As a Substitute
Para-Educator and a volunteer art teacher in my sons’ elementary school, I have
seen many amazingly creative and engaging lesson plans in action; I have also
seen a fair amount of lesson plans fall flat, including my own. This course,
which focused primarily on lesson design, taught me repeatable strategies for
designing effective and comprehensive lesson plans, taking into account
learning standards and targets, instructional methods, support activities,
assessments, and differentiation for different learning styles and student needs.
The concept of
“Backward Design” was particularly eye-opening for me. Instead of beginning
with the lesson activity, which is my natural inclination, the strategy is to
begin at the end by creating an assessment that measures whether students have
met the standard. In this way, learning targets and lesson activities can be
explicitly designed to support learning the standard, which is the goal of the
lesson. The advantage of this methodology is efficiency and focus, particularly
when planning a unit: all lesson components are designed with the standard and
its assessment in mind. While it is tempting to begin with a lesson activity,
especially with the wealth of creative lesson plans available online, I did
find it a more difficult and time-consuming process. The lesson activity either
had to be altered or changed entirely because it did not directly support the
standard or provide the knowledge students needed to pass the assessment. This difficulty
would be magnified when planning a comprehensive unit composed of multiple
lesson plans.
I also appreciated
learning how to include differentiation into a lesson plan. Students are
different. They learn differently, and are more pre-disposed to acquiring
knowledge through visual, auditory, or kinesthetic methods. They come from
different cultural, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds with different
contextual experiences and preconceived notions. They have different learning
needs, some requiring accommodation, others more challenging activities. Creating
a lesson plan that includes a variety of pedagogies and evaluating it for ways
in which differentiation can be implemented are two valuable strategies for
effective lesson design.
Informal
assessments are a great strategy for evaluating student understanding in the
moment. While a lesson plan may seem clear to me at home, presenting it in the
classroom may yield confusion that I did not anticipate. Instead of proceeding
forward and discovering that students did not understand the material through
data obtained with the final assessment, when it’s almost too late to go back
and review an entire lesson plan/unit, informal assessments along the way allow
for the opportunity to revisit material students do not understand in the
moment. These informal assessments can be as simple as asking students if they
have any questions or asking them to give a thumbs up, thumbs down, or thumbs
sideways to indicate their level of understanding.
Engaging, experienced
teachers make teaching look easy. There is a flow to their instruction that
seems natural and fluid. It’s only now that I realize how they are
accomplishing this: through careful lesson planning, considering the learning
standard and the final assessment as evidence of student understanding, establishing
clear learning targets, creating support activities and opportunities for
practice utilizing a variety of pedagogies to engage different learning styles,
and knowing their students so teachers can provide appropriate differentiation
for exceptional learners.
