Creating a Lesson Plan: Five Strategies to Implement

Creating a lesson plan is essential to effective goal-oriented teaching. Teaching is an immensely complex endeavor that must account for a never-ending combination of changing variables. Effective instruction relies on effective planning to ensure that student needs, learning objectives, instructional technology, and instructional strategies are considered together in order to promote high levels of student learning. With so many new technologies and ways of thinking and teaching, planning is an essential aspect of education that becomes even more critical as students and teachers try to cope with new methods, remote options among them.

Components to Include When Creating Effective Lesson Plans

Creating a lesson plan means creating a complete set of instructions. The lesson plan is the anticipated path for the lesson. It is essential to identify the learning objectives as well as instructional and assessment strategies. A strong lesson plan enhances efficient and effective goal achievement.

Lesson planning is a well-established and studied process in undergraduate education programs and in early service professional development. There are many models described in the literature including Essential Elements of Instruction (EEI), Hunter, Danielson, and more. All these models use different terminology and processes; however, there are many common components.

1.Clear Objectives

When a lesson plan’s objectives are created, the instructor should clearly identify what the students should know (knowledge) and be able to do (performance) to demonstrate mastery. These can be written as learning targets. Rubrics can be a useful tool to help the instructor identify different levels of mastery. These rubrics can also help students understand their progress through specific success criteria built into the rubric. By understanding the knowledge and performance objectives, the instructor can strategically identify critical aspects of the lesson. It is essential to identify what you want your students to take away at the end of the class.

A lesson can consist of many skills and important topics. Prioritize the learning objectives and skills by their level of importance. Helping students understand the most vital skills and ideas to grasp is essential.

2. Dynamic Opening

Brain research has indicated that people learn best what they learn first. Therefore, after setting and prioritizing the objectives, the next step is to create an engaging introduction to your lesson to help “hook” students into the learning. A strong lesson introduction generates enthusiasm and helps students better understand what they are going to learn and why the subject is relevant. Identifying the amount of prior knowledge students have about the topic will help the instructor clear any misconceptions and estimate the amount of time needed for students to appropriately master the learning. As the classroom will be full of different students, their skill and knowledge capacity can be different too. A strong introduction accounts for student experience and differentiates accordingly.

3. Strategies for Engaging Instruction

The main body of the lesson plan is created to help students learn and understand the learning targets derived from the objectives. Educators must choose instructional and learning strategies that create experiences that will engage students in thinking, questioning or investigating, writing, and dialogue. A strong lesson will engage students and create excitement or interest. If the lesson is not relevant and interesting, students can quickly lose interest, and progress towards mastery will be limited.

4. Strong Conclusion

While people remember best what comes first, brain research has indicated that what comes last is what people remember the second best. A strong conclusion should be closely aligned to the learning objectives, provide accurate information for students to remember, and engage the students in demonstrating their current understanding. Although it would be ideal for all the students to master the learning targets by the end of the lesson, the teacher should anticipate some misunderstandings. Reiterating the objectives using a variety of strategies should occur at the end of a lesson, especially if students are expected to independently practice new skills.

5. Practice and Monitoring

As students learn new ideas and skills, they often need to rehearse and practice. Monitoring this is important, both during the lesson, often referred to as progress monitoring, and also in independent practice. If students are not evaluated through appropriate progress monitoring such as questioning and regularly assessing, misunderstandings can become concrete. Practice and continual monitoring provides the instructor critical information to adjust instruction to meet the various learning needs of the students in the class.

Conclusion

Effective lesson planning is essential. Accomplishing the immensely complicated task of effective classroom instruction is easier when your lesson plan includes the most critical components of a lesson: clear objectives, a dynamic opening, strategies for engaging instruction, a strong conclusion, and a way to ensure continual practice and monitoring.

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Amy Stock, MS