Lesson Planning, Workshop Model Planning
• What Students Will Learn and Why It Is Important--Including Anticipatory Set
and Sharing Objectives
• Introduction to New Material–Model more than Mini
• Guided Practice
• Independent Practice
• Reflective Debrief–Stressing Connections and Another Chance for Formative
Assessment
To create your lesson plan, you should backwards plan in the same way you
design your assessments, long-term plan, and unit plans. Under this approach,
you start planning your lesson with the end in mind first – that is, you should
begin by understanding your lesson objective and establishing a clear vision of
what it will look like for students to attain this goal.
From there think about the evidence you will gather to determine if students
have mastered the material and skills.
Lastly, think about the instructional activities that you will use during the lesson.
1. The Opening – What Students Will Learn and Why It Is Important
According to ASCD, students who know what they are learning perform 27
percentile points higher than students who cannot articulate what they are
learning.
Students need to also have connections to what they have already learned or
what they know from outside the classroom.
A good Anticipatory Set activates prior knowledge but also, does just as the title
suggests and has the students anticipate where today’s lesson is headed.
The lesson opening should clearly communicate what students are going to
learn, why it is important, how it relates to what they already know, and how it is
going to happen. You will also want to ensure that your opening engages your
students.
Sometimes it is appropriate to pre-assess students where they are. This is true at
the beginning of a unit of instruction, or anytime the learning for the day is a
significant piece to overall mastery.
In the planning, lessons are often successfully started with an Anticipatory Set.
This set starts with an activity to hook students into the lesson, and has an
element to activate prior knowledge. These problems or exercises are referred to
as “Do Now” or “Warm Up,” and students can be expected to begin this activity
when they come in the door. Activities that ask students to predict, or infer are
ways to build the set.
Next, you want to share the lesson objective with the students. Some use
SWBAT (Students Will Be Able to) statements, others use learning targets, “I
can” statements or essential questions. Whatever format a teacher chooses,
recent research suggests that having students help develop one or two
objectives will create “buy in” on the students’ part. As the teacher, you may
choose to develop the main objective for the day and then have the students
help to create others. This only takes a few minutes a day.
Between the Anticipatory Set and Sharing the Objective the following elements
need to be met EVERY day:
• Why it is important to learn the material.
• How it relates to what has been done previously or in their life in general.
• How we will learn the material, including what the practice will look like.
Before you begin your model lesson do a quick check for understanding to be
sure students know where they are going.
2. Introduction to New Material – Model more than Mini
Now it is time when you convey something new – a skill, a bit of knowledge – to
your students. Your students are ready to receive this new information because
you have gotten their attention, engaged them with an activity, told them what
to expect, and prepared their memory to make connections to new information
by referring to prior knowledge. Now is the time for the teacher to actually
explain, model, demonstrate and illustrate the knowledge and skills students will
need to master and eventually transfer the learning.
Children have not yet acquired the skills to process and organize data for long
stretches of time, and construction of learning needs more “input” than straight
lecture the Introduction to New Material will be much more varied and nuanced
than a teacher “standing and delivering”.
You are the most learnt person in the room, so your explanations and examples
need to be both clear and correct in order to serve as the mold for student
learning. Students of every age will benefit when teachers share their thinking.
When in doubt be more explicit with the way you model how you make sense of
the material or how you approach a new skill. When it’s time to expose your
class to new content and skill, the information students glean completely
depends on what you present and how you present it.
In addition to deciding what to present, you must also choose how to deliver this
information. Introduce the new material during the lesson objective. Teachers
may choose to lecture, present a demonstration, use a text, do a simulation,
explore the Internet, or visit a museum.
Modeling should take place everyday, if even for only a few minutes.
Your students can only remember so much in one sitting, so this part of the
lesson should never be more than 10-15 minutes of consecutive time. While you
may feel that you have a lot of content to deliver, this step should not be the
bulk of your lesson. Always remember to leave plenty of time for students to
practice with the new material.
Here are five guiding questions to effective model lessons.
1. What information will you convey?
2. How will you convey the information? Use multiple approaches when
presenting new information.
3. What will students be doing later in the lesson? You need to model this
for your students. How would you perform if you were a student in the
classroom?
4. How will you know what your students can do and understand during,
and at the end of the lesson? How will you assess? The best formative
assessments look like instructional activities so presenting how students will
be assessed (not graded) is important for students to understand.
5. How will you know that your students understand what they will be
doing once you move to guided or independent practice? Two minutes here
can save you 15 minutes later to re-explain what you thought the students
understood about the lesson.
3. Guided Practice
Guided Practice is the bridge between engaging students in new content and
student independent mastery of the objective.
After new material has been introduced, students will need to practice the new
skill with the new content. However, the first time we practice we prefer help.
This is where Guided Practice comes in. Teachers often leave students to work
independently right after introducing new material, without first taking time to
support students while they practice. Give students multiple, scaffold
opportunities to practice with a gradual release of teacher support.
Elements of successful Guided Practice:
• Clearly state and model for how students are to practice
• Monitor and correct student performance, check student understanding, provide
descriptive and actionable feedback.
• Decide how to organize students during practice. Whole class is effective during
Guided Practice, but smaller group activities can be very effective. Consider
pairs and triads.
• Determine how much time to devote to this section of your lesson – always
make sure to allot a significant portion of the lesson to student practice
• Double check the alignment of your practice examples – is there direct
alignment to your practice and your lesson objective?
• Utilize Questions, scaffold the questions, but use them as directives and ways
to check understanding…Article.
