On December 1, the special column of the 7th edition of the "China Education Daily" published the article "Literacy-oriented, student-based, learning-centered: How are the core-literacy-oriented unit learning plans possible" by Professor Cui Yunhuo.

The unit learning plan is a new teaching plan produced under the background of the continuous advancement of the new round of basic education curriculum reform (hereinafter referred to as "new curriculum reform"). It is a realistic product of the combination of educational theory and practice, and it is also a theoretical innovation with Chinese characteristics in the field of curriculum teaching, which helps to eliminate the gap between the expected goals of curriculum reform and the implementation status.

Generally speaking, the curriculum reform of primary and secondary schools in China can be roughly divided into five units: new curriculum standards, new textbooks, new teaching plans, new classrooms, and new assessments. The unit learning plans are based on the actual situation, successful experience and realistic challenges of China's curriculum reform, and is rooted in various schools in China. It is a new teaching plan that is "literacy-oriented, student-based, and learning-centered". Here, we sorts out the necessity, scientific nature and feasibility of the unit education plan for more discussion on the new teaching plan.

Necessity: New curriculum standards urgently need new new teaching plans

Under the background of the new curriculum reform, the necessity of the unit learning plan is reflected in the following three aspects:

First, the literacy-oriented new curriculum standards call for "big unit" teaching. The newly revised curriculum standard takes core literacy as the key idea, and establishes core literacy-oriented curriculum goals, course content (requirements) and academic quality, and provides guidance for textbook compilation, classroom teaching, examination questions, assignment design, and process evaluation. Teachers no longer focus on content standards based on single knowledge as in the past. Instead, they must broaden their horizons, base their teaching on the major themes in the textbooks, take core literacy centered academic quality as standards, analyze the learning status, identify the goal of unit study, and make specific unit teaching design. Therefore, the new instructional design text should not take "class hours + knowledge points" as the instructional design unit, but should start with a bigger picture, and use the "big unit" as the design unit to ensure the core literacy.

Second, the practice of education-oriented teaching profession needs to rebuild the teaching plan. Traditional teaching is mainly about imparting knowledge, while the new teaching advocated by the new curriculum is professional practice with educating people as the core. As a professional way of educating people, teaching aims to guide, maintain and promote student learning. In other words, if students do not master or learn how to study and then sustainably, the meaning of "teaching" will be greatly reduced. Therefore, teachers need to have a professional plan for teaching. As the core carrier of teaching, the teaching plan will shift its focus from "how teachers teach" to "how students learn". Teachers who only design "how to teach" cannot change the way of educating people. Only by providing students with "how to learn" programs or "prescriptions" can their teaching be called professional. Therefore, based on the new understanding of teachers' professional practice under the guidance of people educating, the new teaching plan must adhere to the learning position, uphold learning as the center, focus and support how students learn and why they learn.

Third, individualized teaching under high-quality development requires new breakthroughs. Classroom teaching is the basic organizational form of school education. Although it has greatly improved the efficiency of education, the single teaching mode hardly meet the individualized learning needs of different students. Teaching vitality cannot be fully utilized. The high-quality development of education needs to achieve a higher level of balance between efficiency and fairness, and it is necessary to explore a teaching practice that "sees every student" under the conditions of class teaching. To achieve this transformation, the center of classroom teaching must be students rather than teachers. The teaching form is no longer based on group listening, but on individualized learning, so that each student can learn as much as possible in as much time as possible. They are all investing in the learning designed by teachers according to their own speed, depth and breadth. Correspondingly, the teaching plan should also change from the teaching plan of "facing a class of students" to the teaching aid plan of "letting different students experience different learning", so as to realize the "iterative upgrading" of teaching students in accordance with their aptitude.

Scientific: Turning educational events into structured learning experiences

The essence of school curriculum is that educators structure students' learning experience according to specific purposes, so that it has the characteristics of purpose, planning, organization and so on. In other words, the school curriculum is to integrate each relatively independent educational event into a structured learning experience according to a specific purpose and logic. A unit is a representation of a relatively independent structured learning experience. It is the smallest course unit or micro-course, and each unit is composed of a subject. The entire curriculum system is a course of a certain period of education programs constructed from different subjects.

As a curriculum unit, a unit must embody five self-contained curriculum elements, namely needs (why to learn), goals (what to expect to learn), content (what to learn), implementation (how to learn), evaluation (learned or not), and Only when these five elements show internal consistency can educational events become "complete" and meaningful. Since the needs of the national curriculum are clearly stipulated or presented in the curriculum standards of various disciplines, when implementing the national curriculum, the teacher's unit teaching design text should only focus on presenting the last four curriculum elements and their consistency.

In the process of curriculum teaching, educators transform educational events into organized learning experiences according to specific purposes. They need to use curriculum standards as the starting point for curriculum teaching design, and pay attention to the "academic quality" that reflects literacy orientation and represents comprehensive achievement goals rather than the specific content or knowledge points of the teaching materials. Specifically, when designing unit teaching, teachers must first analyze the textbook catalog and clarify which of the content to be taught in this textbook can be used as the major theme of the unit. Then, based on these big themes, they compare with the academic quality, analyze the academic situation, decide to use big problems, big tasks or big ideas to organize units, formulate learning goals, design the learning process and evaluation, so as to convert the content to be taught into interrelated, structured learning experiences.

