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How to Write a Great Lesson Plan, Part 1: What & Why?

So, for whatever reason, you need a lesson plan. Maybe you’re a volunteer teacher in some far-flung corner of the world trying to help young people grapple with English for the first time, maybe you’ve been hired in a sleepy American town with a bachelor’s in science and a heap of good intentions, or maybe you’re taking your first class on your way to being a certified teacher. Surprisingly, you can’t find one that’s just right on Teachbuzz.com, so you’ve got to write your own.

Well, we’re here to help.

Great lesson plans have a generally agreed upon anatomy. This anatomy not only makes it easy for others to use your lesson plans to good effect in the future, it also ensures that you’ve gone through the proper thought processes to make a complete and effective lesson.

This is part one in a two part series. We’ll go over the first parts of a written lesson plan and get you ready to write a procedure that will actually work. You may be tempted to skip this part and go straight to The How in part two, but, the info below helps you write a lesson plan that works.

1: Title

Before you dive into the title, you need to know what  you’re going to teach, why you’re going to teach it, and to whom it will be taught. Generally, titles can either be written last or written with an expectation of revision, especially for early lesson planners.

The title should convey the complete main objective of the lesson in as few words as possible. So, “Solids and Liquids” is okay, “Differentiating and Defining Solids and Liquids” is better.
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2. Audience

Who is the lesson for? Grade 3 is useful, but what about ESOL students, or students with special needs? The more completely you think about who you’re teaching, the more equipped you’ll be to design an appropriate and engaging lesson.

3: Objectives

Objectives are where things get pretty important. In fact, these are probably some of the most important pieces of a lesson plan, and also the pieces most often skipped by teachers new and old. More than just what you’re teaching, objectives are how you’ll be able to know if you are a good teacher or not.

It’s important that objectives are concrete, observable events. If you’re teaching “Solids and Liquids,” writing an objective that says students will “understand the difference,” leaves you in limbo at the end of the lesson. Any teacher with a few tests under their belt will tell you that your intuition of student understanding is, more often than not, dead wrong.

Instead, shoot for concrete outcomes that you can see, such as:

Students will…

create a poster demonstrating the difference

organize a collection of solids and liquids into appropriate groups

label them correctly in writing

orally defend and explain which a given object is

If you have objectives like these, not only is your lesson sure to be more complete, but you’ll know at the end of your day if you did your job. Either there’s a poster, or there isn’t. If there isn’t, the easy way out is to blame the students. Don’t! Remember, when you take up the mantle of teacherhood you take responsibility for that room and those students, and everything ultimately rests on your shoulders.

To say that it was “their fault” is to say that no human in the expanse of space and time could have possibly met the objectives you set. Then the question becomes: Why did you set them?

A much more useful tactic is to wonder how you could have explained it better, provided more scaffolding, given clearer examples, or possibly just gone slower. The best teachers don’t always meet their objectives, but they always seek to learn and improve when they don’t.

Primary Objectives & Secondary Objectives

It’s important to remember that you’re always teaching more than you think. Primary objectives are the ones we’re likely to think of: adding single digit numbers, generating future tense sentences, correctly labeling primary and secondary sources. Secondary objectives are the ones we teach all the time, or that are peripherally related: Follow instructions the first time, successfully read and understand an article (if for a social studies or science class, for example), explain complex ideas to classmates, etc.

You can’t hope to write every possible secondary objective, but identifying a few important ones never hurts.

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4: Materials

Here’s where things get easy again. Just a list of what you need. It may be useful to list every possible thing you could use, or to simply say “basic stationary,” “poster making supplies,” etc. The most important thing here is to give the reader a general idea of what to expect and also a heads up for unusual supplies such as 100 toothpicks for each student, or 15 color coded spray bottles.

 

Part 2, The How: Procedure and Assessments that get it done and let you know how good a job you did.

Creative Commons Love: Burtoo, changinglivescambodia.org, gringer, on flickr.com 

 

Written by Michael Jones