Start with required learning
Standards remain the foundation. Name the knowledge, skills, and level of thinking students must demonstrate before choosing the problem.
Ask: What should students be able to use, not merely recall?Learn the approach
Familiar teaching, reorganized around purpose.
An Authentic Learning Unit begins with a problem that creates a genuine need for the standards—not with a project attached after instruction is finished.
TRADITIONAL UNITAUTHENTIC LEARNING UNIT
Teach the content first
→Launch a problem that makes the content necessary
Practice skills in separate activities
→Build skills while students work toward a response
Complete a project at the end
→Create a product that serves an authentic audience
Teacher decides the path
→Students make meaningful choices within clear constraints
Test whether students remember
→Assess whether students can apply and transfer
Create an authentic need
Choose a problem with real stakes, a genuine audience, and more than one defensible response. Students should need the target learning to make progress.
Ask: Who outside school uses this learning, and why?Build toward transfer
Scaffolds and activities prepare students to make increasingly independent decisions. A transfer task then asks them to apply the learning in a new context.
Ask: Can students recognize when and how to use what they learned?Five design commitments
What makes an ALU more than a project?
These commitments should be visible from the task statement through the final transfer assessment.
Put them into practice →- 1Purpose before procedure
Students understand the challenge before learning the parts.
- 2Standards earn their place
Content helps students make better decisions and products.
- 3Audience changes the work
Communication responds to someone’s actual needs.
- 4Choice changes the thinking
Students own consequential decisions, not cosmetic ones.
- 5Transfer proves the learning
Students apply their understanding in a new situation.