Plan a unit by reverse-engineering the A-grade response

Plan a unit by reverse-engineering the A-grade response

Term 2 finished on Friday in most Victorian schools and the holidays are the one time you actually have a clear day to plan a Term 3 unit properly. Most planning sessions still start at the front (week 1, lesson 1) and run out of breath halfway through, so the summative task at the end of the unit is the one that arrives understaffed. Backwards design says start from the assessment. This prompt takes that one step further: write the A-grade student response first, in full, and then work back to the lessons that produce each move in it.

The prompt

You are a senior [SUBJECT] teacher and head of faculty in an Australian [PRIMARY / SECONDARY / TERTIARY] school. You plan units backwards from the summative task, not forwards from week 1. Today you are helping me plan a Term 3 unit by reverse-engineering it from a hypothetical A-grade student response.

THE UNIT
- Year level: [YEAR LEVEL, e.g. Year 10]
- Subject and unit title: [e.g. Year 10 Geography, Environmental Change and Management]
- Length: [NUMBER OF WEEKS, e.g. 7 weeks, including one assessment week]
- Lessons per week: [e.g. 3 x 60-minute periods]
- Curriculum frame: ACARA v9.0 [LIST THE RELEVANT CONTENT DESCRIPTORS, or paste the strand]
- State context (if it matters): [e.g. VCAA Levels 9-10 Geography, or NSW Stage 5, or QCAA]
- Class composition in one line: [e.g. "25 students, mixed ability, four EAL/D, two on adjustments for written output"]

THE SUMMATIVE TASK (paste verbatim)
- Brief: [PASTE THE TASK BRIEF AS STUDENTS WILL SEE IT, INCLUDING WORD/TIME LIMITS AND FORMAT]
- Rubric: [PASTE THE RUBRIC, EVERY CRITERION AND EVERY LEVEL. If you have not written the rubric yet, tell me and I will write a draft after step 1]
- The cognitive verb at the heart of the task: [e.g. EVALUATE, JUSTIFY, EXPLAIN, COMPARE, DESIGN, ANALYSE]

PRODUCE FIVE BLOCKS, IN THIS EXACT ORDER. SHORT. NO PADDING.

BLOCK 1. THE A-GRADE RESPONSE (the load-bearing artefact)
Write the response a strong student at this year level would produce, scoring at the top band of the rubric. Full piece, not a sketch. Australian English. Year-level appropriate sentence length and register. If the task asks for a written response, write it. If a multi-modal task, write the script and describe the visuals. Pitch it as plausibly student work, not as a teacher exemplar. The piece must demonstrably hit every criterion of the rubric at the top band. Annotate nothing yet.

BLOCK 2. THE MOVES THE RESPONSE MAKES (one numbered list)
Walk back through the A-grade response and name every distinct cognitive or content move that earned it the grade. A move is a single action: "introduces the framework before applying it", "selects the more contested case study over the safer one", "names the limitation of the source before using it", "uses a comparative connective ('whereas') rather than an additive one ('and')". Aim for 12 to 20 moves. Each move is one short line. Do NOT generalise to "demonstrates analysis"; the moves are concrete.

BLOCK 3. THE TEACHABLE INPUTS BEHIND EACH MOVE
For each move from Block 2, name (a) the knowledge a student needs to hold to make the move, (b) the practice the student needs to have done to make the move automatically, and (c) the misconception that blocks the move if untaught. Three short bullets per move. Be honest where the move is mostly knowledge versus mostly practice; do not pretend everything needs four lessons.

BLOCK 4. THE WEEK-BY-WEEK SEQUENCE
Distribute the inputs from Block 3 across the weeks I gave you, leaving the last week clear for the summative. The sequence rule: a load-bearing concept appears across at least 3 separate weeks in the order introduce, practise, apply, retrieve. No new content in the final teaching week before the summative. Each week is one short paragraph:
- Week N: the focus, the one big idea, the two or three moves from Block 2 that this week's lessons are building toward, the formative checkpoint at the end of the week, and the move from Block 3 that gets retrieved from a prior week (interleaved, not a revision lesson).
Flag any week where you have had to cut content because the unit length is too short, and name what you cut.

BLOCK 5. THE THREE THINGS TO BUILD FIRST (the over-the-holidays list)
Of everything in the sequence, name the three artefacts I should make over the holidays so the rest of the term runs from Monday week 1 without scrambling. Be specific: not "make a unit plan", but "draft the worked example for week 2 lesson 1 with the deliberate error on the conservation step". Each item is one sentence and references the exact week and lesson it serves.

CLOSING JUDGEMENT (one sentence)
Read the A-grade response from Block 1 once more. Is there a move in it that the sequence in Block 4 does NOT actually teach? If yes, name it and the week it should slot into. If no, say so plainly.

RULES
- Australian English. ACARA v9.0 vocabulary. Year 10, not 10th grade. Term 3, not Q3.
- No em-dashes, no en-dashes anywhere. Commas and full stops only.
- Do not invent rubric criteria I did not paste. If the rubric is missing, ask before writing Block 1.
- Do not soften Block 5. If the answer is "you have a week's work to do", say so.
- Do not use the words "leverage", "unpack", "deep dive", "robust", or "scaffold their thinking".
- Do not finish with "let me know if you want me to draft the lesson plans". I will ask if I want that.

What it does well

Forces the model to commit to a full A-grade response in writing, which is the artefact most planning conversations skip and the one that does the most work once you have it. Block 2 is the bit that earns the prompt its place: naming 12 to 20 concrete moves a strong student makes is the analysis you would do with a head of faculty over coffee, and almost never do alone on a Tuesday. The closing judgement is the line that catches the move the sequence quietly assumes a student will pick up by osmosis.

Where it falls over

The A-grade response the model writes is only as good as the rubric you paste. If the rubric is loose ("sophisticated analysis"), the response will be loose, and the moves you extract will be soft. Tighten the rubric first, or accept that Block 4 will land a notch lower than you wanted. The model also tends to write a tidier student response than a real Year 10 produces, with cleaner transitions and fewer missteps. Use it as a planning artefact, not as an exemplar to hand to students; the exemplar prompt from a fortnight ago is the right tool for that. And the prompt cannot tell you whether you have the wrong summative task. If the cognitive verb in the assessment does not match the unit's intended learning, fixing the sequence will not save it. Stop and rewrite the task first.

Try it like this

For the Year 9 history unit you are inheriting from a colleague: paste the rubric they wrote and ask Block 1 to write the response in a Year 9 register, not a VCE one. The moves in Block 2 will tell you which weeks your colleague's plan probably under-teaches, before you reuse any of it.

For a Year 7 maths unit where the summative is a problem-solving task with multiple solution paths: tell the model to write two A-grade responses in Block 1 that use different solution strategies, then run Block 2 across both. The moves common to both are the load-bearing skills the unit must teach; the moves unique to one are the optional extensions for fast finishers.

For a VCE Unit 3 unit on a tight 9-week timeline: set the unit length to 7 teaching weeks, not 9, and let Block 4 build the cut into the sequence honestly. Two weeks of overrun is the planning reality of Term 3, and it is better to plan for it than to discover it in week 6.

If you only have 40 minutes from the kitchen table this week, run Blocks 1, 2, and 5 only. The A-grade response, the moves it makes, and the three things to build before school resumes. Run Blocks 3 and 4 in the second week of the holidays when you have a clearer head.

The unit that earns its place is the one where week 1 already knows what week 7 is going to ask for.