Student Engagement

Setting Up an Engaging Launch for a New Unit in Middle School

By encouraging students to think deeply at the beginning of units, teachers can help them see why the material is relevant to their lives.

October 17, 2025

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Early in my teaching career, I looked forward to the beginning of a new unit as a time for both me and my students to catch a breath. Under the ardent lights of the stage, I would follow my internal teleprompter, delivering the same monologue to my live studio audience: “Great news, everyone. Today will be an easy day. I’m not going to push you very hard. We just want to lay a foundation.”

I thought that a respite focused on rote memorization of vocabulary and copying definitions, concepts, and notes was necessary to lay the groundwork for higher-order thinking later. I was wrong.

Over the years, I’ve come to learn that you can successfully introduce a new unit without sacrificing the much-needed deeper-thinking opportunities for students. Here’s how I do that.

Kicking Off Thematic Units in Middle School

I am always going after the hearts and minds of my students. A good theme is universal. Submerging the class into a relatable and relevant debate or discussion vis-à-vis theme cultivates engagement as we collectively create a context to move forward in. It may seem logical to teach vocabulary of content first. However, vocabulary without context is just words. I’ve found that context and relatability allow for application, analysis, and evaluation rather than simple memorization.

Identify the themes present in the new unit. English language arts (ELA) and social studies teachers traffic heavily in the realm of themes. In ELA, themes are often identified in curriculum materials. (And even without an explicit document, it’s easy to identify themes while mapping a narrative unit, such as blind tradition and conformity when teaching “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson.)

Conversely, in social studies, themes are not often identified—but they are there. As teachers of U.S. history progress toward westward expansion and reform, for instance, a keen historical eye will see themes of equity, societal polarization, and clash of worldviews. The unit holds within it dreams and nightmares: The prospect of opportunity in the form of land and resources for some means devastation, destruction, and genocide for others.

If your curricular materials do not identify themes for you and you are struggling to do so on your own, use a search engine or thought partner with AI to assist.

Choose your theme wisely. Think about each theme. Think about your students. Which theme will make the most juice for the squeeze? In other words, leverage what you know about the makeup of your class—the passions, interests, and disinterests of your students. Which ideas will create the most tension in the room? Which ideas are juicy enough to become impossible for your kids to resist weighing in on?

Both middle and high school students are highly sensitive to the why behind everything. If you students ask: Why do we have this dress code? Why do I need to wear this uniform? Perhaps conformity is your ELA theme. If they wonder: Why is it OK for teachers to have their cell phones, but we have to put ours away? Why is it OK for teachers to use AI, but we get in trouble for cheating when we use it? These are questions about equity and fairness—a theme present, for example, in the social studies unit on westward expansion and reform.

Skillfully connecting the content with the class only comes with the intentional learning, seeing, hearing, knowing, and understanding of our children. This is the heartbeat of engagement that grants us access to the synapses of students.

Mine your theme for the right question(s). Loading a unit launch with thought is all about finding the right question. As a social studies teacher who knows my students are invested in conversations around fairness, I’ve landed comfortably on my theme. Now, I need every child to think deeply about the ideas—the pieces we play with in our mind—associated with fairness, even though the class has not yet engaged the historical content of our new unit.

I am a fan of big polarizing questions. Here are some questions I have mined out of the theme:

  • Is it fair for you to gain opportunities if it means someone else must lose them?
  • What is progress? Is it progress if you don’t benefit from it the same way others do?
  • If most people at our school agreed on a rule, would that automatically make it fair for you?

Build the lesson around the question. In my classroom, any one of the questions above would generate cognitive electricity. I’ve chosen the first of the three. I want to introduce this theme in a way that will open up a rich space for higher-order thinking. Every lesson should do this for every student. Now, many of our students frequent a popular fast casual restaurant that sells bowls, burritos, and tacos. A couple of students even work there. Knowing this, I compiled a chart for students that examines this restaurant’s CEO pay, median worker pay, and CEO-to-worker pay ratio over the last 10 years. Using this chart, students can do the following:

  • Analyze the data using a set of guiding questions.
  • Evaluate the fairness of CEO-to-worker pay using a well-written prompt.
  • Create a new pay structure.

I manage my classroom like a scientist in a lab—always experimenting, collecting data, and analyzing this data to inform my next steps. In this instance, I would also separate the class into groups. Half of the groups would be CEOs. The other groups would be workers. In addition to analysis and evaluation of the data based on the question, “Is it fair for you to gain opportunities if it means someone else must lose them?” as a class, we would also examine whether our fellow CEOs and workers arrived at the same conclusions.

This information will serve us well when we begin to study the devastating impacts of westward expansion on Indigenous populations. Additionally, the class now has a modern or relevant context to connect with historical understandings. Lastly, I have a rich set of experiences from this lesson to leverage and call back to as a scaffold throughout the unit.

Connect the class to the upcoming content. Hopefully you have successfully cultivated a room full of billionaire philanthropists and investors. Now for the Shark Tank pitch. It’s time to seal the deal. I always remind my students to ask the question: Why does this matter? I tell them:

Why does any of this matter for what we are going to spend our new weeks learning together? As we dive into this unit, we are going to continue to wrestle with the idea of what it means when an opportunity for some comes at the cost of others, sometimes even at the cost of life.

As settlers gain land, Indigenous people face genocide.

Enslavers gain wealth and power. Enslaved people lose freedom and humanity.

As some Americans gain rights, women, Indigenous people, and the descendants of Africans remain excluded.

We have now successfully introduced a new unit without sacrificing the currency of learning: electric student thought.

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Filed Under

  • Student Engagement
  • English Language Arts
  • Social Studies/History
  • 6-8 Middle School

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