The following guidance on unit development is intended to assist teachers in developing rich units that help students understand both the concepts in the AERO Social Studies standards and benchmarks and the specific cultural/anthropological, economic, geographic, historical, political, and sociological content from different historical periods and global regions. A brief description of the AERO Suggested Topics Menus is followed by four guiding principles and a set of directions entitled Organizing instructional units with AERO .

The AERO Suggested Topics Menus are designed to accomplish three ends. First, they supports the idea that concepts (such as those articulated by the AERO standards and benchmarks) cannot be separated from content and remain meaningful. Second, their organization suggests connections across time or region in social studies. Third, they provide suggestions (suggestions only!) for grade-appropriate content for the AERO standards and benchmarks.

The social studies content topics in the menus are not always the most obvious ones possible. They have instead been chosen by regional specialists for their particular usefulness in helping students gain an understanding of the benchmarks. That is, rather than necessarily being a compendium of thousands of "must know" facts", the topics were selected for their capacity to illuminate larger ideas. Much familiar content is in the menus, but there are also topics that may well be unfamiliar. Schools are encouraged to add their own topics as they wish.

Topics have not been filled into every time/region block of the menus, and for some of the benchmarks, there are no topics at all. The reasons for this are various. Some of the benchmarks are self-limiting; it did not make sense with these to write region- or time-specific topics for these. In other cases, the benchmark was best addressed only by modern topics, so no topics appear for earlier eras.

Guiding Principles
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Guiding Principle #1: Make Connections
When constructing units, teachers should strive to make them "multi-dimensional" by developing connections to:
Time - How was the topic of study influenced by previous events in history and what was its impact on later events?
Place - How does the topic of study or variations of it appear in other places around the globe?
Strands or disciplines - What are the cultural/anthropological, economic, historical, sociological, political, and geographical conditions that influenced or were influenced by the selected topic or event?
Contemporary situations - How does the topic of study connect to current local or world events or issues?
This chart shows how teachers can use these four dimensions to plan units.

Guiding Principle #2: Create Powerful Learning Experiences
Exemplary social studies lessons are powerful when they are meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active. Excellent social studies instruction helps students become aware of and understand multiple perspectives and develop empathy for other viewpoints.

Guiding Principle #3: Balance Concepts and Content
Effective social studies instruction balances content (as traditionally understood) and concepts (in AERO, these are the standards and benchmarks). In part, this is effective simply because a balance provides for a richer understanding of both content and concepts than traditional approaches that focus on one or the other, but not both. But it is effective also because balanced instruction provides a better means of student learning: Students who tend to think in terms of concepts need a chance to approach content through their strengths - conceptual thinking - but they also must be stretched through opportunities that start with specific content (from which concepts are then derived). Students who are better characterized as "part-to-whole" learners likewise need to be met at their strengths - in this case, grasp of specific content - and guided to an understanding of bigger concepts. The standard/benchmark and topic arrangement in AERO is intended to helps teachers reach a balance between content and concepts.

Guiding Principle #4: Design Units with the End in Mind
The most effective curriculum design process begins by asking, "What should the learners take away from the experience (activity, lesson, unit)?" In practical terms, this approach means teacher decide first which standards and benchmarks are to be the focus of the unit and then, before designing instructional activities, teachers design a culminating assessment that would tell them to what degree their students understood the content and concepts in the standards. Planning of instructional activities, intermediate assessments, and resources - that is, lesson planning - for the unit follows.

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Organizing Instructional Units

One sample unit developed using the following approach can be found by clicking here.

1. Select standards and benchmarks Designing social studies units should be a fluid, flexible, and reflective process. It should not, however, be a "forward-designed" process - taking current units or lesson plans and seeing which standards and benchmarks they might meet. Following on Guiding Principle #4: Design with the End in Mind, it is important first to identify the standards and benchmarks you wish to cluster together in a unit and then select content and events that will illustrate the concept "in action." Teachers might find it beneficial to select a single standard as a starting point and build a unit from this foundation. In that case, it is recommended that teachers rotate through the standards when planning units for the year.

2. Select a content topic or theme Teachers will find that, when properly approached, certain time-tested topics - Westward Expansion, Magna Carta, or Manchu Conquest, for example - lend themselves to powerful illumination of social studies concepts. Teachers can turn to the AERO Suggested Topics Menus, look for the selected standards and benchmarks, and use the topics from any of the time periods or world regions as a spur to unit design. (Checking the topics for the earlier or later grades will help teachers avoid repeating content, or, alternatively, help ensure that repetition is deliberate and spiraling.) Another approach would be to begin with a theme (for example, justice, migration, agriculture, or inventions). A list of themes for each of the standards is found in the Topics Menus under the heading for each of the standards. The themes have a high potential for developing students' understanding of the standards' underlying benchmarks.

3. Decide on the length of the unit Teachers should allow enough weeks of study that students have a chance to develop real understanding of the benchmarks. It is critical that teachers determine how many lessons they can devote to a unit, as this will influence the scope and depth of coverage and the number of benchmarks that can be satisfactorily taught and assessed. Experience has shown that 3 to 6 weeks, and about 3 to 5 benchmarks, are manageable limits. Developing an annual calendar map that lays out the standards and benchmarks teachers will need to work on with their students can help pace instruction and suggest a realistic length for any given unit.

4. Consider connections Several kinds of connections are possible. Click here to see an illustration.

Standard and benchmark connections: With the core standard, benchmarks, topic, and/or theme selected, teachers can see if secondary standards or benchmarks should be included. These benchmarks might be included to reinforce earlier instruction or to prepare students for later instruction in greater depth. A further 3 to 10 benchmarks might be added to the core benchmarks.

Horizontal topics connections: Teachers start with the content topic they have selected from the Topics Menus and look within the same region, forward and backward in time from the core topic.

Vertical topics connections: Teachers start with the content topic they have selected from the Topics Menus and look within the same time period, in other world regions.

5. Create driving questions Teachers can think of driving questions as a mechanism to assist students in focusing on the central points of the unit. These questions can help "drive" the entire unit toward your culminating assessment. Driving questions (known also as essential questions or guiding questions) require students to think deeply and independently about content, use subject-specific skills, and are interesting enough that students will want to discover answers to them.

6. Design a culminating task With the end in mind, teachers can determine a culminating task that students will complete to demonstrate whether they have gained understanding of the standards and benchmarks that were the focus of the unit. The task should be substantial, interesting, open-ended, and, if possible, provide a range of ways that students can give evidence of understanding. Ideally, it should provide the teacher with enough information about student learning to tell whether or not a student has appropriately mastered the key concepts and, if they have not, where the gaps in learning lie.

7. Outline lesson plans The instructional outline should be sequential and provide specific guidance for teaching the unit, including what both the students and the teacher will do. It should include interim assessments that provide information for both the teacher and the student about student progress towards the benchmarks. It should also include the resources (books, articles, artifacts, statistics, videos, internet sites, etc.) used in the unit. The creation and organization of the daily lessons and assessments are the largest component of the unit development process. Unlike in traditional unit development, this component comes last, not first.

8. Reflect on the unit After completing the unit, teachers can identify the strengths and weaknesses of the unit and revise it for further use. Gathering student feedback on what activities assisted them in learning can help a teacher determine which elements were effective. At this time, teachers should collect samples of student work from the interim and culminating assessments - the samples can be used in subsequent years to help students understand what constitutes satisfactory or superior work.