Why This Matters

Everything so far has been "here's a concept, here's an example, now try a piece of it." This is different. This is: close the door, block out three or four hours across the next week, and build one complete unit from a blank planner to something you will actually teach next term. Reading about backward design and doing backward design under real time pressure, with your real students, your real content requirements, and your real gaps in resources, are not the same skill. This article is where you find out if you can actually do the thing, not just describe it.

Understand the Idea

You've now met every component this unit needs, spread across Chapters 02–05: key concepts and related concepts, global contexts, the four-part statement of inquiry (SOI) test, factual/conceptual/debatable inquiry questions, summative task design, criterion-based rubrics, approaches to learning (ATL), and formative assessment. What you haven't done yet is run all of them in the order they actually happen when you plan for real, with the false starts that come with real planning.

This build uses seven steps. Each one produces a specific artefact — not a vague sense of progress, an actual thing you can point to.

  1. Concept and context selection — choosing the key concept, one or two related concepts, and the global context that will organise the unit.
  2. Statement of inquiry — writing the conceptual thesis the whole unit is built to prove, and testing it against the four-part test from Article 13.
  3. Inquiry questions — one factual, one conceptual, one debatable, each earning its place by doing work the others can't.
  4. Summative task and criteria — the task students will actually produce, and the specific criterion strands it will be marked against.
  5. Unit plan assembly with ATL — putting the pieces into the planner format, and choosing ATL skills that are actually taught and actually visible in the summative, not just named.
  6. Launch and lesson sequence — how the unit opens (the hook that establishes the SOI's stakes) and how lessons build toward the summative.
  7. Formative and feedback plan — the checkpoints along the way that tell you, and students, whether they're on track before the summative arrives.

You do not do these steps in a straight line the first time. Real planning loops backward — you write an SOI, test it, and it fails, so you go back to step 1. That's not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's what doing it right actually looks like. The build log below shows exactly that kind of loop, on purpose, because a sanitised "perfect first draft" would teach you the wrong lesson about how planning actually feels.

🧠 Teacher insight: The teachers who find this build hardest are usually the ones who expect it to go in a straight line. It won't. Budget time for at least one full loop back to step 1 or 2. If it goes smoothly on the first attempt, that's a bonus, not the baseline you should expect of yourself.

See It in Practice: A Build Log

What follows is an invented teacher's actual walk through the seven steps — Ms. Trần, a Grade 9 Language & Literature teacher planning her next unit. Her dead ends are left visible on purpose.

Step 1 — Concept and context selection.

Ms. Trần's next required content is a short-story unit — several MOET-prescribed Vietnamese short stories plus flexibility to add international texts. Her first instinct: key concept Communication (related concepts Perspective and Context), global context Personal and Cultural Expression. She checks it against the content: does Communication actually organise what she wants students to notice about these stories, or is it just a safe default for a literature unit? She decides yes — several of the prescribed stories use unreliable narration and withheld information, which is fundamentally about how communication succeeds or fails depending on what's shared and what's hidden. Artefact: key concept Communication; related concepts Perspective, Context; global context Personal and Cultural Expression.

Step 2 — Statement of inquiry.

First attempt: "Authors use different perspectives to communicate meaning in short stories." She runs it against the four-part test (concept + context + a claim that could be argued with + specificity beyond the topic). It fails on the "arguable" test — nobody would disagree that authors use perspective to communicate meaning; it's not a claim, it's a definition of literature. Dead end, visible: she crosses it out.

Second attempt: "Withholding a narrator's full perspective can communicate more truth than revealing it." Better — this is arguable, someone could push back on it. But she checks it against her actual texts and realises one of her three prescribed stories doesn't use narrative withholding at all — it uses shifting perspective between two characters, not concealment. The SOI would leave that story stranded, disconnected from the unit's spine.

Third attempt, revised to cover both patterns: "Writers control what a reader knows and when, and that control shapes what readers believe is true." This covers both withholding and shifting perspective, it's arguable (students could debate whether control over information is manipulative or simply how storytelling works), and it names both her concept (Perspective, in "what a reader knows") and touches context ("believe is true" connects to personal/cultural framing). She tests it a final time against all four parts of the test and it holds. Artefact: final SOI, with the two failed drafts kept visible as a record of the reasoning.

🧭 Planning decision: Write your own first SOI attempt now, before reading further, using your actual key concept and context from Step 1. Do not polish it. You'll test it properly in a moment.

