Recommendation

The recommendations for the unit of work, The Power of Media, is aimed at
improving the overall learning experience for students. The following modification to the
unit’s will increase student engagement, deepen their knowledge of the content and create
meaningful learning experiences. This is achieved through changes in teaching activities,
assessment and the design of the unit outline. These changes will be centred around the
general capabilities of literacy, numeracy and ethical understandings. Furthermore, these
modifications to improve the general capabilities will align with UbD frameworks and target
UbD three stages, identify desired results, acceptable evidence and planning learning
experience. The following recommendations in this report have been made to support the
learning of students in this unit.

Depth not breath: literacy in English

The unit outline allows students to experience new terminology, definition and
concepts that would have been unknown to students. This provides a great deal of breath
within the learning. However, due to the large amount of new terms, student lack the time to
delve deep into these new concepts. Boyles (2018) research highlights this issue in education
as frequently students know the words meaning but fail to apply the terms into context. This
is due to the lack of depth that learning activities provide (Boyles, 2018). Merga and Gardiner
(2018) reinforce this perspective as literacy activities need to be more engaging and complex
to allow for deeper understanding of the topic. To address this issue, changes to teaching
activities, specifically for the unit’s original glossary and definition activities are required. It
is recommended that activities that involve glossaries or definitions be modified to be more
creative and use digital elements to provide a complete literacy experience (Vera, 2011). This
recommendation follows stage 2 of UbD, as activities become acceptable evidence that
targets desired results in the unit.