VIRTUAL LIBRARY OF INSTRUCTIONAL UNITS

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VIRTUAL LIBRARY OF CONCEPTUAL UNITS

Welcome to the Virtual Library of Conceptual Units. The Virtual Libray includes conceptual teaching units for middle and high school English/Language Arts classes. These units have been designed by preservice and practicing teachers at The University of Georgia. The units follow principles of curriculum and instruction developed by George Hillocks, Jr., (see, e.g., Dynamics of English Instruction, Grades 7-12, by Hillocks, McCabe, and McCampbell; Random House, 1971). The process for designing these units is described in Peter Smagorinsky's Teaching English through Principled Practice (Merrill/Prentice-Hall, 2002) and Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units (Heinemann, 2008; an online Instructor's Guide is available for this book as well).The units are designed to cover 4-6 weeks (assuming daily class periods of 45-55 minutes). Each is organized around a concept such as a theme (e.g., Coming of Age), genre (e.g., satire), strategy (e.g., understanding irony), literary period (e.g., Victorian Age), movement (e.g., Transcendantalism), region (e.g., Authors of Georgia), or author (e.g., the works of Emily Dickinson).

The units in this library contain the following elements:

A rationale that provides a justification for teaching the unit to appropriate classes of students.
A set of goals that provide direction and purpose for the unit. These goals serve as the major assessments for the unit and are accompanied by a rubric that guides assessment.
A list of materials that serve as the primary texts for considering the unit theme or focus.
Daily lessons and activities that enable students to work successfully toward rewarding performances on the unit assessments.

In designing the units, the teachers are urged to prepare them as though they suddenly might take an extended leave from their teaching and leave instruction in the hands of a substitute. The units therefore need to be written in sufficient detail that someone else could come in and teach them. The rubric for grading the units is available elsewhere on this website.

The Virtual Library of Conceptual Units appears next. Each unit is available for downloading. To download, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader. You are welcome to borrow from these units; we only ask that you respect each unit's authors and credit their work if you borrow it for your own teaching or unit design. Units listed in red have been identified as good models to follow. Most units are of high quality; those marked in red have been singled out because they model all aspects of unit design unusually well. All units in the Virtual Library, whether marked in red or not, are worth consideration for teaching.

UNIT OUTLINES

This link provides dozens of unit outlines, each providing a unit topic (e.g., The Family, Frontier Literature) and accompanying lists of literature, songs, films, and other appropriate texts. Each topic listing also suggests key concepts and problems to guide the instruction.

If you would like to recommend additional titles for this list, please send the title, author, and appropriate unit to smago@uga.edu. I'm also happy to receive whole new unit outlines, for which I'll list you as the contributor. Thanks!

SEVENTH GRADE

Identity: Coming to Know One's Self through Literature (2002) by Shawn Pate

EIGHTH GRADE

NINTH GRADE

TENTH GRADE

ELEVENTH GRADE

TWELFTH GRADE