Step 3 — Inquiry questions.

Factual: "What information does each narrator choose to share or withhold?" — answerable directly from the text, sets up the groundwork.

Conceptual: "How does controlling information change what a reader believes about a character or event?" — requires synthesis across texts, not just recall from one.

Debatable: "Is it ever justified for a writer — or a person — to withhold the full truth?" — genuinely arguable, connects literature to something students have a personal stake in.

She checks each against the trap named in Article 28: none of them are comprehension questions in disguise. The factual one is close to the line — she almost wrote "What happened in each story?" which would have been pure recall — but "what information does each narrator choose to share or withhold" requires students to notice a narrative choice, not just a plot event.

Step 4 — Summative task and criteria.

Task: students write an original short story (600–900 words) that deliberately withholds or controls information from the reader, plus a 200-word commentary justifying their choices in relation to the unit's SOI.

Criteria: Criterion B (Organizing) for structural control of information; Criterion C (Producing Text) for the creative writing itself; Criterion D (Using Language) for craft. She initially included Criterion A (Analysing) too, thinking "more criteria feels more rigorous," but on reflection the task doesn't actually require analysing someone else's text — it requires producing and justifying their own. She drops Criterion A. This is the assessability check from Article 26 in action: can she mark exactly what the task produces, without inventing extra expectations at grading time? With three criteria, yes. With four, she'd have been assessing something the task doesn't ask students to do.

She also drafts the task-specific clarification for each strand before she finalises anything, because a criterion descriptor on its own is too general to mark against reliably — Article 15 covers why. For Criterion B, "organizing" becomes, in task-specific language, "structuring the story so that withheld information is revealed at a moment that changes the reader's understanding." For Criterion C, "producing text" becomes "creating a short story with a clear narrative voice and a deliberate information-control strategy." For Criterion D, "using language" becomes "using vocabulary and sentence structure that support the story's tone and withholding strategy." Writing these out now, before teaching a single lesson, means she isn't inventing marking standards on the fly in week three — a version of Article 28's mistake 8, summative not matching criteria, that shows up quietly at the marking desk rather than in the planner.

Step 5 — Unit plan assembly with ATL.

She now writes the full planner entry: key concept, related concepts, global context, SOI, three inquiry questions, summative task, criteria. For ATL, her first instinct is to list "Communication skills" because the unit is literally about communication — but she pauses on Article 28's warning about ATL as a tick-box. Communication as an ATL skill needs a specific taught moment and a specific visible moment in the summative, not just thematic overlap with the topic. She chooses Critical thinking instead: students practise it directly in a mid-unit activity (identifying withheld information in a mentor text and hypothesising why), and it's visible in the summative commentary, where they have to justify — a critical-thinking act — their own choices. Artefact: complete planner draft, ATL skill selected with its taught moment and its assessed moment both named.

Step 6 — Launch and lesson sequence.

The launch: students read a short, deliberately confusing paragraph with a twist ending (invented for this purpose) and discuss, in pairs, what they thought was true halfway through versus what turned out to be true. This establishes the stakes of the SOI in the first ten minutes, before any formal teaching happens.

Sequence: Lessons 1–2, launch plus first prescribed story, factual question in focus. Lessons 3–5, second and third prescribed stories, conceptual question in focus, first critical-thinking activity (the mentor-text hypothesis task). Lessons 6–7, debatable question discussion, drafting begins. Lessons 8–10, drafting, peer feedback, revision. Lesson 11, summative due, in-class writing time protected for students who need it.

Step 7 — Formative and feedback plan.

She builds three checkpoints: after Lesson 5, a short written check — "identify one moment where a narrator withholds information in Story 3, and explain what effect it has" — checked against Criterion B language, feedback returned before drafting starts. After Lesson 7 (draft stage), peer feedback using a two-question protocol tied directly to the SOI ("Where does this story control what I know? Where could it control it more deliberately?"). After Lesson 9, a teacher check-in on drafts in progress, feedback framed against the criteria, not general encouragement. Each checkpoint feeds directly into the summative — none of them are busywork disconnected from where students are headed.

Apply It

Teacher Activity: This entire article is the activity. Set aside roughly three to four hours across the coming week — not one sitting; the loop-back moments need thinking time between them. Work through all seven steps for your own next unit, using your own real content, real class, and real time constraints. After each step, run the checkpoint below before moving to the next.

