Unit Organizer Routine: Instructor’s Manual

About the Author

Keith Lenz, Ph.D.

Affliations

 

Senior Disability Researcher
SRI International
Menlo Park, CA

 

President
Velvet Bridge, Inc.
Kansas City, MO

 

Retired Senior Research Scientist
Certified Professional Development Specialist
University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning
Lawrence, KS

 

Retired Associate Professor
Department of Special Education
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS

My Background and Interests
My memories of elementary school are that I did what teachers asked me to do, and that if I did what the teachers asked, school was going as it was intended to go. I didn’t realize that learning was up to me and that I should at some point start assuming some responsibility for my own learning. Around 4th and 5th grade, I started to get into trouble with teachers because I wasn’t doing homework assignments. I really believed that schoolwork was done at school and that homework included all the activities I normally did at home, and they were mostly play activities. I didn’t connect independent effort and responsibility with schoolwork until my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Mason, began to make the connection very explicit. Needless to say, because my 4th- and 5th-grade learning experiences were very dismal, 6th grade required a lot of hard work to make up for my earlier failures.

In many ways, the feelings of failure that I had in 6th grade have helped me greatly during my career. I know what it feels like to be caught cheating on a math test, face the principal’s grim questions about why none of the first 75 pages of my social studies workbook have been completed, see column after column of D’s and F’s on my report card, and continuously struggle to understand what I was doing wrong in school. Looking back, those early experiences and feelings made me understand what it feels like not to understand how to learn. Not only did I struggle with learning, but I also watched many of my classmates struggle with teachers who taught on the surface without barely a thought or concern about unlocking learning for any of us.

I had to figure out how to learn on my own. I eventually became a teacher myself, teaching at the junior high school, high school, and university levels. As I learned how to teach, those memories of my schooling kept me honest about what I wanted to do in my teaching. Also, when I became a researcher, I realized that I wanted to make learning easy for students. I wanted to develop teaching methods and materials that would help them become good learners.

I will be the first to admit that I have not always been a good learner or a good teacher. However, I have always wanted to be a better learner and a better teacher. Working with my colleagues to develop learning strategy instruction, the Content Enhancement Routines, and other interventions related to strategic instruction has taken me exactly where I know I needed to go in order to help teachers teach better and to help students learn what they need to learn. I know that these are the tools that my teachers needed to use when teaching me years ago.

The Story Behind the Unit Organizer Routine
I am convinced that teacher quality is significantly influenced by how teachers approach planning and specifically how they approach instructional planning for diverse groups of learners. A number of years ago, Jean Schumaker, Don Deshler, and I had an opportunity to study how teachers approach planning to teach diverse groups of learners. We asked secondary social studies and science teachers to partner with us to help us understand and improve ways to plan for teaching content in academically diverse classes.

We started with lesson planning. While we learned about many important elements of lesson planning and teaching, we also quickly learned that teachers had previously made many of the important instructional decisions that seemed to influence day-to-day (lesson) instruction as they had planned the unit and the course. As a result, we earnestly began to engage teachers in conversations about what contributed to student failure on formative and summative measures related to unit learning. We also were interested in learning what types of teacher planning at the unit level might improve student learning and performance on assessment measures.

After talking to our group of fifty teachers for nearly two years about unit planning and teaching, we developed a set of target challenges that we believed that we needed to address. Teachers seemed to be trying to teach more than they had time to teach, and they were frustrated by what seemed to them to be an impossible expectation. Also, teachers reported that many students seemed to be continuously lost in their organization, understanding, and attempts to study and remember what was important.

To address some of the challenges described by teachers, we decided to build on the growing research indicating explicit organization, especially through the use of graphic organizers, could significantly help more students in academically diverse classes. We began to work collaboratively with teachers to develop simple graphic organizers that would require teachers to visually consolidate and label important aspects of the content and identify and illustrate how that content was organized for understanding and study.

The graphic organizer associated with the Unit Organizer Routine evolved from being only a planning tool to a tool that could also be used to present and teach information and to communicate with other teachers, parents, and students about what should be learned. Finally, we not only began to see changes in how teachers planned, but we also saw how these changes led to improved performance on student assessments and in how well students organized and remembered the information that teachers had identified as critical.

