Hannah Carney

Teaching and Learning in Urban Contexts

Professor Kate Kinney Grossman
August 12, 2016

Narrative of Unit and Lesson Plan

When we first started discussing our unit plan, I knew that I would like to accomplish
two goals in this assignment: first, I wanted to get to know my students and have them get to
know each other through the use of oral histories, and second, I wanted to create a unit around
African American history to help support a culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995)
approach to my teaching. These two goals are closely entwined, in a sense, because of the central
importance of oral history to both African and African American history. Starting out the year
with oral histories will ideally help my students to expand and build upon their understanding of
what a primary source can be (is it just old, dusty government documents? Church registers?
Census records? Or can it be stories passed down through generations, songs, artwork?).
Encouraging students to explore their own identities and cultures will help them to more
sensitively and thoughtfully approach the ancient and early modern cultures of Africa that are
essential to an accurate understanding of African American history.
Framing my unit using backward design, and crafting essential questions, understandings,
and learning goals, was quite challenging. Initially, I wanted to include an exploration of
personal identity, of culture, and of ancient African cultures as well as pre-modern West and
Central African societies, but I quickly realized this was far too much to teach in a single week. I
eventually came up with three essential questions that addressed the areas I found most important
in the unit: one question addresses individual and group identity with regards to the personal

reflection and study of ancient African societies, and the other two questions address both
individual and collective culture as well as the geographical elements that shape all societies.
In starting the unit with oral histories, I hope to encourage students to begin the course by
reflecting on their own lives, how they have come to feel the way they do (Haberman, 1991, p.
10). I also hope to draw my students parents in to their schooling, as I think about Delpits
(2006) arguments for including parents of color in particular in discussions of their childs
education, (p. 45) and Oakes & Liptons (2013) discussion of building bridges between students
home and school lives (p. 324). I am also aware of scaffolding this oral history component of the
unit, starting with an explanation of what oral histories are, and then having the students listen to
a contemporary example (from the oral history-promoting organization StoryCorps). Next
students will work on their own oral history in class, asking each other questions that they create
or draw from a list of potential questions that StoryCorps has compiled. As I move around the
classroom listening to pairs conduct their interviews, I will be giving feedback about the kinds of
questions they ask and how the interviewer records the information. This follows Tomlinson &
McTighes (2006) suggestion to provide feedback early in the learning process so that students
may modify their approach and find earlier success at that task (p. 77).
I wrote about the importance of scaffolding and providing clear feedback in my first blog
post about the research project assignment at Upward Bound Math and Science:
Dweck and Ferlazzo would perhaps have approved of the pedagogy behind the research
project, but they both would have urged the instructors to be sure that their high
expectations for the students' work were matched with clear, measurable goals and a very
clearly defined assignment with scaffolded steps (Carney, 2016).
In this unit plan for the first week of school, the clearly defined assignment with scaffolded
steps will be critical to student success and learning.

Another key pedagogical element of the oral history portion of this unit plan is the fact
that students get to engage in content that has real-life application to their livesindeed, the
content is their lives and those of their families. The at-home assignment after the first day of
class is for students to interview any family member or friend other than the person they worked
with in class today, and to ask them some of the questions they formulated in the first class, or
questions from the list I handed out. In thinking about their own histories and their family
histories and stories, I want to encourage the students to start making connections between the
personal and the general, and to see that connection reflected in the study of history. In my
fieldwork placement, I observed how effective one of the early writing assignments was, largely
due to the topic the teacher chose. She asked students to write a persuasive essay, whose
elements she outlined clearly, in which the students took a position for or against the
Philadelphia soda tax. At first I thought this was not a very interesting prompt, but the students
proved me wrong: they were highly engaged in the topic and argued passionately for one side or
the other. Most of the students felt that the soda tax affected them either directly or indirectly,
and that real life connection between their lives and assignment allowed for great learning to take
place.
An essential part of the first week of school will be creating a classroom community and
beginning the continuous and constant process of gaining my students trust. Several of the
elements of my lesson plan are designed, at least in part, to help me begin to create a classroom
community, and Ladson-Billings (1995) discussion of how social relations are structured by
teachers offers a helpful framework. I am thinking particularly of demonstrating a connectedness
with all students, developing a community of learners, and encouraging students to learn
collaboratively and be responsible for one another (p. 480). The getting-to-know-you activity

