Lesson Planning Tips

After reviewing the entire lesson plan template you will see that there is a LOT to think about when you design a lesson.

Lesson Plan Template-(Alice Keeler)

Quick Overview of the Lesson

Think about what you want to teach
Whole lesson in very short words

This is not where to start. After designing your lesson, give a quick elevator pitch that describes your entire lesson plan in less than 100 words.

Hook: Why do students care about this lesson?

Just because YOU care about it does not mean the students do!

design for the kids to care about the lesson

What do students care about? How is that incorporated into the lesson?

incorporate student interests or current events

Build a bridge? Do kids care about that?

Kids don't care about bridge building

The problem with the textbook/curriculum company is it does NOT know your students. The lessons were NOT designed for the unique individuals who sit in front of your face. The pre-packaged curriculum does NOT incorporate current events nor does it incorporate the latest trend that is annoying the crap out of you. (It's not about you! If kids are into it, you're into it!)

For this section show us that you have put significant THOUGHT into why the students would care about this lesson. "Because it is important" is NOT a justification.

Essential Question

Essential question drives the lesson

Do not be boring!

Don't Be Boring

This is going to be HARD! Make your brain sweat!

This is going to be hard

I love an essential question where you are not sure what the learning objective is. It does NOT stink of school. You need to know the learning objective in order to answer the question. And the students are so curious about it they WANT to answer the question.

It's not a quiz question! In order to answer the question you need to learn something... from the question you may not know what it is you need to learn!

It is NOT a quiz question. Essential question is interesting.mp4

Learning Objectives

What exactly are they going to LEARN?

NOT what are they going to DO.

At the END of the lesson learning objectives

There should be a "Million" ways to do something to learn the learning objective!

A million lesson plans for the learning objective

Your learning objective should be open ended enough that would allow a student to say "Can I do this instead?" and you would be able to say yes because their activity idea also addresses the learning objective .

Has to start with a verb.

Start with the verb

"Students will" is old school, DUH you teach students.

Common Core

Do not put down standards that you are not actually teaching!

What are you TEACHING that your lesson addresses?

8 principles of critical thinking

Could this lesson have been done in 1980? It’s Probably not Common Core

How many students are thinking "Can we just get started already?" or "Can't we just Google that?"

House Hunters activity

Review the worksheet to the right. It has NO C's. In fact, this is DOK 0, the students do not even need to recall place value. In an attempt to upgrade the worksheet so it had at least ONE C I made a spreadsheet.

No Common Core standard for "Knows Place Value"

Lame add at least one C. No standard for knows place value
Have to have different lessons not just slap on the common core standard

5 E's Lesson Plan Model

This is a modern design for lessons, old lesson plan templates are .... OLD and outdated.

Engage

Spark their interest! HOOK them into the lesson!

what causes them to run to class

Old lesson plan templates called this the ANTICIPATORY SET! It is where you ACTIVATE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE and hook them into the lesson.

Explore

Have the students EXPLORE BEFORE you tell them what to do.

If you show students how to do something, expect they will do that and exactly that. The level of creativity goes WAY DOWN.

You are doing the thinking for the students. Stop that.

Let students think and work in small groups first.

critical thinking feedback loop

Discussion has HIGH EFFECTIVENESS for learning. Look at the seating in your room does it say "you're here to discuss, collaborate, and think" or "you're hear to listen to someone do the thinking for you?"

What can students do WITHOUT YOU? Answer... A LOT!

Not training robots

It is nearly 20 years into the 21st century. Let's not pretend that the Internet, Google, YouTube, and smartphones don't exist. THEY DO and they are an essential part of everyone's everyday life. They should be essential parts of your classroom too!

  • Do not tell students things they can look up!! Ask instead of tell.
  • Drop the ego, kids CAN figure it out if you back off. Expect that they can look things up and figure out basic things without you.
  • CHANGE HOW YOU SPEND YOUR TIME! More critical thinking building. More activities. More discussions.

THE FUTURE IS ALWAYS CHANGING AND SO SHOULD YOU!

It's hard to accept that things that were essential for us as students can be OBSOLETE! EVERY SINGLE YEAR that you teach have some deep breaths and get real about what is no longer culturally relevant, what has been replaced by technology, and what are the NEW skills that students will need more than the ones that are phasing out?!

Explain

Explain comes THIRD!!!!!

explain comes 3rd

I NEED TO LEARN THIS TEACH ME!

Establish the need to learn it

Extend

YOU be creative!


And relevant


And modern


And think about skills of the FUTURE kids need.

Evaluate

How do you know they learned?

What do they still need to work on?

evaluate yourself

Evaluate yourself too! You did NOT have the perfect lesson plan. You have to take ownership in the results.

If you're complaining about your students change your lesson plan

Should students suffer with a low score when POSSIBLY the reason is the lesson plan needed to be improved or the assessment wasn't that great?

Research shows that teacher created tests are NOT accurate measurements of what a student knows. YOU MADE THAT UP! If a student does not perform as the student thinks they should have or that you thought they should have, how else might you evaluate the student?

SAMR Model

The purpose of technology is NOT to be paperless.

Technology should make learning BETTER not just paperless or more efficient. Believe there is a way to upgrade that lesson idea.

Lame = fill out this worksheet on the computer. Circle using a digital pen or highlighter the multiple choice answer.

SAMR: Instead of circle digital paper, use a digital tool that grades it for you and the student. Win Win, you use your time to work WITH students instead of grading papers. Student gets immediate feedback which is MUCH more motivating.

