Dylan Frendt

School and Society

13 August 2015

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Reflection on My Unit:
Introduction:

When I sat down to prepare my unit, I gave pause to reflect on my strengths, but also on the
students that I would be teaching and on how I could create a first week unit that would prepare
them both academically and personally. I also gave pause to ask myself what exactly I sought to
accomplish with this unit, and how it would set the tone for what I want to accomplish, overall,
as a practitioner of education in Philadelphia. I thought at length about Habermans
understanding of the Pedagogy of Poverty, and what constitutes good teaching. More
specifically, I thought about how I could ensure that my students were involved in planning
what they will be doing, involved with applying ideals such as fairness, equity, or justice, and
actively involved, as I genuinely believe that these are an indicator that learning is going on
(Haberman). This gave me my initial answer to what I wanted to do: I wanted to teach my
students that they have agency in their learning and in my classroom, and that their perspectives
and views are more than just valid. I wanted them to know that their perspectives, learning
needs, and beliefs could become a part of how I teach, why I teach, and what I teach. I wanted
them to be active and equal partners in creating rules and expectations in our classroom.
Beyond this philosophical inquiry into the why, I delved into the who. By this I mean:
who exactly are my students? My research and ethnographic investigation taught me that my
students were predominately English Language Learners who hailed from Asian countries and
were often children of refugees or very new immigrants. I know that the neighborhood around
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my school was predominantly white, but the student population was predominantly not white.
Finally I know, from interviews, that community members recognize Furness as a racially
diverse high school that is not considered great among school options. Knowing this made me
pause to reflect on Oakes and Liptons first chapter. I asked myself how I could leverage my
understanding of the hardship and xenophobia faced by immigrants as well as my understanding
of vast inequalities of access to make my classroom a space to challenge the assumption that
immigrants should be forced to assimilate to dominant, often racially motivated standards. More
specifically, I asked myself how I could use my first unit to, as Mauro Bautista said, [identify]
inequities in education, [build] coalitions with others affected by these inequities, and then take
action to disrupt the reproduction of these inequities (Oakes and Lipton, 26). With this idea
that my unit should be about providing space for agency, rejecting the pedagogy of poverty, and
directly addressing inequality, I moved towards constructing a unit that played to my academic
strengths and would play to the strengths of my students.
Enduring Understandings:
Constitutions and governing documents are interesting in that they are a reflection of both
the time and a statement of goals that transcend the boundaries of space and time and reflect the
aspirations and fears of those who write them. They are often the product of a gathering of those
with political, economic, and social privilege, and can often leave out the critical voices of the
communities without these forms of privilege.
Because I do not believe that I have all of the answers and because I believe it is more than
necessary to get to know my students while providing them a space to grow, I wanted to create a
space where students created their own rules and expectations for their learning and a space
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where I could observe them as they did this. Constitutions create the rules and expectations of a
society, but they must be changed and democracy depends on the peoples ability to push their
society towards progress and an expansion of rights. There is no difference between this macrolevel decision making and micro-level discussions about what students should expect from their
classroom society. In fact, my unit design became even more intentional as I reflected on a study
by Jean Anyon that I read for School and Society. Her 1980 publication was an investigation
into how instruction differed at schools with different social class distinctions, from executive
level capital owning classes to working-class, wage-dependent classes (Anyon). One of her
observations that school instruction often reproduces socioeconomic classes and is a mirror of
the experiences of students in these broader classes has weighed heavily on my mind since I
have read her piece (Anyon). Because I know my students come from a working class
socioeconomic background and because I know schools like this often focus on discipline,
classroom mechanics, and following the rules, I thought of how I could actively disrupt this, and
provide my students the freedom, autonomy, and rigor that often comes with elite-executive
style education (Anyon).
This train of thought was very important as I constructed my enduring understandings and
essential questions. As I constructed them, I was careful to make sure that my understandings
were based in observed fact but also were more focused on ways in which students can use their
perspectives and beliefs to shape the world around them. I was careful not to build my
understandings and questions around the idea that they were facts to impose upon my students,
and I was careful to hypothesize how what I was writing would affect my individual lessons and
assessments, as I knew that they, too, could not simply be based on instruction and discipline.
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As I sat down to do the work of writing these questions and understandings, Carol Dwecks
research came to mind. Her research has shown us that students with a growth mind-set
focused on learning, believed in effort, and were resilient in the face of setbacks while students
who have a fixed-mindsetworried more about looking smart and not making mistakes, thought
that needing to make an effort to learn meant that their intelligence was deficient, and became
discouraged or defensive in the face of setbacks (Dweck). Though her study references ways
that students are praised for performing a task and is key to in-moment classroom management, I
think it is a healthy starting point for big-picture curricular design, itself. If I am attempting to
teach my students that effort, learning, and resilience will be effective in countering setbacks (by
giving them autonomy to create their classroom constitutions while still making it a unit of
learning and observation), I cannot walk in to my classroom with enduring understandings and
essential questions that assume a static knowledge, much like I cannot praise them on intellect
and should instead praise them one effort. By this I mean: if my enduring understanding had