will be the first thing students participate in in my classroom. For this activity, students are asked
to find someone who has the same answer to my question (e.g. favorite color), and, once they
find someone, they are expected to share something from their summer or something about
themselves that other people might not know (Kristen model teach, July 2016). I will be
circulating during this activity and observing how students are interacting and what they are
discussing when they end up in pairs. My students will need to know each other in order to
learn collaboratively and feel connected to the classroom community, and the very first
activity will help start that process. Building on this process of having students get to know each
other, I will introduce the Circles of My Multicultural Self graphic organizer that Professor
Kinney Grossman provided in class during a discussion of cultural positionality. Students will
choose what to share with a partner about themselves and will continue the important process of
relationship building with their classmates.
Another element in my unit plan that is designed in part to help create a classroom
community is to introduce the practice of journal writing that my students will continue for the
rest of the school year. I will explain that journal entries will be read but not graded by me, and
that I expect students to use the journals both as a place to answer specific prompts that I provide
and to reflect on their positionality as historians approaching historical thinking through the
content of African American history. An excellent English teacher who taught a special topics
seminar my senior year had us write in a journal at least once a week, and I still remember some
of the written conversations we hadher responding to my writing and my responding to her
comments. As I pointed out in a Journal entry for School Society and Self, I realize now that my
teacher was getting something important out of those journals as wellbetter understanding and
familiarity with her students. As a formative assessment, the journals in my class would not be

graded on their own, but would factor into grading of class participation, particularly for students
who might be less comfortable contributing orally in front of the whole class.
A last element of creating classroom community that I want to touch on briefly is
establishing order in the classroom. I will address this explicitly several times during the first
week by stating my expectations of how students are to behave in class. I have also left time in
the week unit plan to discuss classroom rules and expectationsof both the teacher and of the
studentson the second day of class. As Weinstein describes it, classroom management is not
about achieving order for orders sake; its about achieving order so that learning can occur (p.
6). By explaining my expectations of my students, and engaging them in a conversation of what
we should all expect of each other in the classroom, I am starting the ongoing and continuous
process of establishing order in my classroom so that learning can occur throughout the school
year.
As discussed in both Professor Kinney Grossmans class as well as in Professor
Hickmans class, differentiation is a crucial element to effective teaching in diverse classrooms.
Though I will be placed at Masterman, a top performing school in the district, Im certain that I
will be teaching learners who have strengths in some academic and social areas, and struggles in
others. For one thing, there will be people in my classes who are more domain identified as math
or science people, and who are intimidated by humanities or writing intensive courses. There will
be English Language Learners as well as students whose language at home differs from their
language at school (for example, African American Vernacular English) (Phelan, 1991).
One way that I aim to include differentiation in my teaching is in the Jigsawed readings
that I assign on the second day. These readings, one of which is actually an audio recording, give
students the chance to become an expert on their given reading and to collaborate with peers to

reach a shared understanding of the main points and ideas. As Tomlinson and McTighe (2006)
note, the Jigsaw method is particularly good at reaching students who are motivated by choice
and who may need or want to spend more time on a particular topic (depth rather than breadth)
(p. 98).
The graphic organizers that I will provide for both of my PowerPoint lectures on ancient
African history will help students with attention problems to focus better on the lecture, and will
help English Language Learners and other learners with aural learning challenges focus their
attention on the most important elements of the lecture (Tomlinson et al, 2006, p. 98). They also
may be helpful for visual learners who like to organize their ideas spatially.
A final element of differentiation in this unit plan is the choice that students are afforded
for the final project. Students may either participate in a skit, create a PowerPoint presentation,
or develop a poster that helps students to synthesize what they learned about ancient African
civilizations this week. The evaluation rubric for this assignment will provide clear, concise
guidance about what is expected from each of the final projects to make clear that all three
performance media will be evaluated using the same criteria. Groups will be assigned, but each
group will choose which medium to use (meaning that all the groups may end up using the same
medium, but with different results). Student choice is an important element of both
differentiation and culturally relevant pedagogy, and the different media for the performance task
also take into account the Multiple Intelligences of the students (Gardner, 2016).
Lastly, I want to address the need that many of the authors for this course have stated for
engaging, interesting content. Starting out the year with an exploration of oral history, and the
primary sources in the Jigsaw assignment, helps the students to get back into the historian
mindset, to think like historians, which is a theme I hope to introduce early and come back to

