Being clear about what your students need in order to make progress

Good lessons must be planned. Planning helps to make your lessons clear and well-timed, meaning that students can be active and interested. Effective planning also includes some built-in flexibility so that teachers can respond to what they find out about their students’ learning as they teach. Working on a plan for a series of lessons involves knowing the students and their prior learning, what it means to progress through the curriculum, and finding the best resources and activities to help students learn.
Planning is a continual process to help you prepare both individual lessons as well as a unit of lessons, each one building on the last. The stages of lesson planning are:
being clear about what your students need in order to make progress
deciding how you are going to teach in a way that students will understand and how to maintain flexibility to respond to what you find
looking back on how well the lesson went and what your students have learned in order to plan for the future
Educational goals and objectives provide a sense of mission and purpose. The more aware you are of your mission and purpose in teaching an area of content, the more you will be able to inspire your students to learn it. Your ability to articulate goals conveys to learners your sense of purpose, from which they can make a commitment to learn. This is why goals are important—they energize and motivate students to become actively engaged in and committed to the learning process. Goals help teachers articulate “Why am I teaching this?
Learning objectives, although written for the teacher, are expressed from the learner’s point of view. In other words, objectives identify what your students will learn from your instruction.
Deciding what you want your students to accomplish during a lesson or unit of instruction requires answering the following questions:
What knowledge or content (facts, concepts, principles, rules) is essential for learner understanding of the subject matter?
What intellectual skills are necessary for the learner to use this knowledge or content?
What habits of mind or attitudes are important for learners to perform successfully with this knowledge or content?
What are learning objectives
In education, learning objectives are brief statements that describe what students will be expected to learn by the end of school year, course, unit, lesson, project, or class period. In many cases, learning objectives are the interim academic goals that teachers establish for students who are working toward meeting more comprehensive learning standards.
Defining learning objective is complicated by the fact that educators use a wide variety of terms for learning objectives, and the terms may or may not be used synonymously from place to place. For example, the terms student learning objective, benchmark, grade-level indicator, learning target, performance indicator, and learning standard—to name just a few of the more common terms—may refer to specific types of learning objectives in specific educational contexts. Educators also create a wide variety of homegrown terms for learning objectives.
While educators use learning objectives in different ways to achieve a variety of instructional goals, the concept is closely related to learning progressions, or the purposeful sequencing of academic expectations across multiple developmental stages, ages, or grade levels. Learning objectives are a way for teachers to structure, sequence, and plan out learning goals for a specific instructional period, typically for the purpose of moving students toward the achievement of larger, longer-term educational goals such as meeting course learning expectations, performing well on a standardized test, or graduating from high school prepared for college. For these reasons, learning objectives are a central strategy in proficiency-based learning, which refers to systems of instruction, assessment, grading, and academic reporting that are based on students demonstrating understanding of the knowledge and skills they are expected to learn before they progress to the next lesson, get promoted to the next grade level, or receive a diploma (learning objectives that move students progressively toward the achievement of academic standards may be called performance indicators or performance benchmarks, among other terms).
The focus of this chapter will be on single lesson or class-period learning objectives. Teachers may also articulate learning objectives for specific lessons that compose a unit, project, or course, or they may determine learning objectives for each day they instruct students (in this case, the term learning target is often used). For example, teachers may write a set of daily learning objectives on the blackboard, or post them to an online course-management system, so that students know what the learning expectations are for a particular class period. In this case, learning objectives move students progressively toward meeting more comprehensive learning goals for a unit.
There are two commonly used formulas for developing MLOs. One is using the SMART attributes and the other is the ABCD method. These two methods are very similar, but one or the other may be more or less helpful to you personally when writing MLOs. We will look at both methods and you can decide which makes the most sense when considering the type of lesson you are planning.
Start with behavioral verbs (action verbs) that can be observed (either informally or formally) and measured. Using concrete verbs will help keep your objectives clear and concise. Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a list of such verbs and these are categorized according to the level of achievement at which students should be performing.
While verbs above clearly distinguish the action that should be performed, there are verbs to avoid when writing a learning objective. The following verbs are too vague or difficult to measure: appreciate, cover, realize, be aware of, familiarize, study, become acquainted with, gain knowledge of, comprehend, know, learn, understand, learn.

Behavioral Verbs- Must be observable and measurable.

The key to writing learning objectives is using an action verb to describe the behavior you intend for students to perform. You can use action verbs such as calculate, read, identify, match, explain, translate, and prepare to describe the behavior further. On the other hand, words such as understand, appreciate, internalize, and value are not appropriate when writing learning objectives because they are not measurable or observable. Use these words in your big picture goals/ enduring understandings, but not when writing learning objectives.

Overt behavior: If the behavior is covert or not typically visible when observed, such as the word discriminate, include an indicator behavior to clarify to the student what she or he must be able to do to meet your expectations. For example, if you want your learners to be able to discriminate between good and bad apples, add the observable behavior “sort” to the objective: Be able to discriminate (sort) the good apples from the bad apples.
Some teachers tend to forget to write learning objectives from the students’ perspective. Mager contends that when you write objectives, you should indicate what the learner is supposed to be able to do and not what you, the teacher, want to accomplish. Also, avoid using fuzzy phrases such as “to understand,” “to appreciate,” “to internalize,” and “to know,” which are not measurable or observable. These types of words can lead to student misinterpretation and misunderstanding of what you want them to do.

