instead of on creating to rigorous and authentic tasks and assessments that teachers need to implement in order to provide students with a profound education. This time spent on creating pacing guides could be spent creating unit designs that will truly help teachers gain at-a-glance, overarching, in-depth knowledge of the real-world and cross-curricular tasks, assessment and student engagement activities that can be used in teaching and learning. Instead, the focus of pacing guides is on the time needed to cover objectives instead of the rigor and quality of learning. Pacing guides do not allow teachers and other educators to meet the individual and collective needs of our students since there is a time stamp for finishing learning goals. In order to profoundly impact learning, we must cater for the individual needs of students as students learn at different paces. Research and effective teaching pedagogy require that we assess students’ learning needs often and adjust instruction to meet these needs. However, are teachers truly and genuinely allowed to do this knowing that they have to follow a pacing guide for specific learning goals? As we progress in education, we push for more personalized and individualized learning, yet we regress with pacing guides. Are pacing guides truly benefiting students? The benefits of Unit Designs All teachers, especially new teachers, need curriculum clarity and they rely on the guidance of the curriculum experts to help with paving the path for rigorous task creation and implementation. Unit designs are very effective in not only providing teachers with more clarity, but also students, the ultimate stakeholders, with a more in-depth learning. Unit designs consist of a blend of all the effective researched strategies that powerfully impact teaching and learning. These include learning goals, rigorous real-world tasks, project-based learning, blended and individualized learning, student engagement activities, representing learning, and more. Unit designs also itemize a general pacing for completion of the unit that is not rigid and overwhelming. Instead, this general pacing allows teachers to meet the needs of students based on formative assessments and help each student master content and achieve at high levels. The gurus of unit and curriculum design and planning, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, suggest that we plan with the end in mind. In one article to teachers, Grant Wiggins advised teachers to plan backwards to incorporate authentic tasks using worthy goals. Unit designs provide teachers with the opportunity to blend learning goals and generate worthy goals by unpacking state standards and aligning them to authentic and rigorous tasks. Some educators believe or have been informed that state standards are not allowed to be unpacked to create student friendly learning goals. State standards are created to guide learning; I do not believe any state will object to the creation of aligned student-friendly goals that lend to aligned rigorous learning experiences. The incorporation of cross-curricular high cognitive demand tasks allows us to meet multiple learning goals and heighten student critical thinking. When students have adopted the art to focus on the depth of learning, we have inadvertently impacted pacing because students have strengthened their neural connections to learn at higher levels. We are in an educational era that focuses on innovative and individualized learning. Unit designs help us progress rather than regress as we focus on student creativity and individuality in learning. While there is a general pacing guide for each unit design, this just being a total number of days to complete all learning goals within a unit, teachers feel free to genuinely meet the needs of students as they engage in authentic tasks. Differentiating learning becomes a main focus in helping each student master and creatively represent their learning because there is no day-to-day time constraint on when learning goals should be completed. In his article to teachers, Grant Wiggins suggested that teachers should focus on what students should do with their learning. Unit designs give us the opportunity to depict ways for students to innovatively represent their learning. Representing learning is not a part of pacing guides, but it is included in unit designs. We spend hours planning and teaching in order for students to learn, so it is critical that we focus on ways to ensure that students are given extensive and consistent time to creatively represent their learning; unit designs allow for this to happen. Blended learning and problem-based learning are also part of unit designs and these help teachers increase the rigor and personalize learning even more to meet the needs of each student in reaching their highest potentials. As we analyze test scores nationally and internationally, we notice that our students are not performing at the high and critical levels of thinking that they can perform at. Could it be that we need more focus on profound unit designs that provide our teachers and students with quality tasks, overviews of learning, and most importantly, representation of learning, instead of pacing guides that focus on the general topic/numbers and amount of time that content is covered? Knowing that a minute section of unit designs provides a general pacing, and unit designs focus primarily on the tasks, learner and the depth of knowledge attained, which would benefit our students more, pacing guides or unit designs? Why not allow for the creation and implementation of unit designs that will provide teachers and students with powerful teaching and learning experiences? Do you want to close the achievement gap, impact rigor, critical thinking skills and increase teacher’s capacity? If your answer is yes, then I strongly encourage the creation and implementation of unit designs. Note from the author:
As an educator in the U.S, I taught at a Title 1 school in NC with a demographic of 96% free and reduced lunch and my students took high-stakes tests. I was given the flexibility to focus on the creation of unit designs similar to the ones I used when I taught in my country of origin, Trinidad and Tobago. My students in the U.S. engaged in research on cliff diving, fireworks, foreign exchange currency, and participated in Math labs such as The Birthday Candle and Big Gulp lab. They also engaged in presentations, gallery walks, peer-tutoring, small group instruction and more. I was never asked to use a pacing guide, instead I created and used unit designs. My Algebra 1 and Geometry scores were 100% for consecutive years (scores went from 45% and 14% respectively) and 100% of my IEP students showed growth in their state tests. I am thankful to the leaders I had during this time, especially my academic facilitator who was very focused on providing students with an in-depth education. If I had to follow a pacing guide, these scores and the depth of knowledge and 21st century skills my students acquired would not have at all been possible. References Mctighe, J. Three Lessons from Grant Wiggins. https://jaymctighe.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Three-Lessons-from-Grant-Wiggins-1-2.pdf David, J. L. What Research Says About Pacing Guides. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct08/vol66/num02/Pacing-Guides.aspx Comments are closed.
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Cherry-Anne GildharryOn this page, you will find blogs on educational connections and my life's experiences. Ideas, thoughts and views are my own and are not representative of my employers. References/sources used are public articles found on the internet to support my blogs. Archives
April 2024
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