Whether you are a Year 1 or a Year 20, change of curriculum or subjects you teach is
inevitable. Before I even begin each year and get into the finer details of lesson planning, activities, reviews, tests, etc., I always spend some time doing these 3 things first.
Creating Your Units
In my current district, the only thing we really have that dictates our curriculum are our state standards, TEKS. I also teach an Honors (Pre-AP) course, and we go beyond the TEKS to add some standards found in AP Biology.
The TEKS are already broken up into 5 major categories. We then break those down into smaller chunks. Take a look at your standards and decide on the major points or topics that you will need to teach. Depending on how long you have been teaching, this may be something that comes very easily to you or you may need to spend a bit more time going through the standards. Here is a look at Texas' major reporting categories for biology and how we broke them down into smaller chunks.
What you don't see is our Introductory Unit. We to introduce with an overarching theme and pulled viruses out of our cells unit and water is not a TEK, but is part of AP biology curriculum, so we added it here. More detail about this below.
Putting Your Categories in Order
There tends to be a lot of diversity in pacing and curriculum choices made from one district, or even school, to the next. Even then, the order in which you teach your curriculum or how you bundle those into units is often left to the discretion of the teacher or department.
Here are some of the questions we asked ourselves when guiding our choices to the order in which we teach the units.
Do we want to teach from Micro to Macro? We chose to do a bit of a mix. We start with the overarching topic of What is life? as an intro to the course. We like how this is a "lighter" unit and helps introduce all the topics that we cover throughout the year. We then move into Ecology, which is more of a Macro unit, looking at how living things interact. We chose to do this before going down into the Micro level for a few reasons. First, it tends to be more of a review for students, so they find success early on in the year. It is also the topic they do fairly well on for state testing, so moving it from the end of the year to beginning seems to help in that department as well.
Do we want to save our more difficult units for the end of the year, closer to state testing? We moved our ecology (see answer to #1) for this reason. This also put genetics at the end, which is one of the more difficult units to grasp.
Do we want to keep our S&S similar to our standard level biology class to account for students who drop down a level at beginning of the year and semester? Answer to #1 and #2 mesh well with this answer, which is YES. We will have students change levels on the 3rd and 6th week of school, as well as at semester. If we can cover similar topics, even if it isn't at the same level, we have found we reduce stress for those students who want to level change.
Do we create units that are traditional (topic by topic) or do we want to combine our units into large phenomena units or storylines? I personally choose to do units more traditionally, topic by topic. I have looked into storylines and more project based units, but still tend to fall back to the traditional....however, this leads me to #5.
What units work best before and after each other, to better
help us spiral information? I think this one is really important if you are sticking to traditional format. I want to make sure that my students can see how each topic and unit fits into each other. For example, biomolecules spirals in all year long, so we teach it first. That is also where we start teaching micro --> macro.
Here is a peak at my current Scope and Sequence and Essential Questions we use for each unit. The file can also be downloaded below. I hope you find it helpful.
Happy Teaching!
Mrs. Townsend
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