ABSTRACT
Think about your classroom and the content you need to teach. Your goal
is to develop an authentic, open-ended task that will create a felt need for your students to learn skills. Here are some guiding steps to developing your task. If you find yourself having difficulty with any of the steps, return to the previous step and rethink your decisions:
A well-crafted ALU starts with curricular standards. Consider your curriculum and identify the general content, skills, and concepts you plan to teach over a three-to five-week period of time. If you are a primary-grades teacher (Kindergarten to second grade), consider a two-to three-week period. If you are an intermediate-grades teacher (third to fifth grade), consider a three-to four-week period. For middle grades, high school, and college, consider a four-to five-week period of time. Units that run for longer than five weeks tend to become too complex, and students can lose focus on important content. Units that run for fewer than two weeks tend to be too labor intensive to design and don’t allow students to explore content with much depth.