throughout the year. Rather than have students read from a textbook, at least initially I would like
to draw readings from diverse sources, and provide them in different formats (e.g. audio files) in
order to draw and sustain the students attention. I also want to make use of the technology we
have available both in the classroom (laptop and smartboard or projector and screen), in the
school library, and in the students homes.
My hope is that the use of this unit plan will facilitate good and just teaching (CochranSmith, 2009) on my part and understanding and engagement on the part of my students. Through
classroom community-building activities, identity reflection, differentiated instruction, an
establishment of classroom expectations, and small and large group work, I aim to set the tone in
my classroom for the school year and lay a foundation for culturally relevant pedagogy in the
teaching of African American history.

Questions for Implementation:

My main concern about implementing this unit plan is time. I know that the plan is very
ambitious in terms of what it hopes to accomplish. In tying the classroom community-building
and exploration of personal and family identity to the subject content of ancient African history, I
am trying to fit quite a lot into that first week. Having worked at schools with 50 minute periods
(as Masterman will have), I know how quickly that period can fly by. My guess is that in the
actual classroom this unit would have to be spread across six or seven days. Still, it was
extremely helpful for me to use the Backward Design model of curriculum planning and to think
of the unit goals and essential questions and understandings before I even touched the actual
content and activities.

Another concern I have is space. Several of the activities I have outlined require students
to split off into small groups, and I have already heard that Masterman classrooms are small, and
class size can be over 30 students. I may need to modify my expectations of what we can do as a
class in terms of small group work when I am actually in the classroom and seeing how the
students and the teacher fit into the space.
A third concern I have about this unit plan is that, at this intense, high performing school
with some potentially intense, high performing students, the students (and parents) may expect a
more substantial summative assessment within the first week of school. I purposely did not
assign a research paper for the first week of school as I want to put the emphasis on building
classroom community and introducing some of the main themes of the course. But I have to
acknowledge that some of my students may feel that the first week should be more homeworkand writing-intensive than it is in its current form.

Bibliography:
Carney, H. (July 15, 2016). Research Friday: creating excellence? [Web log post]. Retrieved
from http://hannahcarney.weebly.com/blog on 8/12/16.
Cochran-Smith, M., Shakman, K., Jong, C., Terrell, D., Barnatt, J., McQuillan, P. (2009). Good
and just teaching: the case for social justice in teacher education. American Journal of Education.
115(3), 347-377.
Delpit, L. (2006). Other peoples children: cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY:
The New Press.
Gardner, H. (2016). Retrieved from http://multipleintelligencesoasis.org/
Haberman, M. (1991). Pedagogy of poverty versus good teaching. Phi Delta Kappan, 73, 290294.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American
Educational Research Journal. 32(3), 465-491.
Oakes, J. and Lipton, M. (2013). Teaching to change the world. Boulder, CO: Paradigm
Publishers.
Phelan, P., Davidson, A., and Cao, H. (1991). Students multiple worlds: negotiating the
boundaries of family, peer, and school cultures. Anthropology & Education Quarterly. 22(3),
224-250.
Tomlinson, C. and McTighe, J. (2006). Integrating differentiated instruction and understanding
by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Weinstein, C. and Novodvorsky, I. (2014). Middle and Secondary Classroom Management:
lessons from research and practice. Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill Education.