The unit learning plan is constructed based on the above understanding. It is a learning aid plan or scaffold developed by teachers for students to learn textbooks well, including unit names and class hours, learning objectives, evaluation tasks, and learning processes (including resources) and suggestions), homework and testing, and post-school reflection. Among them, there are several key techniques in the design of unit learning plan:

✦ Unit learning objectives need to be compiled based on academic quality, and the implementation of core literacy must be "visible";

✦ The design of assessment tasks should precede the learning process in order to achieve the consistency of teaching assessment;

✦ The design of the learning process needs to reflect advanced, structured and practical features;

✦ The design of homework and testing needs to reflect integrity, school-based and matching with the goal;

✦ Post-study reflection is the key point of the unit learning plan. Teachers need to design the path or support for post-study reflection according to the level of reflection as well as the literacy goals, so as to ensure what input is knowledge, and output is literacy.

Only in this way can teachers move from teaching to educating people, let education return to the essence of educating people, and can truly realize the curriculum educating people advocated by the new curriculum.

The unit learning plan provides a strong support for the occurrence of deep learning. For elementary and middle school students, deep learning is not born in their natures, but requires teacher education or guidance. Teachers should provide students with professional learning assistance programs, so that students can clarify learning goals and paths, engage in challenging big problems and tasks, engage in advanced designed learning processes, and carry out process evaluation and post-study reflection. At the same time, under the background of the same textbook, classroom and teacher, students can achieve different learning progress, depth and breadth.

It should be noted that the above has always emphasized the importance of academic quality in the design of learning objectives, so should the original content standards that carry knowledge points be discarded? The answer is negative. When teachers are working out the class time goals in unit teaching, they still have to refer to the content standards or requirements. Only when teachers think about the learning objectives that carry specific knowledge points and are usually related to class hours in the overall concept of the unit or after clarifying the high-level unit objectives, will it be more conducive to solving the long-standing problem of low efficiency.

Feasibility: realize the "iteration" from the traditional teaching plan to the unit learning plan

In general, 10-year exploration of learning plans have mainly led to two "iterations": "replacing" the previous class-hour teaching plans with class-hour learning plans, and then unit learning plans.

Since the 21st century, with the advancement of a new round of basic education curriculum reform and the development of learning science, the "curriculum-teaching" thinking has surpassed the "education-teaching" thinking and has been increasingly accepted by principals and teachers. Compared with the lesson plan that focuses on how to teach, the innovation of the unit learning plan lies in the transformation of teaching design standpoint and thinking. The unit learning plan advocates from the perspective of students' learning, based on specific goals, to present the process of how students learn with a professional plan, so to make the learning process visible. At the same time, the unit learning plan pays more attention to how to design and organize students' learning experience rather than teachers' teaching behavior, so as to help students realize from not knowing (less) to (more) knowing, and from unable to able. This is the sublation of traditional teaching plans.

In 2014, the Ministry of Education issued the "Opinions on Comprehensively Deepening the Curriculum Reform and Implementing the Fundamental Task of Cultivation". In 2016, the "Core Literacy for Chinese Students' Development" was released, and core literacy has increasingly become a key word in our country's curriculum education. In 2017, the Ministry of Education promulgated the "General High School Curriculum Plan and Curriculum Standards". Its biggest breakthrough is to condense the core literacy of each course, forming “goals families” of curriculum objectives, content standards and academic quality standards. At the same time, the high-level literacy goals put forward new requirements for teaching design. How to transform the class-hour academic programs that are suitable for short-term learning and limited to low-level goals to adapt to the teaching demands of the core literacy era has become an urgent problem to be solved. Based on this, our research further focuses on the unit learning plan that is core literacy-oriented, so as to realize the innovation of teaching design from the lesson design that focused on fragmentary knowledge points in the past to the design of big units.

To describe the difference between a class-hour degree case and a unit degree case, I will give an example in life to describe it, just like the difference between "cooking one course" and "cooking a table of food". Teachers must first learn to "cook one dish", and then learn to "cook a table of dishes". The former is the basis of the latter, but the focus of the former and the latter is different: the focus of the former may be how to cook, that is, skills; the focus of the latter is for whom so many dishes are cooked and how to match them to make better combination, with focus on people. Therefore, the design of the unit learning plan means a greater challenge for teachers' professional practice, but it is also the advancement of teachers' professional development.

So, how to understand the feasibility of the unit learning plan? From the perspective of its functions, we have summarized five major functions of the unit learning plans from our 10 years of research experience:

First, the learning plans are student aid plans prepared by teachers to help students learn the textbooks well, rather than a teacher's teaching plan, similar to the medical records or prescriptions written by doctors to patients.

Second, the learning plans provides students with a clear goal and a cognitive map of the learning path to achieve the goal, similar to a travel plan customized by a tour guide for tourists.

Thirdly, the learning plans facilitate the establishment of learning files that record the complete learning process, reflecting the subjectivity, constructivity and accumulation of learning. At the same time, it can also help students evoke or awaken memories of the learning process.

Fourth, the learning plans are interactive text carriers between teachers, teachers and students, and students, which not only reflects the professionalism of teaching, but also implements in-depth learning.

Fifth, the learning plans are the direct basis for teachers' daily monitoring of academic quality, which can not only reflect the consistency of teaching evaluation, but also truly ensure that "the first users of process evaluation information are students".

There are currently professional practices on unit learning plans across the country, and the teaching exploration with the theme of learning plans has won provincial teaching achievement awards in many provinces, which also proves its feasibility.

Of course, "feasible" does not mean that "learning plans" and "unit learning plans" are a set of prescription techniques, that is, teachers can apply them only with their existing knowledge and ability, but it means that this professional practice is in teachers’ “zones of proximal development". Only the continuous collaboration and efforts of the professional community is the key to the "feasibility" of the new teaching plan.