My thoughts About Content Enhancement Routines
I believe that the Content Enhancement Routines are comprised of those practices that we currently know are effective for teaching critical content to academically diverse groups of students. Several elements embedded in each of these routines reflect the evidenced-based practices that should be incorporated into content-area teaching. First, carefully designed graphic organizers are used in each routine to allow teachers to focus student attention on critical content. Second, detailed implementation guidelines are provided that supply details related to how each graphic-organizer teaching device should be used in order to replicate the results of the original research. These guidelines are captured in “Linking Steps” for each routine, and each step is linked to how each section of the graphic organizer should be used to verbally lead students to organize, understand, and remember critical content. The verbal supports used by the teacher ensure that each graphic-organizer teaching device become more than just another graphic organizer. Third, explicit procedures are given in the manual that are related to how to use the teaching devices to grow a “teaching routine” that students can expect the teacher to use repeatedly throughout the school year to model and encourage the development of strategic patterns of thinking. As students repeatedly experience the routine, they learn how to use the device independently to become more strategic in completing tasks. Finally, when the devices and routines are used with sufficient explicitness, rigor, and frequency, they can be used to prompt the development of both general and content-specific literacy and reasoning strategies.

I would like to see all teachers consider using Content Enhancement Routines to improve their teaching in relation to academically diverse groups of students. In the beginning, use of these routines does require some really deep thinking about what is truly critical for all students to learn. Accurately selecting the most critical content that all students should be expected to learn is the most difficult step in the overall process of implementing any Content Enhancement Routine. The device associated with each Content Enhancement Routine then becomes a tool to help teachers ensure that the most critical content is explicitly taught and learned by all students. I have heard some people use the expression, “Garbage in; garbage out.” To me, this means we can teach dumb stuff really well, but the learning that is produced doesn’t amount to much. This orientation to teaching won’t help us improve student scores on critical outcome measures. Thus, the careful consideration of what is truly critical to teach and to enhance is the first step to improving teaching in content-area courses.

As a footnote to these remarks about the implementation of Content Enhancement Routines, I want to mention two components that I believe provide important supports to the effective use of the routines. First, computer software called GIST has been developed to help teachers develop, plan for the integration of, and present and use Content Enhancement devices with students. A GIST software purchase comes with the graphic organizer templates for the Course Organizer Routine, the Unit Organizer Routine, and the Lesson Organizer Routine ( www.gistplan.com ). Templates for the other routines in the Content Enhancement series are also available for purchase. What is important about the software is that is allows for the integration and digital creation, adaptation, and reuse of each device. Second, a library of devices completed by teachers in a variety of subject areas is available for free downloading and sharing to help teachers get started with the content enhancement planning process. The content enhancement library of devices is called Depot and can be found at www.stratepedia.org.

Teacher Feedback on the Unit Organizer Routine
The greatest rewards from the collaboration with teachers on the design and implementation of the Unit Organizer Routine came from the unintended effects of the uses of the Unit Organizer (the graphic device used along with the routine). As teachers began to embrace the use of the Unit Organizer and began to use it routinely in their courses, they began to report a need to revise their unit tests to better align what they were testing with their new way of planning and teaching. They also reported that their lessons were becoming more explicit and organized, and they felt that they needed to revise their courses.

Teachers began to share Unit Organizers with other teachers in order to facilitate shared planning for students with special needs or to serve as a source of input for shared teaching across different classes. Principals began to accept Unit Organizers as substitute plans for required weekly “Lesson Plan Books.” Finally teachers and schools began to use Unit Organizers as ways to communicate to parents and began using the Unit Organizer as a way of communicating course content on Web sites. In general, we began to see the Unit Organizer take on a life of its own as its use began to expand to fill a variety of needs in the secondary school instructional setting.

What meant the most to me was when one teacher said the following: “Sure it takes a long time to plan a unit with the Unit Organizer. However, once it is done, you can easily reuse it, expand it, and revise it each year. The heavy mental lifting is done the first time you develop it. Now when I teach, I have to plan and build the Unit Organizer with my students. If I don’t, I know that I am not doing my best to reach all my students. I could never return to the less effective ways of planning and teaching that I used before I started using the Unit Organizer. Now the image of the Unit Organizer is with me always in my head. I can begin to plan wherever I am, even in the shower. And sometimes, planning in the shower is the only time that I can truly call my best time to plan.”

My Contact Information
Please contact me at keith.lenz@sri.com