Instructional Planning - Research and Additional Resources

This article reports details of a social validity study for developmentally appropriate assessment linked to professionally sanctioned practice standards and indicators. Based on these results, we offer recommendations to advance valid, sensible, and contextually appropriate assessment for early childhood intervention.

NCTM has released this series of books which help teachers determine the big ideas and essential understandings for math concepts, how each concept develops across grade levels, and how to assess the concepts. These books are essential tools while unit planning.

This book describes how to design curriculum that emerges from children's inquiries.

This book discusses the importance of planning for effective early learning, though it does not stress a formal unit planning approach.

This guide helps teacher teams to collectively plan for and deliver highly effective units of study in grades PK-2.

This study examines how a group of elementary (grades 3–5) pre-service and in-service teachers incorporated Engineering Design-based Science Teaching (EDST) into their planned science instruction.

This book takes the reader step-by-step through the curriculum design process: from identifying national and local standards and translating them into user-friendly language to crafting meaningful writing assignments and assessments that effectively reveal student strengths and weaknesses.

In this paper the authors evaluate 85 elementary education teacher candidates' integration of technology into interdisciplinary units that the candidates wrote during the semester before their full-time student teaching internship.

This article describes a model that starts from the basics of the OWL (observe, wonder, learn) large-group discussion strategy then moves onto new experiences that serve as the jumping off point for student-generated questions and investigations.

This article provides a brief overview of research on teachers' planning processes and the place of mental and written plans. It focuses on possible elements of written unit plans for primary mathematics, and the relative importance which teachers attributed to these elements.

This book provides practical and accessible tools for developing a map and for making the important connections among all unit map components, including differentiated instruction.

This short article introduces the C3 Framework and includes the IDM Blueprint, which is one way of planning a unit.

Written by the lead authors of the C3 Framework, Inquiry-Based Practice in Social Studies Education: Understanding the Inquiry Design Model presents a conceptual base for shaping the classroom experience through inquiry-based teaching and learning.

This article presents new variations of the blueprint to support curricular and instructional strategies that target specific goals—for example, taking informed action, the need to fit inquiries into limited class time, and the promotion of student-centered learning.

This book describes innovative assessment practices for Social Studies teachers.

This report describes a new assessment design approach called scenario-based assessment (SBA) and explains how it can be used to measure the reading ability of school-aged children in the current context of high standards.

This book includes thorough explanations, step-by-step exercises, and detailed templates, assessments, charts, tips, and prompts centered around key CCCS concepts for grades 6-12.

The Parallel Curriculum Model (PCM) allows teachers to determine student performance levels and design intellectual challenges that help students develop expertise in specific subject areas. This book provides sample language arts units written by practicing teachers to demonstrate what high-quality curriculum looks like within a PCM framework.

This is a primer for teaching secondary English and a comprehensive guide to creating and using four to six week instructional units.

This describes how to create a concept-based curriculum.

This describes how to plan, design, and implement literature-based instructional units for ELA.

This describes how to create a concept-based curriculum.

Clear, concise guidance enables teachers to quickly integrate low-prep, high-value lessons and strategies in their middle school and high school classrooms. Every strategy follows a practical, how-to format established by the series editors.

Through collaborative discussions and the ensuing creation of a generative unit assessment, this article finds spaces to authentically understand ontological growth and continual learning through assessment.

This book outlines basic teaching strategies, such as questioning and exploration of concepts. It also provides advanced strategies for teachers who are already implementing inquiry-based methods. Section 2 is on designing Project Based Learning units.

NCTM has released this series of books which help teachers determine the big ideas and essential understandings for math concepts, how each concept develops across grade levels, and how to assess the concepts. These books are essential tools while unit planning.

This comprehensive resource fully prepares teachers to demystify math for a wide range of learners, including students with learning disabilities, ADHD, and mild cognitive disabilities.

This guide helps teacher teams to collectively plan for and deliver highly effective units of study in grades 6-8.

This guide helps teacher teams to collectively plan for and deliver highly effective units of study in high school.

This article takes the OWL model and stretches it into a unit-planning tool that uses disciplinary core ideas (DCI) to support learner-centered, developmentally appropriate inquiries that culminate in authentic writing and media products.

This paper explores how co-design creates opportunities to learn practical design knowledge related to clarifying and balancing goals for a particular class of design contexts: developing materials that meet ambitious, externally defined disciplinary learning goals that also connect to the interests and priorities of students from minoritized groups and communities.

The purpose of the NGSS Lesson Screener (or NGSS Screening Tool) is to quickly review a lesson to determine: (1) whether a lesson being developed or revised is on the right track; (2) if a lesson warrants further review using the Educators Evaluating the Quality of Instructional Products (EQuIP) Rubric for Lessons & Units: Science; and (3) to what extent a group of reviewers have a common understanding of the NGSS or designing lessons for the NGSS.

This resource includes example lessons span from 1st - 5th grade, middle school, and high school. The majority seem to be for middle school.

This article explores Next Generation Science
Standards (NGSS) with disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), and suggestions about how the crosscutting concepts (CCs) might be incorporated into instruction.

This article discusses the benefits of using sensory and art activities in early childhood education for infants and toddlers under the age of three. The authors highlight benefits for the development of motor and social-emotional skills and provide suggestions for incorporating sensory and art activities into curricula using high quality, inexpensive materials.

Offering practical guidance on encouraging creativity in early childhood settings, this much-needed book highlights the importance of the arts and creativity for children's learning, critical thinking, social interaction and self-regulation.

This article argues that ages 3–8 represent a critical time for children to benefit from process drama integrated into the curriculum and highlights the unique impact process drama can make when it is used to explore a particular problem, situation, or theme, referencing related national core arts.

This article investigates how instructors can utilize the integration of early literacy skills and the arts to cultivate the appreciation and celebration of cultures in early childhood classrooms.

This article focuses on early language acquisition and development because of its importance to all later academic achievement, and explores puppets and puppetry as an example of arts-based curriculum delivery.

This article describes a collaboration, how we navigated the divide between a 4th-grade teacher and a visual artist to create an integrated lesson plan to share with other teachers. It also discusses the benefits of their collaborative model of visual arts integration between an elementary school teacher and university professor.