Redesigning Classroom Instruction: A review of Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry out Instructional Units by Shana V. Hartman

In our ever-changing and highly pressured classroom climate, planning for instruction can often drift far away from those that are impacted most by our decisions as teachers: our students. Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units, by Peter Smagorinsky, a professor of English Education at University of Georgia, helps teachers of reading and writing take a step back, remember that we are in the business of helping foster student learning, and allows us to rethink our classrooms in a way that meets important learning outcomes and fosters meaning making for our students. Based upon social constuctivism and ideas of scaffolding (via Vygotsky), this book asks teachers “to consider the possibilities of teaching students in ways that challenge them to draw on a wide range of their intellectual resources to construct new knowledge and meaning in relation to the English curriculum” (18).

The book guides the reader towards understanding the “conceptual unit.” Smagorinsky provides in-depth, but easily accessible, guidance on how to set up the “construction zone” and a constructivist classroom through the design of the conceptual unit. A conceptual unit is defined as a unit of instruction that provides students with “sustained attention to a related set of ideas” (111). This definition is not groundbreaking, but the components of what makes a strong conceptual unit and the theoretical framework underpinning the design of the unit are. Smagorinsky presents seven types of units from themes, such as social justice in the U.S, to a key learning strategy, such as how to decode and interpret literary elements. The conceptual unit has several key components that allow a teacher to deeply ponder his/her classroom, and the book provides in-depth discussion and resources for each of the following:

• A rationale for the unit: “the argument you [the teacher] make to justify your selection of unit topic and its contents ” (112),
• Student inventory: “a vehicle that helps you learn about your students” before beginning the conceptual unit (112),
• Well-designed unit goals: “the unit’s destination,” incorporating but certainly not limited to grade-level standards (113),
• Introductory activities: “designed to help students develop the kind of schematic knowledge they need to understand the unit’s key concepts and problems” and prepare students for the unit (173),
• Clear and meaningful assessments: “culminating texts” students create that “correspond to students’ learning” and unit goals (114), and
• Integrated and sequenced lessons: “identifiable pieces of the larger unit…[that] are related…to the overall conceptual knowledge that students construct” (114).

One critique of the text might be that Smagorinsky tries to tackle more than just a “how to” for designing conceptual units. His arguments against traditional, teacher-led transmissions of knowledge in school, via discussions of everything from education psychology to writing instruction, are all in an effort to defend the conceptual unit and construction zone model for learning. Knowing that lesson and unit planning for English/Language arts often stem from lists of skills, vocabulary words, literary terms, and literature that the teacher must be able to check off, Smagorinsky’s approach clearly acknowledges what students know first and then guides teachers in finding processes for discovering new concepts and makes new knowledge collaboratively. Learning becomes more than checking items off on a list. Students are asked to be active members of their learning. The text is full of resources that teachers will find useful when designing such units or when just looking for a quick idea, like how to foster authentic discussion in a classroom. However, since he is an English educator, most of Smagorinsky’s examples focus on working with older students. The “Virtual Library of Conceptual Units” website provides numerous sample conceptual units from pre-service and in-service teachers at the University of Georgia (the link is provided in the book, but also easy to find via Google). Overall, this text helps teachers find a way to negotiate the need for well-formed learning goals, effective teaching strategies, and authentic assessments, but it does so on the terms of the most important stakeholders in the classroom—the teachers and the students.