LONG-TERM PLANNING

Long-term planning is critical in ensuring each of my students is on track towards mastery of content standards and success on our end-of-course exam. Long-term planning allows me to ensure a variety of assessment styles and instructional strategies throughout the course and lets me plan ahead to make sure that I maintain an organized and efficient pace. For my Civics course, I ground my planning in the NGSSS Social Studies Benchmarks and Florida Standards which are in turn separated into two categories: content-based standards and literacy-based standards. Content-based standards are analyzed and dispersed into unit plans covering similar benchmarks while literacy-based standards are laced throughout the course with specific assessments and instructional strategies tailored regardless of content. The Miami-Dade County Public School District recommends breaking up the courses benchmarks into four reporting categories: Origins and Purposes of Law and Government, Organization and Function of Government, Roles, Rights and Responsibilities of Citizens, and Government Policies and Political Processes. ​ Essentially reporting categories are a way to break down the content into more manageable chunks that all fit a common theme. From this starting point, I re-structure benchmarks into a style that I think makes the most logical sequence. In my course there are twenty-seven Civics benchmarks that work as a content standard that ground most of my planning process. It is critical that I develop a pacing structure to map out the course of my year in order to ensure that I get through each o the twenty-seven benchmarks in a comfortable amount of time. Having taught this course for a few years, I use foresight to structure this pacing guide in accordance with my students learning needs. After structuring each individual benchmark into a reporting category, I create a list of content and literacy based vocabulary terms that will help my students to master the standard. In addition to reporting categories, I decide to dig deeper and structure the course into topics. Each topic contains a few benchmarks that encompass similar content. In turn these topics are turned into unit plans later on. Each topic features learning measured by regular assessments and driven by tracked data. Chunking content allows me to adequately pace out the content over the entire year and leave additional time for review, remediation and re-teaching during the fourth 9-weeks before the end-of-course exam. Finally essential questions are developed for each topic that ground planning at the unit level.