5 Part Lesson Plan

Cite as: Mintrop, H.; Tompkins, R.P.; & Tollefsrud, H. (2012). The Five-Part Lesson Plan. Reach Institute for School Leadership & University of California, Berkeley.

The five-part lesson a multiple part lesson design that consists of an 1) an opening phase, 2) a modeling of new content phase, 3) a building & checking understanding phase, 4) a guided practice phase, and 5) a closing phase.

Description

Good lessons are an art and a science. Good lessons draw from established formats or templates, which can be varied with creativity. Lesson formats are also the result of scientific effort. One of the better-researched lesson formats is the five-part lesson plan, which rests on a strong research base. (Brophy and Good, 1986; Rosenshine, 1983; see also Schmoker, 2011 for a re-interpretation of this research).

Purpose and Rationale

The five-part lesson plan is effective when teachers want to introduce new content and enable learners to clarify their new understandings, correct misconceptions, and reinforce their learning with the assistance of the teacher -- the “bread and butter” of teachers’ work. Other lesson formats may be more effective for other purposes, for example a practice lessons in which no new content is introduced, or an exploratory lessons in which new understandings are not modeled, but may be discovered. The five-part lesson plan, however, is scientifically solid (“bread and butter” so to speak) and is a standard format in a teacher’s repertoire of teaching.

Components

The five-part lesson consists of an opening phase, modeling of new content phase, building & checking understanding phase, guided practice phase, and a closing phase.

Each part highlights particular instructional practices, but not to the exclusion of all other phases. For example, modeling may go on intermittently throughout the lesson. Definitely checking for understanding is an on-going activity, so is giving feedback, and so on.

Thus, in every phase, teachers deploy instructional strategies that enhance the effectiveness of the lesson and students’ learning, particularly regarding:

· Assessment of learning

· Student engagement and equitable participation

· Routines & procedures that foster a productive instructional environment

But, in a five-part lesson certain instructional practices play a particularly strong role during identified lesson phases. For example, generating curiosity and motivation should ordinarily occur prior to modeling, since modeling requires students to concentrate on something that is challenging to them: new content or new strategies. Checking for understanding is especially needed after teachers have modeled new content because they need to know if students have grasped the new content or strategy before they can move on. During guided and independent practice, students shift from interacting with teachers to interacting with material. Teachers increasingly relinquish control. After periods of guided or independent work, feedback from the teacher or fellow students is paramount.

Quality Criteria

The beauty of the five-part lesson format is its straightforwardness. Cutting through the bells and whistles of instructional techniques and the overwhelming comprehensiveness of the teaching standards, the five-part lesson is concerned with only two simple questions around students’ conceptual learning:

· Did the lesson enable the learners to learn a new concept or cognitive strategy (or substantially augment an existing one), and if so,

· How widely distributed was this learning across a given group of learners?

For each part of the lesson, educators evaluate the quality with simple straightforward questions that are tied to the conceptual learning process.

Lesson Phases

In a good opening or introduction, the teacher gets the students’ attention, builds a bridge between preexisting knowledge/interests and new content, clarifies for students what will be learned, and motivates students by generating curiosity or anticipation for the new content.

In a good modeling phase, the teacher is crystal clear about what is new and what is already known, including new vocabulary. The introduced content is either new, or a more abstract or more complex concept or strategy than what has come before. Understanding of new concepts or command of new strategies may be constructed with the help of clear explanations, connections to students’ more concrete or intuitive understandings, and strategies that help simplify the task. Good modeling depends on the teacher’s ability to anticipate the thinking processes that learners of varying skill and intellectual maturity will need to engage in, in order to move from more simple to more complex thinking or from more concrete to more abstract concepts. Modeling is often seen as teacher’s work, but it can also be dialogic with students. The teacher deploys engagement strategies that ensure the majority of students are receiving, following, and clarifying the new concepts. Assessment in this phase may be informal, as the teacher monitors student responses and questions to determine if they are following the progression of new concepts.

In a good ‘building/checking understanding’ phase, the teacher enables learners to reformulate new understandings in their own words, recognizes learners’ misconceptions across the spectrum of the learning group, and dispels these misconceptions with corrective reformulations. This is a transitional phase bridging the modeling and the guided practice phases. Checking for understanding is therefore not simply a checking for correct or incorrect answers, but a further reconstruction of new content. Engagement and assessment are integrated through out this phase, and is predicated on the idea that checking for understanding is joint work between teachers and students. During this phase, teachers gather enough specific information about students’ readiness to determine the level of scaffolding and differentiated support needed in the guided practice phase. Note: While building and checking understanding is an important phase, good lessons also include formative assessments in every phase.

