Cognitive and Language Demands

Generally, I liked the Science unit plan related to earthquakes. I found the big ideas to be great examples of cross-cutting phenomena that relate to the real world, and the guiding questions are excellent open-ended questions that will generate some high level discussions in the class. In terms of cognitive demands, there are activities that span the cognitive demand spectrum baked into the lessons, ranging from knowledge and comprehension to synthesizing and creating. The reaching goal related to engineering a way to mitigate the risks of earthquakes is a great way to get students thinking at a high level about how to apply what they learn in the classroom to real world problems. This generates not only strong cognitive demand, but also interest and curiosity.

Related to language demands, the way students use language in this unit is multimodal. Students have opportunities to listen, speak, read, and write throughout the unit, which provides opportunities for all students to make meaning through their strongest mode of engagement. I also appreciated the amount of language supports that are included in each component of the unit, such as sentence stems, graphic organizers, translations, and modeling. This will ensure that all students will be able to engage with the lessons and their work products will accurately reflect their learning throughout the unit.