Most Radical Readers know that I am PASSIONATE about using Unit Overview Sheets in my classroom to help students to keep track of the progress that they are making as learners

(See here, here and here).

There’s just something beautiful about sharing essential outcomes with students in language that they can understand — and then asking students to keep track of where they are versus where they need to be as learners.

Here’s what a complete Unit Overview Sheet looks like.

Don’t want to click on the link?  Then check out the image below to see what one learning target on a unit overview sheet might look like:

Using Unit Overview Sheets allows teachers to accomplish two goals.

First, they reinforce the message that students can assess their own learning  — instead of passively waiting to be assessed by the adults in their lives.  Second, they reinforce the notion that every student — including those who never see evidence of learning in traditional grades — is a capable and competent learner.

Last week, I was working with a school district on Unit Overview Sheets and one question was asked again and again by elementary school teachers:  How do you create learning targets for reading?

The challenge, teachers explained, was that reading skills aren’t as explicit or easy to outline as skills in other subjects like math or science or social studies.

So lemme show you how I would do this work. 

Let’s imagine that we are a fourth grade team that is interested in developing a few learning targets for a reading Unit Overview Sheet covering the notion of theme.

First, I’d have to work with my team to determine just what “theme” means — and just what we would want kids to know about the theme of stories.  We might decide that the essentials of understanding theme include:

• Themes are often expressed (and identified) through the pattern of events in a story.
• The actions of individual characters also give readers hints towards the theme of a story.
• There are several common themes that appear in stories over and over again — things like good versus evil, the importance of family and friends, overcoming hardships, and the value of hard work.

The first two bullets are well defined in the Common Core standards for reading literature — so that would make the perfect starting point for developing the individual cells on my Unit Overview.

Here’s what the first might look like:

Neat, right?  Each of those check boxes encourage students to think carefully about the events of a story — and to make inferences about what those events mean.  Those are critical skills for being able to determine the theme of a story.

But here’s where things get really interesting:  The skills detailed in those check boxes are also progressional.

The first check box is a second grade standard from the Common Core and the second check box is the corresponding third grade standard.  Fourth grade level mastery is detailed in the third check box and fifth grade mastery is detailed after Extend Your Learning.

Understanding events isn’t the only thing that a reader has to do in order to determine the theme of a story, right?

When good readers are determining the theme, they also pay attention to the actions taken by the characters of a story — and make inferences about the intentions behind those actions.

Here’s how I’d translate that into a cell on a Unit Overview Sheet.

Like the earlier learning target on the events of a story, each of the statements next to the check boxes in this cell were drawn directly from the Common Core standards for reading literature — so generating them was easy for me.

And like the earlier target on the events of a story, the statements next to the check boxes in this cell are also progressional:

Think about how useful including progressional skills on a Unit Overview Sheet can be. 

By including progressional skills, teachers make expectations for students incredibly explicit.  If you are going to meet grade level expectations as a student, you need to be able to prove that you can complete the tasks listed next to the first three check boxes.

Including progressional skills also ensures that all students will be able to “make progress” as learners — including those who are both BEHIND and BEYOND grade level during the course of the unit of study.  That’s the key to leaving kids convinced that they are capable and competent learners.

Finally, including progressional skills helps students to more accurately evaluate their own performance — and that’s support that students who aren’t used to self-assessment might need in order to better rate their abilities.

And that’s a REALLY good thing.

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If you are interested in learning more about shifting your classroom/school from a culture of grading to a culture of feedback, check out this book that I wrote with my good friend Paul Cancellieri.  You might also be interested in checking out the first strand of conversation on The EduNerds — an ongoing discussion I’m having on YouTube with a few good friends of mine.