Checkpoint after Step 1: Can you write one sentence explaining why this key concept — not a different one — organises this content? If you can't, you've chosen by vibe (Article 28, mistake 3). Go back.

Checkpoint after Step 2: Run your SOI against the four-part test from Article 13. If it fails any part, revise it now — do not carry a failing SOI into Step 3. Keep your failed drafts; they're evidence of real thinking, not embarrassment to hide.

Checkpoint after Step 3: For each of your three questions, ask: could a student answer this correctly by copying a sentence from the text without understanding anything? If yes for the conceptual or debatable question, rewrite it.

Checkpoint after Step 4: Does every criterion you've selected map to something the task genuinely requires students to produce? Drop any criterion the task doesn't actually test, the way Ms. Trần dropped Criterion A.

Checkpoint after Step 5: For your chosen ATL skill, can you name the exact lesson where it's taught and the exact moment in the summative where it's visible? If either is blank, choose a different skill or build that moment in.

Checkpoint after Step 6: Does your launch activity establish the SOI's stakes before any formal content teaching starts? If your launch is just "here's the topic," redesign it.

Checkpoint after Step 7: Does each formative checkpoint feed directly into the summative, using the same language as the criteria? If a checkpoint could be deleted without changing what students are prepared for, cut it or fix it.

By the end, your artefact is a complete unit plan — all seven components filled in, tested, and ready for the review step below.

A note on pacing, because this is the part most first-time builders underestimate: expect Steps 1 and 2 to take longer than they feel like they should. Ms. Trần's build log shows two full SOI rewrites before the third one held — that's not a slow first attempt, that's roughly what a genuine first build looks like. Steps 3 and 4 usually move faster once the SOI is solid, because the questions and the task are largely implied by a good SOI rather than invented from scratch. Steps 5 through 7 are typically the fastest in raw time but the easiest to rush carelessly, because by that point you're tired and the planner fields feel like paperwork rather than decisions — which is exactly the mindset Article 28's mistake 2 warns against. If you notice yourself speeding up and stop double-checking, that's the moment to slow back down, not push through.

If you get through all seven steps and the unit still feels thin — technically complete but not exciting to teach — go back to Step 1 and ask whether the context you chose is one you find genuinely interesting. Units built around a context the teacher finds tedious tend to stay flat no matter how well the mechanics are executed. That's not in any rubric, but every experienced MYP teacher will tell you it's true.

🛑 Do this now: Before you consider the build finished, run it through the five-indicator quality check from Article 26 (coherence, conceptual depth, authenticity, assessability, feasibility). This build produces a complete unit; Article 26's check tells you whether it's a good one.

Avoid This

"I wrote a perfect SOI on the first try and moved on." Symptom: it later turns out to be too generic once you reach Step 4 and can't map criteria cleanly to it. Fix: deliberately stress-test your first SOI attempt against the four-part test rather than accepting it because it sounds fluent.

"I built all seven steps in one sitting, exhausted, and stopped checking myself halfway through." Symptom: Steps 5–7 feel rushed and generic compared to Steps 1–3. Fix: split the build across two or three sessions, exactly as recommended — decision fatigue is real and it shows up first in ATL and formative planning, the steps people rush.

"I skipped the checkpoints because I was confident I'd got each step right." Symptom: a flaw from Step 2 propagates invisibly into Steps 4 and 6, and you don't notice until you're teaching it. Fix: the checkpoints exist because errors compound forward — five minutes at the checkpoint saves an entire unit's worth of misalignment.

"I treated the peer or coordinator review as a formality after finishing." Symptom: you show the finished unit to a colleague only for sign-off, not real feedback. Fix: ask a colleague to specifically try to find your weakest indicator from Article 26's five, before you tell them what you think it is.

Check Yourself

Look at your completed unit plan. Can you point to the exact sentence in your summative task instructions that your SOI predicts? Can you name, without checking notes, which ATL skill you chose and where in the unit it's actually taught? If both answers come quickly, the build held together. If either answer makes you hesitate, that's your unit's weak point — worth fixing before you teach it.

Continue Learning

Next step: Article 30 turns this single completed build into an honest look at your overall practice — and closes the handbook.

📎 Download: MYP Unit Plan template (blank) + Unit Quality-Control Checklist + build log template (to record your own dead ends and revisions, the way Ms. Trần's log did here).
📌 Official source: Cross-check your finished summative task and criteria against the current subject-specific criteria descriptors in your subject guide on the IB Programme Resource Centre before finalising grade boundaries or achievement-level language.