Well Structured Lesson Plans

The first element of the Candidate Assessment of Performance (CAP) is well structured lesson plans, and is described as “develops well-structured lessons with challenging, measurable objectives and appropriate student engagement strategies, pacing, sequence, activities, materials, resources, technologies, and grouping”. (Massachusetts DOE, 2016).

While undergoing my practicum, lesson planning was the CAP element that I had focused on the most in the beginning. I believe that well-structured lesson plans are the most important aspect of education. If you don't know what you're doing in the time you have in front of the students you will fail. Lesson planning allows you to make sure you are giving your students the best and most important information possible in the short time you have with them.

A good structured lesson plan has many moving parts. For instance, every lesson plan needs to have an objective. The objective is the whole reason for the lesson, it is what you build off of. Your objective comes from Massachusetts math standards. Another key part to your lesson planning is what you are actually going to do in class. I worked hard on not just having learning activities but also trying to include a closer and opener. The closer and opener were imperative to my practice as I got further into my practicum. I have learned that the closer and opener are not only imperative to student learning but also for classroom management. With the opener, you have the students reviewing what you learned the day before and it also helps you as an educator see what you have to put more of an emphasis on in class that day. The opener also gives the students a routine which connects to a safe learning environment. The closer does most of the same things, but is even more important for classroom management. When you come to the last 5 minutes of class, that is where the closer is key. With a few minutes left of class my students would get antsy and start to not pay attention (and on bad days try and get up and leave the class). When I had a closer for them to do those behaviors started to subside. They had to keep their brain rolling for that much longer and it allowed a more manageable classroom setting.

In practicum seminar we discussed backward design, which is when you come up with your objectives for the class first, then you plan what you will actually do in the class. As I underwent my practicum I started using the concept of backward design. My team at Shrewsbury High School is lucky enough to have a well thought out curriculum plan before the start of the year that we can go off of, making the process of backward design even easier. As I went through planning my lessons, my mentor teachers and I were very deliberate with what we used to teach our students based off of the objectives we derived from school’s curriculum guide.

The backward design element of lesson planning, allowed me to think of my students and their needs while I was writing the plan for the day. Once I had my objective, it was much easier to say “oh, student A learns this way but student B learns this way how can I get them both to where they need to be in my short class time?”. I ended up using a lot of desmos activities, Woot-Math’s and group work in order to achieve this goal. They allowed me to be able to check in with most of the lower students in the class while having something the higher achieving students in the class could move into when they were ahead. The Woot-Math’s were extra helpful because I got an immediate visual response of how my kids were doing. Each one of the lines is a different student and the green means they go the answer correct and red is incorrect.

I could also look at individual questions to see where the mistakes were happening.

My lesson plans also included a variety of different teaching styles in order to engage my students. For instance, someday I would do toolkit cards (which is a mini math dictionary), some days I do board notes, we have had worksheets, interactive group work and my favorite day was when we did graph dance battles. My students were not understanding how to visualize graphs when given equations during the direct variation unit we did. So, I made up dance moves and (most of the students) responded very well. Then when we had our direct variation quiz I saw the kids doing the dance moves at their desk to help them remember.

After my first observation Irene had told me to make sure I had an exit ticket in my lesson plan and after that I saw the importance of them and grew from proficient in my summative assessment to exemplary in my formative assessment. Between the exemplary status of my summative assessment and by being able to teach a lesson plan every day, getting through my lesson and see students’ growth from my teaching I have achieved competency in this CAP element.