4. Independent Practice
During this time students refine their skills, and does not necessarily mean that
the student must be working alone. The difference between Guided Practice and
Independent Practice is in Guided Practice someone (teacher or student) is
guiding the learning. In Independent Practice the learning in being developed by
one or more students through the practice. Independent Practice can be the
time when students demonstrate their understanding of the objective through
completing formative assessment. If assessment is the main function of the
activity, then students should be working by themselves for that part of the
lesson.
Independent Practice may involve solving problems, answering questions,
demonstrating a skill, completing a “performance task” (an experiment, roleplay, debate, report, song, poem, skit, project) or applying the knowledge in
some new way (such as developing a new analogy or metaphor) to demonstrate
mastery and eventually transfer. By the end of Independent Practice, students
should be able to achieve the daily objective that you set at the beginning of the
class.
Like guided practice, your independent practice should give students multiple
opportunities to demonstrate their understanding. Include more than one
example or problem in your practice, especially if it serves as your formative
assessment. This will provide you with a more complete view of whether your
students truly have mastered the material.
Elements to consider in planning Independent Practice:
• Determine how you will group students. When students are constructing
meaning -- pairs or triads work well.
• Decide if you should utilize Learning Centers. Here are some aspects to
consider with learning centers:
1. Decide on the type of center.
2. Specify the outcomes.
3. Create center activities and instructions.
4. Model how to use centers.
5. Provide constant feedback to students.
• Group work should necessitate interdependence. That is why pairs and triads
work well; it is hard not to be accountable when you are in a group of 2.
• Develop group and individual accountability. Make sure that students
understand there are group goals and measures, but as an individual student
there are measures in place to demonstrate their individual contributions to the
group.
• Explicitly teach the skills needed to work successfully in a group. Spend time at
the beginning of the year to work on these skills, but also come back and
practice the cooperative skills needed to work in a group.
• Develop opportunities for group cohesion. Do icebreakers and team building
activities from time to time, especially at the beginning of the year.
• Allow time for the group to reflect on their work and the process.
If teachers do not allow time for student practice—both with guidance and
independently—they will not have an opportunity to assess the degree to which
students understand the new skill or concept.
5. Reflective Debrief
This final stage of your lesson reinforces the lesson objective, provides an
opportunity to check for student understanding, but most importantly lets
students “cement” their learning into place. Brain research has demonstrated
that students retain, and develop more learning when lesson ends with a
reflective debrief.
This debrief can be in the form of questions posed to the whole group, Reflective
Journaling, Exit Slips, Short Responses, answering the lessons Essential
Questions, or short demonstrations of the learning objective.
The Reflective Debrief should never be an option that is left out. It is so
important that even if you must shorten Practice, or save material for the next
day you should always make time for students to reflect.
An effective lesson closing does not take much time. In fact, your closing should
usually take between five and ten minutes. An effective closing, at a minimum,
Answers the following:
• What was our learning objective today, and how well did you meet it?
• What part of the lesson was particularly successful in building your learning?
• What part of the learning would you like more time or review?
These questions can be put into many different questioning stems that fit the
age of your students.
If you have the students produce something, a written exit ticket, a symbolic
representation of their learning, etc. then you can use it as formative
assessment. You can then utilize the evidence to address your future lesson
plans based on mastery of learning or gaps in knowledge and student
misconceptions.
Planning your next lesson based on sequence but also by answering
the question:
What did the Assessment tell you?
*If your assessment was aligned well to your learning target for the lesson, and
you were assessing several levels of cognitive complexity, then you can gather
the information needed to help students who have misconceptions or gaps in
knowledge.
Before we look at the assessment data, let’s look at the four choices a teacher
has when they discover there are students who need academic interventions.
Those four choices are:
1. Adjust instruction to the whole class.
2. Assign students to homogeneous groups.
3. Assign students to heterogeneous groups.
4. Conference with students individually.
The decision on which of the four is not a shot in the dark, or automatically to
re-teach the lesson to the whole class. The assessment “data” will guide you to
the correct choice. So, what is the process?
First:
Look at the number of students who have significant misconceptions or gaps in
the learning. If it is less than half the class, the option to adjust instruction to the
whole class should be off the table. In fact, for my classroom, rule of thumb was:
if there were a mix of interventions needed, I would not design interventions
that involve the whole class even if only 30% to 40% of the students
demonstrated mastery of the material.
Second:
Are there more than 4 students with the same problem? And
is the problem of simple complexity (recall, explain)?
If the answer is yes to both of the questions, then creating homogeneous groups
is the best option. This allows you to develop activities that will allow the
students that did learn the material to explore the information from a new
perspective. This will free up your time to work with the students that have the
problem. It is advisable to develop some activities to help the lower performing
group so that some of the time you can work with or supervise other students.
For this type of grouping it is a good point to remember to keep the groups
small, if they are working independently, you can have as many groups as you
want working on the same material, but big groups tend to become distracted.
A quick note, heterogeneous grouping can work with these criteria also, but it
tends to become a tutoring situation. That is OK, some of the time. However, the
contingency for intervention should not automatically utilize the students who
mastered the material to tutor those that have not.
Third:
Are there more than 4 students with the same problem? And
Is the problem of a high level complexity (analyze or above)?
If the answer is yes to both of these questions then heterogeneous grouping
works well. The reason is: you can develop activities that challenge all
participants who are in the same group, even though they are at different levels
of mastery. Answering high order questions keeps the students who learned the
material moving forward with new perspective, and allows the students who had
problems to hear the thinking of someone who has mastered the material.
Fourth:
Are there only a few students who had problems? Or
Are your initial thoughts about the student work, that they understand the
material, but you need some clarification to be sure?
If the answer is yes to either of the questions then the most productive strategy
to employ maybe to do individual conferencing.
You may have procedures in your classroom for this, or you can place the other
students into either homogeneous or heterogeneous groups with assigned
activities to free up time to work with students individually.
Homework?