Effective lesson planning

LET’S BEGIN… Activating Strategy - Video

• The format of a lesson should..
• Go one step at a time
• Have a picture for every step
• Have a minimal reliance on teacher talk

• An effective lesson plan is a set of plans for building something – it “constructs” the learning.

Ingredients of a Good Lesson

• Objectives
• Essential Question
• Pre-assessment
• List of materials
• Warm-up and introduction (Activating Strategy)
• Presentation
• Practice (graphic organizers)
• Evaluation
• Closure
• Application

• The greater the structure of a lesson and the more precise the directions on what is to be accomplished, the higher the achievement rate.
• Harry Wong, The First Days of Teaching

OBJECTIVES

• A description of what the student will be able to do at the end of the lesson
• Provides alignment with district and state goals (Uses SCOS/CCSS)
• Use action verbs to describe the expected outcomes
• No-no’s: appreciate, enjoy, understand, love, etc.

“Thin” & “THICK” Objectives

• Avoid vague, unclear tasks, be specific in what you want students to do.
• Thin: Students will research landforms.
• THICK: Students will create representation of a landform of their choice and present statistical data in a manner appropriate for selected audience.
• The Differentiator

Curriculum-Framing Questions

• To target higher-order thinking skills
• To require comparison, synthesis, interpretation, evaluation, etc.
• To ensure student projects are compelling and engaging
• To require more than a simple restatement of facts
• To focus on important topics
• To connect learning to other disciplines and other topics of study
• To ask questions that have been asked throughout human history
• To address compelling questions