The way this unit plan is set up is based on the Understanding by Design Unit Template because, as I discussed under “Models of Teaching,” backwards design is a great tool to allow educators to be intentional about why everything is being taught while making sure that students understand big themes tied to the content. It looks at the goals of the overall unit based on national standards as well as your own personal standards and transfers those goals into making meaningful questions and understandings that students will be able to learn from. After the basis of the purpose of the unit is set, then we can begin to build assessments that will allow students to demonstrate their understandings of the unit. All of the weekly lesson plans build on each other and provide foundational knowledge for the next section until all of the knowledge can be presented through a final evaluation.

Throughout my lesson plan I ask students to explore how different science concepts and ideas relate to their everyday lives or their communities and reflect on their own role within the interrelated systems of their own ecosystem. The objectives of this unit are to provide students with the necessary understandings of ecosystems and their relationship to them in order to think more deeply about real-world environmental problems and solutions. As such, the essential questions of this unit are: (1) Why is it important to preserve different components of an ecosystem? (2) What is our role (as humans) in the natural world around us? and (3) How responsible are we for the changes in our ecosystem and when should we be willing to address it?