A Helpful Unit Plan Format for Secondary ELA Teachers
Are you a Type-A planner with a time-tested unit plan format, or are you more of a free-spirited type, allowing each unit’s needs to guide your direction?
It can feel overwhelming to sort through the materials provided by your district or textbook publisher as you prepare to figure out your next unit plan. This feeling is only exacerbated by looking at a pacing guide that seems to suggest it is not only possible, but completely expected, that you and your students will whizz through each and every activity in a number of days that is jaw-droppingly short. These guides seem to not account for things like the length of a class period or that we’re dealing with easily distracted teenagers.
Real-world unit planning is a cut-throat business. You’ve got to decide what to prioritize and what to leave out. How much “fun” is too much fun? How much “focus” is too much focus? As Type-A planners, we’ve got a time-tested unit plan format, and we’re sharing it with you today.
8 Elements of a Unit Plan Format
1. Introductory Activity
These activities introduce students to the themes or background of the text and try to capture their interest. We also use this part of the unit to introduce skills students will need, like literary devices or writing strategies. This part of the unit tends to work best with low-stakes, high-engagement activities, and we like to bring in contemporary texts whenever we can.
2. Guided Reading Activities
One of our early teaching mistakes was expecting students to be prepared to discuss a text in class without completing any sort of preparatory assignment. When there was no written work to accompany reading, many students didn’t do the reading, and others struggled to understand the text. When we started assigning guided reading questions, students were better prepared for discussion and we had guided them to pay close attention to key areas of the text.
3. Skills Practice
We often combine this component with our guided reading activities or writing assignment, but we ask students to practice whatever skill we introduced in the beginning of the unit, whether they are discussing the use of specific literary devices in the text or using a new writing strategy.

4. Opportunity for Feedback and Revision
Students need to engage in some sort of interaction with others to process the text, revise their thinking, go deeper, and learn from other perspectives. While this often takes the form of classroom discussion, it doesn’t have to. Students can work out the meaning of the text together in a group project or submit short-answer responses that will receive feedback prior to a revision opportunity.
5. Prewriting
Because we like to plan our units with an end in mind, we try to make every activity lead up to the unit’s final writing assignment. Sometimes, students are adequately prepared to write by completing the guided reading questions: we’ve given them opportunities to think about the prompt and find evidence, even if they haven’t realized it. Other times, we create a separate activity where students can focus on key ideas, collect evidence, and develop their thinking.
6. Writing Assignment
Whether students write a process essay, a timed essay, or a paragraph, it’s important that they have ample opportunities to practice writing skills. Not only is this part of being an English student, but when students have to articulate their thoughts on a text, they strengthen their understanding of it.

7. Final Assessment
We always like to include some sort of “objective” assessment in each unit, like a reading check quiz or a unit test. Not only does this show us what students have learned and hold students accountable for the material, but it provides a balance in student grades. Allowing students to demonstrate mastery of a text through both written and more objective means can help students feel successful even when their writing scores are low.
8. Something “Different”
This isn’t so much a separate part of each unit as it is something we try to keep in mind throughout; a floating element in our unit plan format, if you will. Is there something to break up the reading, allow students to be creative, or differentiate this unit from the ones that came before? We love a good routine, but it’s nice for all of us to have a little bit of variety in each unit, whether that means we show a movie, vary the format of our assignments, or include a creative component.
Related Content
You’re starting to feel a unit plan format taking shape in your mind and then you run into a fairly significant roadblock: the text. Whether you’ve got a less-than-stellar textbook or a novel students (and maybe even you) dread to read, it doesn’t matter how refined your unit plan format is if the text you’re working with is an absolute dud. Having been in this situation more times than we’ve liked, we’ve developed a few tricks to help overcome these momentum killers. Check out this episode of our Answers May Vary podcast and this YouTube video for our suggestions on making a challenging text or curriculum work for you.