I changed my unit plan around a little so for context, one of my new big ideas is Stories help us Practice Empathy. Two of my new EQs connected to that big idea are: "How does reading about others help me empathize with them?" and "How do I define and practice empathy?" That being said, my aligning goal for my students is that that by the end of our unit reading A Long Walk to Water, students will be able to demonstrate empathy (verbally and in writing) by identifying how characters are feeling using textual evidence and by using reasoning skills to explain why they might be feeling that way.

This goal connects to my students because every day as part of our Content Language Objective, we also have a Social-Emotional Learning connection.More specifically, this particular class of students is comfortable and enthusiastic in talking about values of diversity, in terms of their own and others identities. They also enjoy healthy competition and debate, which ties into the goal of empathy because we are working on being able to hold multiple perspectives at once and see a singular situations from multiple perspectives.

So far, we have begun to assess these goals using CER writing, answering the prompt: “What is a challenge our character has faced in chapter 1? How is he feeling about it and how do you know?” as well as participating in some fortunately/ unforunately thought experiments both verbally and in writing. We will continue to assess this goal with juxtaposition and compare/contrast exercises.

This goal connects to language demands because students are engaged in all four domains. They verbalize and write out their thinking, practice active listening toward others’ perspectives, and of course, carefully read the text to identify how plot points contribute to character development and mood. This particular goal also requires that we continue to learn and expand our definitions of complex vocabulary words like empathy and juxtaposition (for example, our working definition of juxtaposition right now is opposites, though the ultimate goal is for them to see juxtaposition as a way to compare and contrast two situations or even two sides of the same situation).

The goal connects to cognitive demand in many ways, though perhaps the most significant is that students are practicing: Us[ing] reasoning and evidence to generate criteria for making and supporting an

argument of judgment (DOK level 3: Analysis).

One Colorado Academic Standard that aligns with this goal is: Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence. (CCSS: W.7.1) Importantly, a sub-standard here is the ability to acknowledge an opposing claim, which is something we are not doing yet. Identifying how other’s feel in a situation will help us achieve this goal by challenging students to look at one situations from multiple perspectives and acknowledge how people can feel multiple emotions simultaneously.  

The most important thing I’ve needed to consider so far in unit planning is keeping an eye to the big ideas while also accomplishing the nitty gritty. This is ELA and when it comes to individual lesson planning, we need to write (especially CERs), read with fluency, check for understanding, and practice conventions. I was able to tie the unit planning to the lesson planning in the following example last week:
In conjunction with chapter one of A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park, I created an activity that combined critical reading, reasoning, and writing skills with the ability to practice empathy. Students first ranked basic survival needs (food, water, shelter, family, etc.) from most important in their lives to least important. Afterward, we read chapter one together, stopping frequently to answer “right there” questions  and students wrote a CER about the struggles one of the character’s faces, practicing their ability to create and justify a claim using both proper textual evidence and reasoning skills. Finally, they used that CER to return to their survival lists, answering the question: “After reading chapter 1, which resources do you think are more important? Which do you think are less important? Why?” In reflecting, students not only practiced restate language and using textual evidence but also practiced empathy with the characters and their needs.