The best questions serve not only to promote understanding of the content of a unit on a particular topic; they also spark connections and promote transfer of ideas from one setting to others. We call these such questions “essential.”

Tips for using essential questions:
Use a reasonable number of questions (two to five) per unit. Make less be more.
Frame the questions in “kid language” as needed to make them more accessible. Edit the questions to make them as engaging and provocative as possible for the age group.
Ensure that every child understands the questions and sees their value.
Design specific exploratory activities and inquiries for each question.
Sequence the questions so they naturally lead from one to another.
Post the essential questions in the classroom, and encourage students to organize their notes and work around those specific questions.
Wiggins and McTighe identify big ideas, essential questions and enduring understandings as critical elements, of course design in Understanding by Design. If a big idea is like a point on the horizon you are steering toward, and enduring understandings are the highlights that you will always remember, essential questions are the engines of inquiry that propel students through your learning experience. They should prompt exploration and open discovery. All content should contribute toward or inform learners as to the evolving complexity of potential responses to these questions. Grant Wiggins characterizes them as “well, essential: important, vital, at the heart of the matter – the essence of the issue.” Essential questions are important because they identify the point of inquiry from which you create actual instructional material and experiences for your students.
As a big idea will unpack into multiple essential questions (usually), so an essential question will itself unpack into multiple smaller questions. The smaller questions are not unimportant, but it is crucial to understand how the smaller questions relate to the Big Idea. For instance:

Essential question: What traits and characteristics are collectively used to determine a classification?

Non-essential question: How many legs does a spider have?
It may well be the case that non-essential questions can be used to bring about understanding of the essential questions, but they are not the essential thing. Consider another pair:
Essential questions: How do history and context determine the definition of “art?”
Non-essential question: Is Duchamps “Fountain” art or not?
Now comes the challenging part, where you, the novice teacher must develop these essential questions related to your instruction. Know that developing essential questions are part of the work, school teams do when mapping their curriculum using the Understanding by Design module. Many schools post their work online. Look at models of that have been developed to gain an understanding of how essential questions align with curriculum standards. Ultimately, you will need to be the judge of the quality of material you find online. Check with your supervising practitioner to see if your school has done grade level curriculum mapping. What you find may not find exactly what you are looking for, but you will find models to help you begin developing your own essential questions for your lesson plan.
Pulling it all together
You will begin developing your lesson plan by completing the top sections of the lesson plan template.
Measurable Learning Objectives
Common Core State Standards or Early Learning Standards (ECE)
Related IEP goals
Essential Questions
The beginning stage of lesson plan development:
You have collaborated with your supervising practitioner (SP), completed a case study student profile which will include *learning targets for a “case study student” with a disability or learning challenge, and discussed the needs of the other students who will be included in your lesson. Based on this information you will develop a measurable learning objective for your lesson.
Next, you will identify Common Core State Standards (CCSS) or Early Learning Standards (ECE) that align with the developmental level of your students. You may need to add a modified measurable learning objective(s) to meet the needs of mixed ability students. This is a standards based education curriculum approach to enable students with disabilities access to the general education classroom (curricula).
Include any related goals/objectives from your student’s IEP. Include behavior related goals/objectives if appropriate.
Develop one or two essential questions, in question format and in student friendly language that speaks to the core concept/theme of the lesson.
Examples of the beginning section of the lesson plan that includesdownload icon
The next step will be to preassess your students to determine their current level of performance related to the measurable learning objective(s) and CCSS or Early Learning Standards.
Based on the data from your preassessment, you may need to revise your original measurable learning objectives.
A lesson plan is the instructor’s road map of what students need to learn and how it will be done effectively during the class time. Then, you can design appropriate learning activities and develop strategies to obtain feedback on student learning. Having a carefully constructed lesson plan for each 3-hour lesson allows you to enter the classroom with more confidence and maximizes your chance of having a meaningful learning experience with your students.
A successful lesson plan addresses and integrates three key components:
Assessment to check for student understanding
A lesson plan provides you with a general outline of your teaching goals, learning objectives, and means to accomplish them, and is by no means exhaustive. A productive lesson is not one in which everything goes exactly as planned, but one in which both students and instructor learn from each other.

1. Identify the learning objectives
Before you plan your lesson, you will first need to identify the learning objectives for the lesson. A learning objective describes what the learner will know or be able to do after the learning experience rather than what the learner will be exposed to during the instruction (i.e. topics). Typically, it is written in a language that is easily understood by students and clearly related to the program learning outcomes. The table below contains the characteristics of clear learning objectives:
Characteristic and Description
Clearly stated tasks Free from jargon and complex vocabulary; describe specific and achievable tasks (such as ‘describe’, ‘analyse’ or ‘evaluate’) NOT vague tasks (like ‘appreciate’, ‘understand’ or ‘explore’).
Important learning goals Describe the essential (rather than trivial) learning in the course which a student must achieve.
Achievable Can be achieved within the given period and sufficient resources are available.
Demonstrable and measurable Can be demonstrated in a tangible way; are assessable; achievement and quality of achievement can be observed.
Fair and equitable All students, including those with disabilities or constraints, have a fair chance of achieving them.
Linked to course and program objectives Consider the broader goals - i.e. course, program and institutional goals.
The Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (link) is a useful resource for crafting learning objectives that are demonstrable and measurable.