learn-co-curriculum / breaking-your-curriculum-into-units

What are the main milestones (both skills and knowledge areas) that students need to pass to be able to complete this project? You don’t need to get too specific and there is no set number of milestones. You know your topic better than anyone else, so if you feel that that’s 20 separate milestones, that’s totally fine. If you think it might be closer to 10, not a problem either.

Oftentimes when you’re figuring out the milestones, you’ll find yourself working backwards from the end. That’s fine, but once you’re done, list the milestones in the sequential order in which you think they should be covered.

Now change milestones to units. Congratulations! You’ve just broken your large topic into much more manageable units.

Here are the sample Milestones/Units in our Ruby on Rails Curriculum:

Section	Topic
1	Intro to Rails and What it Is
2	Rails Models Basics
3	REST
4	ActionView
5	CRUD with Rails
6	Validations and Forms
7	Associations and Rails
8	Refactoring with Partials
9	Refactoring with Helpers and Private Methods
10	Routes and Resources
11	Authentication
12	Asset Pipeline
13	Popular Gems
14	Consuming APIs
15	Building APIs

Breaking Your Unit Down into Lessons

Let’s take a closer look at the unit. What are the specific things students need to be able to do at the end of a unit? And what’s your plan for how they should get there? In other words, what are the actions, skills, and knowledge that they need? Wherever possible, focus on the actions that students are taking and not the knowledge itself. Many times that might come down to a particularly large lab that you would want them to do that covers these concepts. Always remember that learning is about doing, and not about content.

For each of your units, list these down in the sequential order in which they should be covered.

Congratulations again! You now have a rough outline of the lessons that your unit will include. Sometimes, one action or skill can be its own lesson. Other times, it might need to be several lessons. Or in other cases, you can combine multiple actions and skills into a single lesson. Again, you know your topic better than anyone else so use your judgement and shape those expected student actions, skills, and knowledge into lessons.

Units can also vary in length. We don’t have a standard for how many lessons belong in a unit since we understand that some units take less time to cover while others might be more difficult and need more lessons devoted to them.

Also remember that when we talk about lessons, we mean both Readmes and Labs. Our typical flow is that every Readme should immediately be followed by a Lab so that a student can immediately apply the skills they’ve just learned. Towards the end of each unit, we also also want to have more difficult labs that encompass multiple concepts (some of which can come from previous units) and require more of students.

Rework your list of lessons from above to include the breakdown of Readmes and Labs in your unit.

Sample Rails Unit Breakdown for Association in Rails:

Content	Topic
Readme	Association Recap
Lab	Rails Join the Fun
Lab	Flatiron BNB Associations
Lab	Flatiron BNB Methods
Readme	Displaying Association Data
Lab	Displaying Association Data Lab
Readme	Forms and Basic Associations
Lab	Forms and Basic Associations Lab
Readme	Basic Nested Forms
Lab	Basic Nested Forms Lab
Readme	Displaying Has Many Through
Lab	Displaying Has Many Through Lab
Readme	Has Many Through in Forms
Lab	Has Many Through in Forms Lab
Lab	Rails Blog Complex Nested Forms
Lab	Rails Blog Assocations and Validations Lab
Lab	Rails Pollywog Ranch Lab

And there you go! Now you have a solid high level outline of your course. This will go through several iterations. You might in your process, learn that a unit needs to be broken down even further or that there were missing units and lessons you hadn’t considered. That’s totally fine and expected! View this lesson on Learn.co