1 Choose your grade band
Sets the grade context for the unit.
2 Choose the driving structure
Every subject draws on both structures. You are choosing which one drives this unit, not which one the subject has.
The quick test: ask what a student has to get better at. If it is knowing and explaining a body of content, the knowledge structure drives. If it is doing something well, and the content is whatever they are doing it to, the process structure drives.
Usually knowledge-driven: sciences, history, geography, economics, and the conceptual side of mathematics. The facts are the raw material concepts are induced from.
Usually process-driven: language and literature, additional languages, the arts, music, drama, physical education and sport, and the making side of design. Here the discipline is a set of skills and strategies, writing, composing, performing, training, prototyping, that a student gets better at across any content.
Genuinely both: design and mathematics. A design unit about materials and their properties is knowledge-driven; the same course’s unit about running a design process is process-driven. Pick per unit, not per subject.
3 Add your subject
4 Before you start: the interplay
No subject is purely one structure. Maths and Science have processes; Language and the Arts rest on knowledge. You've named the structure that drives this unit, the planner keeps the other in view.
Why? Understanding is generated in the movement between the two levels of thinking, the factual/skill level and the conceptual level, the interplay concept-based authors call synergistic thinking (Erickson, Lanning & French, 2017, p. 11): not climbing from facts to concepts once, but moving between them until students can think with the idea in a new context. Every prompt in this planner is built to provoke that movement.