Nailing Your Unit Sequence

So you’re going to teach a new course?  Or are you finishing up a course, and now looking at next year and some changes you may want to make?  Looking at how your unit sequence is very important to how your course goes. 

How to Have Your Units Flow One Into the Next

I think a lot about “academic whiplash.”  I don’t want my students to feel like the things they learn are so different from each other.  I want my course and my lessons to connect to each other.  The good thing about that is that there is less time needed to review and reteach with students.  As your content slowly builds on itself, students easily make connections and grow in baby steps. 

When I first started teaching, I didn’t have another chemistry teacher to spitball with.  I had to do everything on my own.  At the beginning of the year, I taught the phases of matter, phase changes and separation of mixtures.  That made a lot of sense to me, having never taught a full year of chemistry.  After having to make up a term to teach kids a very difficult and high level concept, I knew that I was doing it wrong.  I restructured the course.  I moved this unit from number 2, to number 7. How did the unit sequence change the course?

The Effects of Changing Unit Order

The term “molecular magnetism” was removed from my course (thank goodness). My students understood more, and had to review less. I went from five days of review to five weeks of final exam review.  

I’m not saying that this is entirely necessary for each course and each year, but changing the order of units could possibly change your entire course and your outlook.  So at minimum, consider it. 

I have a list of questions you should ask yourself to see if you should take the time to change the sequence of units in your course. You can grab that list here.

Questions to Ask When Sequencing Units

1. What units did the students do well in?
   1. This is maybe because they know the prerequisite skills.  The goal is to have one unit spill into the next. 
2. What units did the students do poorly in?
   1. The time of year can be part of this, or it could simply be how your units are stacked.
   2. Do the kids need more time to grapple with this information?
3. Are the lessons in a good order?
   1. Should the lessons be moved into a different unit?
   2. Are similar but conflicting concepts too close to each other?
4. Are there any other ways that the units can be reorganized? Rearrange your unit plans and see if it is something you’d want to try. 

Tips for Sequencing Units

1. Dig into standards and check out prerequisite skills
2. Ask somebody else how they sequence their stuff.  You may simply be inspired by them. 
3. Check on your student data from this year and see how your kids handled things. 
4. Does the timing align with the cognitive ability of your students.  You can’t teach algebra to a six year old.  Do you have too much complex content too early? These kids may literally have brains that are too young to handle the content your working with. 
5. Is your unit sequence not the problem at all, and it’s actually something else? Maybe your lesson order?
6. Don’t change things “just because.” Make sure it’s something you think will be helpful to your students.
7. Sometimes things don’t go well just because of the particular batch of kids you have.  Especially after distance learning, there may be some things that are missing that you expect kids to know. 
8. Check on what kids should have learned in years past and build on those in the beginning of the year.