In a good ‘guided practice’ phase, the teacher gives students the opportunity to practice or apply what has been taught or modeled. Increasingly the teacher relinquishes control and students shift from interacting with the teacher to interacting with material and each other. The teacher offers materials and scaffolds, including clear directions for the expected process and products, that enable the great majority of the learning group to relearn the new concept or re-enact the new strategy in cognitively meaningful, demanding, and relevant ways. Targeted support and intervention, informed by prior assessments and/or the information gathered in the building and checking understanding phase, helps spread learning across the whole group or class. The teacher monitors and assesses student progress. Depending on degree of assessed readiness, students are given the opportunity to practice and demonstrate independent mastery of the objective. Engagement in this phase frequently includes opportunities for students to work in pairs or groups as they are often best teachers and translators of what has been taught.

In a good ‘closure’ phase, the teacher enables learners to communicate the results or products of their learning in their own words or symbols, further assessing their understanding and providing feedback. Learning gains are made visible to the group, and existing misconceptions are further problematized or clarified. Key ideas are reviewed and summarized. The goals of the lesson presented in the opening are revisited and students reflect on their progress towards the goals, providing an additional opportunity for the teacher to monitor student learning. Future lesson topics or directions may be highlighted connected to the broader learning sequence, essential questions or big ideas of the unit or course.

Independent practice is not included in this conception of a five-step lesson plan. However, as mentioned above, guided practice progresses towards increasing independence. Many teachers may assign homework or design subsequent lessons that are intended for students to independently practice and demonstrate the new skill

Misconceptions

The five-part lesson plan is a five-step lesson:

In fact, phases may actually intermingle or overlap, for example, modeling and building/checking understanding. For the planning, however, the teacher should be very clear about the various aspects of the students’ conceptual learning process and the specific phases during the lesson that these varied aspects are activated.

The five-part lesson plan is a direct instruction model:

It is true, the teacher may be more present in the students’ learning process compared to an exploratory lesson. But, in fact, the various phases could be quite exploratory. The introduction could be question or hypothesis-generating, the modeling could be a problem-solving dialogue between teacher and students; the guided practice a more complex problem solving practice; and the results and feedback phase more elaborate presentation.

The five-part lesson plan fosters a passive learning mode:

In fact, a good introductory phase stimulates the learners’ curiosity and preexisting understandings; a good modeling phase may not be a teacher-only demonstration, rather a dialogic construction of new knowledge; a good checking for understanding phase can include an opportunity for re-construction of modeled content, etc. Each phase should enable learners to formulate- in their own words or actions-understandings and reveal their misconceptions. A good lesson plan simply anticipates these processes, and a good lesson delivery flexibly responds to the material students generate.

References

Bongolan, R., Moir, E., & Baron, W. (2010). Keys to the secondary classroom: A teacher's guide to the first months of school. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Brophy, J. & Good, T. (1986). Teacher behavior and student achievement. In M. Wittrock, ed., Handbook of Research on Teaching. New York: Macmillan, pp. 328-375.

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2008). Better learning through structured teaching: A framework for the gradual release of responsibility. Alexandria, VA: ASCD

Hunter, M. (1994). Enhancing teaching. New York: Macmilan College Pub. Co.

Mintrop, H.; Tompkins, R.P.; & Tollefsrud, H. (2012). The Five-Part Lesson Plan. Reach Institute for School Leadership & University of California, Berkeley.

Rosenshine, B. (1983). Teaching functions in instructional programs. The Elementary School Journal, 83(4), 335-51.

Schmoker, M. (2011). Focus: Elevating the essentials to radically improve student learning. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Endnotes:

The cognitive and emotional dimensions of learning related to each phase are as follows:

1. Opening: Concentration, Retrieval, Expectancy, Experience, Motivation, and/or Cognitive dissonance

2. Modeling: Disciplinary concepts, Intellectual challenge, Acquiring new procedural or declarative knowledge, Simplifying complexity, Concretizing abstraction, and/or Scaffolding learning

3. Building/Checking Understanding: Comprehension, Application, and/or Recognizing misconceptions

4. Guided Practice: Encoding, Reinforcement, Application, and/or Performance

5. Closure: Comprehension, Application, Recognizing misconceptions, Synthesis, Reinforcement, and/or Meta-cognition