1.A.3: Well-Structured Units and Lessons

About the Element

The teacher candidate must be able to adapt and incorporate state standards into well-structured lessons and units. All considerations, such as challenging tasks, measurable outcomes, student engagement strategies, pacing, sequence, reources, grouping, questioning, and strategical technology usage, should be made and used to help enhance students' learning of the the knowledge and skills defined by state curriculum.

This element is important for the teacher candidate to be assessed on the development and planning of lesson structures. It is crucial for teachers to have a plan for how the class will be conducted, to create a structure base where students can learn effectively and efficiently. While there are numerous factors in lesson planning that teachers should account for, they must also plan for flexibility in the lesson, especially in pacing. For example, sometimes an activity may run longer or shorter than expected. Well-structured lessons allow for teachers to account for these possibilities, and set up a framework for how the teacher may be able to adjust during the lesson. In the longer than expected example, teachers would note on their lesson plans, where time might be able to be subtracted from a different activity in order to allow for pacing goals to be met. For the shorter than expected example, teachers can plan additional materials that increase in complexity and challenge or plan to allow students to work on another activity, such as starting the homework. Well-structured units are important for teachers to approach an overarching goal that each lesson is building towards in a specified timeline defined by the department or school.

My Lessons

In my lesson plans, while including state standards from the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework - 2017 into my content objectives, a critical part of my lesson planning was determining a plan for pacing during the delivery of the lesson. In the actual lesson plans, I marked out the approximate amounts of time I aimed to spend on each activity. These timelines served as checkpoints for me during the live classes. To ensure we progressed through enough of the lesson such that students would be able to complete the homework for practice, if we reached a checkpoint time, we moved onto the next section. It was noted to the class that it was okay if we did not completely finish an example, because I emphasized the importance of the setup and approach to solving the problem. If time remained at the end of class, I was able to jump back to previous examples for extra practice as needed, without a lapse in transition due to the Pear Deck technology.

My lesson activities were designed through Google Slides, and I utilized a software program, called Pear Deck. The Pear Deck system allowed me to create slides that students could draw or type on, while I provided direct and individualized feedback to each student on their work. The general structure of slides was instructional video, followed by examples for the students to try each with worked out solutions broken down step-by-step, which we reviewed as a class.

The Pear Deck did not allow for changes to my original slides to be made without relaunching the entire lesson, so in my lesson preparations I had to account for the multitude of possibilities and differences in each of my classes. This meant ahead of the lesson, I had to add extra examples for additional practice if a class needed one more example to try out, and more challenging and complex examples for classes that were ready for the next step. During the lesson, I could flip to any slide in the Pear Deck at any point. From the student view, the students could only see the slide I had selected, which allowed for quick transitions to each example tailored to the individual classes.

Additionally, I was able to incorporate sentence frames and guide structures (e.g., frames for Scientific Notation) directly into the Pear Deck, as my slides would become the background of the screen students would write on. I added additional resource videos at the end of the slides and encouraged students to revisit my videos from class and the extra ones to reinforce the concepts that we had learned that day. All of my slides were posted on Google Classroom with the homework assignments for students to easily access for review or if they had missed the class.

Element Artifacts

Anna Eng

WPI Teacher Preparation Program

aeeng@wpi.edu