Rationale:
The title of this disciplinary unit is La cultura de deseos y necesidades, the culture of wants and needs. The
unit was designed to support the national, state, and district standards for teaching a level 1 Spanish class.
Developed using the Understanding by Design (UbD) template created by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, the
unit intends to “make meaning of learning via big ideas to transfer learning” (Wiggins and McTighe 2011).
With an emphasis on long-term achievement gains, the planning process was purposefully circuitous—crafting
desired results and assessments prior to creating individual lesson plans and then circling back up to ensure
that the content addressed is aligned with the desired results in addition to the assessment standards.
The Spanish vocabulary and grammar included in this unit are modified from the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD scope
and sequence. Vocabulary and grammar lessons do not typically draw students in. For this reason, I have
added a cultural component comparing and expressing wants and needs to serve as the heart of the unit.
Because one of the main focuses of a World Language class is being able to effectively communicate in the
target language, my classroom is structured so that students are almost always working in cooperative
learning groups, either heterogeneously or homogeneously mixed depending on the activity. To effectively
facilitate deeper meaning and long-lasting learning, I employ a variety of research-based strategies from ACTFL
and The Strategic Teacher by Harvey F. Silver, Richard W. Strong, and Matthew J. Perini. Some of the more
prominent strategies in this unit are Inductive Sorting, Compare and Contrast, Story like a Rockstar, Teams,
Games, Tournaments, the use of Authentic Resources, Window Notes, Real(ish) Scenarios, and Performance-
Based Assessments.
Staying true to the UbD process, the learning does not stop with these final assessments. The desired results
are much broader and more long-term. At the end of 12 days, students will not only be able to say what
school supplies they want, need, and have, and what activities they want to do, need to do, and have to do,
but they will also continue on their journey of becoming more proficient in the target language and develop a
sense of respect and understanding of other cultures and their wants and needs. They will understand that
having more doesn’t equate to superiority and that the way in which they ask for something can impact the
response. And it is with these transfer goals that our students are able to reach Robert Marzano’s fifth
dimension of learning, Habits of Mind, characterized by critical thinking skills, creative thinking skills, and self-
regulated thinking. (Marzano 1997). They are able to extend what they have learned throughout the unit and
authentically apply it to their everyday lives outside of the Spanish 1 classroom.
Works Cited