been Constitutions are the law of the land and an essential question would have been simply
Who decides the law of the land instead of also asking why, I would have assumed static
knowledge, and would have been more predisposed to fixed-mindset praise instead of growthmindset inquiry. Because of these trains of thoughts, my enduring understandings and essential
questions became about more than simply the who and what, by also about the why, and
most importantly, the how.
Assessments:
With my enduring understandings set down, I moved on to assessments and how I could
maintain my philosophical devotion to agency and self-exploration but also use these
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assessments to learn about my students individually, as a group, and to ascertain whether or not
they were learning from my teaching. When constructing these assessments, I kept the
Tomlinson and McTighe in mind. Specifically, I focused on the principle that assessments should
be photo albums and not simply snapshots, and I focused on the six facets of understanding,
which include explaining, interpreting, applying, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge
(Tomlinson & McTighe, 61-67). I designed my entrance slips and exit slips to test priorknowledge and to test post-knowledge. I wanted to see if what I taught would be reinforced, and
if this reinforcement would lead to a deeper understanding. More importantly, though, I wanted
to use these slips to gauge my ESL students and their command of English, how they informally
express themselves, their particular vocabulary and word choice levels, and if they could use this
informal method of assessment to communicate more complex thoughts. These assessments,
graded for completion, would also help me learn how I could better help my students when it
comes to my formal writing prompts, which could serve them in other academic disciplines.
Additionally, I designed the three performance tasks so I could observe students in structured
settings: small groups, individually, and in large groups. I wanted to be able to learn about how
my students interact with both the material and with each other, and then use these observations
to inform further unit development. These assessments, to me, more strongly emphasized what
Tomlinson and McTighe called authentic work, in that it focused on debate versus multiple
choice, problem solving versus fill in the blank, and purposeful writing for an audience versus
simple essays (Tomlinson & McTighe, 68). Moreover, these assessments were designed to be
rough approximations of how constitutions (with a more implicit academic emphasis on the U.S.
constitution, as that is my subject area of mastery) are formed. The formal charters governing
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societies are themselves the result of a lot of work, work that is often dependent on social capital,
social maneuvering, understanding of the topic at hand, and an ability to use that understanding
to convince others while compromising on deep-seeded beliefs. In this sense, my assessments
were designed to create a real-life experience that mimicked the political process, with the
culminating performance task quite literally being a set of rules that we would be bound to (thus
promoting agency and showing students that being involved with this process yields real results).
Individual Lesson:
My individual lesson was the merging of my enduring understandings and essential
questions with what I hoped to accomplish with my assessments. I chose to highlight the
Constitutional Amendment portion of my unit-week, as I felt that it most captured my aims and
incorporated a host of student performances: group work, entrance slips, working with
technology, critical thinking, critical feedback, individual beliefs, group beliefs, compromise, and
working towards a goal. It also was the lesson that provided me with the most room to be a
facilitator and active observer, as I would be using classroom time to provide students with
feedback and guidance but would not be directly lecturing them or trying to sway their individual
conversations. More critically: it gave students the opportunity to critique me, directly. In this
sense, I would have an formalized what their learn how their beliefs, cultures, backgrounds,
ideologies, understandings of rules, aspirations, and feelings were and how these many things
related to what they wanted to learn and how they wanted to learn it.
I dwelled considerably on Tomlinson and McTighes idea that we should select
instructional strategies that support responsive teaching. What I mean by this is that, by
observing them in this setting and by being a facilitator rather than a lecturer, I could learn how
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my subsequent units could address their individual learning and group learning. I could learn
what students needed reading support, help with English vocabulary, and about their readiness
and interest in what I was teaching, on the whole (Tomlinson & McTighe, 97-101). In this way,
my individual lesson was more of one large assessment that could help me adjust and reassess
further assessments, and further day-to-day lesson planning.
Questions:
All of this leaves me with a few critical questions that I would like to address:
1. Was this unit too focused on the theoretical and not the practical?
2. What problems am I going to encounter by focusing my first week on individual and
group agency as opposed to setting my own expectations?
3. If students are not engaged in this unit, how am I going to structure further units to try
to engage them at deep levels?
4. If students are engaged in this unit, how do I continue to designs unit like this while
still finding ways to intertwine my teaching methods and beliefs with the expectations of the
school district and the state standards?
5. Does my units focus on demonstrating understanding through writing and group
collaboration miss opportunities to incorporate multiple intelligences or multiple ways to
demonstrate understanding? Does this matter if I plan on doing this, later?

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Bibliography:
Anyon, J. (1980). Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. Journal of
Education, 162(1), 67-92.
Dweck, C. (2010). Mind-Sets and Equitable Education. Principal Leadership, 10(5),
26-29.
Haberman, M. (1991). The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching. Phi Delta
Kappan, 73, 290-294. Retrieved August 12, 2015, from http://orthohosmag-lausdca.schoolloop.com/file/1278179292392/3729077694349233798.pdf
Oakes, J., & Lipton, M. (1999). Chapter 1: The U.S. Schooling Dilemma. In Teaching to
Change the World. Boston, Massachusetts: McGraw-Hill College. Print.
Tomlinson, C., & McTighe, J. (2006). Considering Evidence of Learning in Diverse
Classrooms. In Integrating differentiated instruction & understanding by design
connecting content and kids. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision
and Curriculum Development.

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