Same Task = Same Learning

Doing something digitally does NOT make it better. You need to do something DIFFERENT to make learning better.


Do not bury your head in the sand and pretend technology does not exist

Go to http://wolframalpha.com and see that it will do math problems, all the way up to calculus, for the students AND SHOW THE STEPS! The mobile app photomath will too.

If you can Google the answer to the question, it is not a high quality question. ASK BETTER QUESTIONS!!!

Technology should change what we are able to do. Now that technology will answer those questions for us, NOW WHAT CAN WE DO INSTEAD? If the computer can give you the answer, it’s a DOK 1 question. We are trying to increase the DOK levels! More COMPLEX not harder.


The definition of insanity is to do the SAME thing and to expect different results. If you use tech to do the same things but digitally... the learning will be the SAME!

SAMR is just a frame of mind

So the question to ask is.... how does this make learning BETTER?

It should make the learning better
The tech does not make the learning.

What does make learning better?

Student engagement matters for learning! Multi-media is a part of that. But not all of it!

"Effective teaching is characterized by thoughtfully designing learning tasks with these features:

• The task requires and instills deep thinking.

• The task immerses students in disciplinary inquiry.

• The task is connected to the world outside the classroom.

• The task has intellectual rigor.

• The task involves substantive conversation (Willms, Friesen, & Milton, 2009, p. 34)"

Click here for a research article on what influences student engagement.

If you don't want to read the article, here are some highlights:

"It is obvious that students live in world that engages them differently than the world their parents experienced. That students respond to this world and have changed over the last twenty years in response to their engagement within a technology rich society and changes in upbringing almost goes without saying. How schools respond is key to student success"

"If we fail to change our pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment strategies, we fail our students and jeopardize our own futures (Willms, 2003; Robinson, 2009; Tapscott, 1998; Prensky, 2005; Gilbert, 2007)."

"to engage learners in learning, new educational curriculum and activity must include – “Interaction, Exploration, Relevancy, Multimedia and Instruction” "

"We have synthesized the following categories from our reading and will use these to elaborate further: (1) Interaction, (2) Exploration, (3) Relevancy, (4) Multimedia, (5) Instruction, and (6) Authentic assessment. "

"Hay (2000) reports that “Net Geners want more hands-on, inquiry based approaches to learning and are less willing to simply absorb what is put before them” (as cited in Barnes, Marateo, & Ferris, 2007, p. 23)."

"Today’s learners ask that their learning apply to real-life scenarios whenever possible as opposed to being theoretical and text-based. Working with authentic problems or community issues engages students and builds a sense of purpose to the learning experience (Claxton, 2007; Dunleavy & Milton 2009; Willms, Friesen, & Milton, 2009). "

Looking at the highlights from the article above... can tech make it easier to do those things? YES. It's not the tech, it's the using tech to do the above things!

John Hattie's research looked at 180,000 studies on learning. Take the research with a grain of salt. Most of the studies are not measuring creativity, critical thinking, long term retention, passion for learning, etc...

sit next to a kid
design my tech to help me do that
  • FEEDBACK that is specific about what is good and what specifically could be improved.
  • FEEDBACK that is timely.
  • FEEDBACK that is actionable. Not comments, but rather an opportunity to improve based on the feedback!

Without tech, the feedback is slower and hard to be back and forth which is important for learning.

  • RELATIONSHIPS RELATIONSHIPS RELATIONSHIPS

Interacting with the teacher and building relationships with the teacher is important for learning. How do you use tech to increase interactions and relationship building. PDF worksheets just don't cut it.

  • Cooperative Tasks
  • Class Discussion
  • Mastery Learning

What matters most is the quality of the teacher. Your lesson plan! The relationships you build with students. How you choose to interact and give feedback.

Link to research article on the teacher matters by John Hattie

4 C's

Communicate Ideas

Communicate Thinking

Critical Thinking

Build critical thinking into your lesson

Creative Thinking

Want students to be creative

Collaboration

collaborate to improve learning

Try to avoid all students turning in the exact same thing. How do they interject themselves into the lesson?

I like to have students choose a picture! This allows them to make a choice (even if it's small) and then I don't have students all using the same clip art, they personalized it with a picture they got off the Internet, camera roll or their Instagram.

Sometimes rigor is mistaken for MORE. This is WRONG. Rigor can be LESS. More problems, more work, more homework, more practice… NOT RIGOR!!!!

Pretty much all the math problems in the math book is DOK 1 and maybe DOK 2. Doing MORE math problems does not make it Common Core and does NOT make it critical thinking. INSTEAD ask LESS problems, like 3, and have students dive DEEP with THINKING and EXPLAINING and MAKING CONNECTIONS. Give more COMPLEX problems that they can not just Google Search that requires they really think through it.

One good thinking problem is better than a whole page of low critical thinking practice.

Harder is not more critical thinking. Need to go for complex.

Read this article on complexity

This is a really important article on Depth of Knowledge. Please make sure you review it.

This may be a little overly simplified but it’s pretty good!

Research and Advanced Search

In the 21st Century search is an essential part of everyday life. How do we TEACH students how to do this and not just assume they can just "Google it." Truth it, students suck at using technology and "googling" academically. DESIGN into your lesson plans instruction that helps students be better at

  • finding information
  • evaluating the validity
  • citing sources
  • backing up claims with evidence
  • advanced search techniques

Try A Google A Day. It's a game to help you improve your advanced search techniques!

Do a Google Search for "Advanced search techniques" or "Advanced search tips." Learn one at a time! Have a tip of the week!