Transforming Units

I have begun working on the Unit Plan Assignment for this course. Looking at example unit plans from my 2 week observation, its amazing how often one-dimensional, fill in the blank type activities are used.  These activities do meet the requirements of the PLOs, but it is so obvious that they do not offer anything more - whether it be something to generate interest in the students, or maybe something to get them thinking critically. It just seems like a first step has been taken to find all the materials to be covered, but then the lesson designing process simply stopped. 

In a way, this is not such a horrible discovery to make in terms of my own future lesson/unit planning... for example, what my group plans to do for our unit plan is to take the information from  an existing unit and create a much more enriched, engaging unit. It is almost as if much of the tedious work of meeting PLOs etc. has been done, and we can focus on designing a stronger unit to cover the same concepts. Applying this idea more generally, I'm sure throughout my career resources will be shared with colleagues on various units - some of which will probably be pretty basic... but I really like the idea of shaping/transforming lessons. Just a thought.