Unit Teaching

Units are often considered the building blocks of successful instruction. When a teacher is assigned a particular subject or course to teach, one of the first tasks he or she approaches is the breaking up of the course into a series of units of instruction. The reasons for this approach vary, but although students, and often their teachers, find it difficult to conceptualize an entire course ranging across a 10-month span of time, it is also difficult to assist students in the creation of meaning using only daily lesson plans. Unit teaching provides a structure whereby teachers can work with students to achieve learning goals while creating meaning by providing a larger, less fragmented approach to instruction, a goal congruent with both Gestalt psychology and ...