The Four Steps to Lesson Plan Design

 

Get your lesson planning going with this helpful tips

 

From a guy who taught a lot of classes, let me nutshell it for you on lesson planning. An effective teaching lesson should do specific things. It is vital in your planning to understand how the brains of students actually work, to put those principles to use in maximizing what they learn. I’m summarizing here some of the elements of Madeline Hunter‘s Instructional Theory Into Practice (ITIP) model.

 

Strong teaching includes these four steps

 

  1. Anticipatory Set: When 22 students enter, 22 minds will be in 22 different places. You need some device to hook the brain of the learner into what’s to come.  Especially for new teachers, this is key.  The anticipatory set should involve some overt behavior you can see, such as writing something down in a notebook, raising a hand, or leaning over to a neighbor to reason a question.  For law class, I’d post a daily legal question on the board for written reactions to be spot-checked.  The anticipatory set is crucial to classroom management too. When 22 youngsters enter your room, many will approach you with personal needs, things like absentee notes, passes to leave school early and the like. You must address those issues. Overlapping, the ability to have several things happening in your room at once, is important. The anticipatory set allows you to have the students doing something productive toward the lesson simultaneous to your institutional housekeeping. Many teachers call this the “do now.” The anticipatory set at the start of a class is crucial to unify the minds of the learners and to allow you a few moments for institutional stuff.
  2. Active Engagement: Students disengage when their task is simply to listen to the teacher. A student will listen to a teacher speak for about 3 to 5 minutes. Then it becomes a lecture and their minds go elsewhere. The class must have some form of interaction. Active engagement means that students are reasoning a proposition with one another: disputing someone of an opposing point of view, building something, reacting to something. You the teacher are just the coach that sends in the play but at this point the students must be the players. Imagine dividing your class into New England colonies, Middle colonies and Southern colonies and having each region’s representatives argue why their region held the most for potential immigrants. Students will work together in this portion. Think of it as resourced-based instruction.
  3. Monitoring and Adjusting: Now it’s your job to do “clipboard cruising.” While the students are engaged in their proposition with relevant documents and opposing views, circulate and check on comprehension. Stay out of their discourse as much as you can, but poke and prompt and prod where appropriate. Trust your instincts. If students’ minds go elsewhere, steer them back to task. Keep an eye on them and check in with their reactions. Here is where you find their misunderstandings and weaknesses. Last, check in with youngsters who are either accelerated or remedial. For an accelerated youngster, drop by her desk to take the issues a little further and deeper. For a youngster who needs help, drop by to be sure he has the essential takeaway.
  4. Closure: Now you close. Give students time to sum up for themselves. Unless you close the learning correctly, so that the learner can store the ideas, they may eject them.  Give the students the chance to “nutshell it” by articulating a summative  sentence or two. For example, ask them to explain three reasons the battle of Gettysburg was a turning point in the Civil War. Closure is especially important for youngsters with IEPs. Sometimes they need a little extra prompting to close the lesson, so check in where appropriate.  Always allow time, through a quick Q+A if you like, for their brains to sum up and store into long-term memory. Before going to their next class, their brains need a wrap up.

 

Your takeaway for lesson planning

teaching

 

Effective teaching means making the minds of the learners do what we want and need them to do. Experience has shown that these really work:

Hook Them. Involve Them. Check on Them. Close It.

In all of your teaching, think about how you can stay true to these steps. You will be more effective in all of your teaching.

Also remember that these steps need not occur all in the same day. A project like Rate the Colony could take up to two weeks.

 

 

If these ideas helped improve your teaching, we would love it if you’d check in with our online store of great lessons and projects in US history for students.