
11 Unit & Lesson Design “Pitfalls” to Avoid
By Rosalind LaRocque
It is the goal of every educator to develop units and lesson plans that promote deep understanding of content and engage students. However, below are several “pitfalls” that are easy to fall into, and not always easily observable.
1. Including too many standards in a unit or lesson
Often pacing guides seem to privilege coverage rather than deep understanding, but in effective unit design, generally there is no more than three standards
2. Designating pre-requisite skills as unit goals
Pre-requisite skills that are essential to mastery of new learning should be identified and taught prior to teaching the unit. Goals, on the other hand, should delineate new learning.
3. Failing to consider knowledge objectives and skill objectives in the plan.
Planning should include knowledge objectives and skill objectives, where applicable.
4. Incoherence between the instruction and the identified standards.
Coherence and cohesiveness within and between the units facilitates deeper understanding of content and supports retention.
5. Poorly phrased Essential Questions
Phrasing the Essential Question as a guided question limits the student’s potential to demonstrate ownership and understanding of the content. What is vegetation is a guiding question while a well written essential question would be, “How do climatic conditions affect vegetation?”
6. Crafting tasks around “the verb”
All tasks have verbs, but the verb is not the task itself. Rather the verb tells us what we will be doing to complete the task. Consequently, the same verb can describe four tasks all of which are increasingly more complex and more challenging.
7. Not including plans for adjustments
Students learn at different paces. Yet, pacing guides can often project a one-size-fits-all approach. Effective plans have room for adjustments to accommodate those who need more time.
8. Failure to use differentiation strategically.
Differentiation is just one way to meet the needs of all students. Every lesson does not need to be differentiated nor does everything in a unit plan. Differentiation can be used to determine levels of understanding; as a means to give students “choice”; or as a way to motivate students to attempt challenging tasks.
9. A lack of opportunities in the plan to engage students in the transfer of knowledge.
Giving students the opportunity to engage in interactions that foster the transfer of knowledge, will help guarantee student ownership of the new learning.
10. Confusing “Engagement” with “Fun”
The end goal of engagement is for students to solidify learning in their long-term memory through interactions with the content. Activities included in instruction can be fun, but activity for the sake of activity will not foster coherent learning.
11. Failure to design adequate assessments
Something is lacking if assessments allow students to do well without being proficient in the targeted knowledge or allow students who have acquired the targeted knowledge to do poorly.

Mrs. Rosalind LaRocque is an associate director who currently works at the American Federation of Teachers in the Educational Issues Department, designing professional development experiences for all educators. In 1975, she graduated with honors from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados and began her teaching career preparing students for the external General Certificate Exam set by Cambridge. She later served as an examiner for the Caribbean Examinations Council. In 1980 she obtained her MA in Education from the University of the Virgin Islands and by 2003 completed her Ph.D. with Madison University.
LaRocque taught in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, served as Language Arts Department Chair and later became a Master Teacher, under a union-district sponsored program. By 1987, she became the local site coordinator for the AFT research-based program that brought researchers and practitioners together to develop professional development experiences for educators.
She is the recipient of several certificates of appreciation; awards from her students, school and community groups. Mrs LaRocque has written several articles, and her first book Reform vs Dreams, Preventing Student Failure was released February, 2012.
