Even teachers who taught in the one-room schoolhouses had to answer basic questions about the curriculum.
Today, teachers are not alone in creating their curriculum. A variety of resources exist—state and national standards, textbooks, district-level curriculum guides, statements from professional organizations, and even other teachers within your building. One of the great joys of teaching is planning a lesson, unit, or course and having it succeed—knowing students have learned the right stuff, in best ways, for good reasons.
Planning clear, age-appropriate, engaging instruction is essential to becoming an effective teacher. All teachers must answer WHAT, HOW, and WHY questions about the curriculum. What is most important to teach? Why? How will content be organized and structured? Why? What strategies are best suited to teach a certain idea or skill? Why? How will I assess student progress and mastery? Why?
This chapter is designed to help inform your curricular judgments.
Instructional planning occupies a central part of the life of every teacher. Every teacher, of any subject, at any level must make decisions about the curriculum. And, every teacher plans the curriculum in a unique way. The lesson or unit plans of veteran teachers are often focused on a few core elements whereas the plans of a novice tend to include a little more detail. Your professors also require that you plan in more detail than you will when you have your own classroom; your lesson and unit plans allow us to “see” and “hear” your emerging ideas as a teacher. Without sufficient detail, we cannot provide adequate feedback, coaching, and guidance. This is the one time in your career when you are able to benefit from the scrutiny, wisdom, and experience of mentors who all want the same goal: for you to become a great teacher! So, take instructional planning seriously as it requires you to synthesize and apply important ideas in curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
If you took a survey of 100 teachers and asked how they planned the curriculum, you are likely to get 100 unique responses. In time, you will formulate your own model, applying principles and ideas that make the most sense to you and your circumstances, based on your experience and wisdom of practice.
Teachers must consider planning at a variety of different levels. The most general level of planning is at the course level—what do I want students to gain from this course? What knowledge, skills, and dispositions are of most worth?
Course planning is important—it helps teachers carefully consider their long-range goals. Within courses, teachers must consider how their courses will be organized into smaller units. Instructional units are typically two to three weeks of instruction focused on a single theme or question. Teachers must also consider specific lessons that will comprise each unit.
For effective teachers, instruction is purposeful and intentional; never aimless or accidental. Effective teachers carefully consider what content and skills they will teach, how the material will be organized, how students will learn, and what will constitute evidence of student learning.
One of the most prominent models of curriculum planning is known as Understanding by Design, developed Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. The model requires teachers to ask and answer a number of practical questions:
Read Understanding by Design White Paper from Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development and watch a two-part video from Grant Wiggins explaining his model of planning.
One of the most challenging parts of the Understanding by Design model is formulating essential questions. Essential questions help students and teachers focus on the most important information in the most interesting ways. Some of the basic elements of writing effective essential questions include:
Watch the following video to gain additional insights into framing essential questions.
In addition to operating within some model, teachers also plan the curriculum with certain principles in mind. Years ago, I (Tom Vontz) sat down and constructed a “top ten (twelve) list” of planning principles—big ideas that guided planning decisions:
What principles do you think are the most or least important on the list?
What additional principles would you include on your own list?
Students sometimes ask us, “What is the best lesson you ever taught?” We tend to think of lessons that made some real difference in the life of a student. Many of the most memorable moments in our teaching careers had less to do with us than the experiences we arranged for our students. Most of those experiences required an artful use of resources—arranging for a Holocaust survivor to visit school, conducting an archaeological investigation at a local cemetery, or conducting authentic research.
One characteristic of effective teachers is knowing how to maximize the resources available to them. When effective teachers encounter new things, they begin to visualize how they might use them in their classes. The local retirement home becomes a source of local oral historical research; the river on the edge of town becomes data for a lesson on water pollution; a generic software program is transformed into a compelling game for students.
We begin by analyzing the most common and prominent resource in the K-12 classroom: the textbook. How can teachers squeeze the most from the textbooks they are provided?
Of course, there are lots of general criteria teachers use to evaluate their textbooks. Is the content organized well? Is the writing lively and interesting? Does the textbook use interesting, controversial, and relevant examples? Is the textbook visually appealing? Does the textbook provide multiple perspectives? Does the textbook invite higher levels of thinking? Is the textbook age appropriate?
Within each of your subject areas, you might also add additional criteria. For example, a teacher of civics and government may well decide that he or she is concerned with having a textbook that helps students conceptualize important ideas such as constitutionalism, democracy, human rights, representative government, and civil society. Watch a critique of textbook publishers below.
What general and subject-specific criteria do you expect from your textbooks?
How well do textbooks align with standards in your content area?
How will you use the textbook in your classroom?
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement:
“Non-traditional and new-media resources hold a great deal of promise to maximize student learning.”
As resources, all textbooks are incomplete. Even the best textbooks need to be supplemented with additional resources that bring ideas and skills to life. Watch the brief video below that describes how an anthropologist at DePaul University, Jane Baxter, transformed mobile technology and access to local cemeteries into deep learning for her students.
Speaking of resources, while you will certainly find some great ideas for decorating your classroom on share sites such as Pinterest, make sure you extend your search. Include sites with content supported by Common Core or state standards, research-based practices (look at the citations in the reference list), or activities created by curriculum specialists when looking for lesson- or behavior-based classroom activities.
However, if you do stumble across something that seems credible on Pinterest, follow up by clicking on the link and investigating the planning/preparation, purpose, and research behind the thumbnail image.
To get you started, here are a few examples of credible online sources to find curricular materials and activities:
Brainstorm a list of specific resources you might use with your students.
Although practicing teachers need to carefully plan courses and the units of instruction within each course, as beginning pre-service teachers, we will focus on the most basic component of planning: the lesson.
Like most other important issues in teaching and learning, there is no single, agreed-upon best model for lesson planning. Most teachers eventually develop their unique way of lesson planning. You may hear people talk about the Gagne Model or the Hunter Model or the 5E Model. . . . All of these models are based on some similar characteristics.
In CIA, we are asking that you use a simple and straightforward model of lesson planning that contains the following elements:
STANDARDS
OBJECTIVES
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
MATERIALS
ACCOMMODATIONS
BEGINNING OF A LESSON
MIDDLE OF A LESSON
END OF A LESSON
Simple guidelines for each of these parts are provided below. . .
MAT
LESSON PLAN FORMAT
Kansas State University
STANDARDS:
OBJECTIVES:
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS:
MATERIALS:
ACCOMMODATIONS:
BEGINNING OF LESSON:
MIDDLE OF LESSON:
END OF A LESSON:
Effective teachers are purposeful–they begin planning with a clear idea of what they want students to know, be able to do, or feel. Teachers write objectives at different levels of generality–course, unit, and lesson. Objectives or outcomes provide focus and clarity to student learning and help to guide instructional practice. Carefully planning for student learning by writing clear and challenging objectives, however, should not limit spontaneity, constrain creativity, or restrict the teacher’s ability to adjust instruction based upon assessment of student learning.
Two main types of learning objectives or outcomes exist–behavioral objectives and descriptive objectives. Behavioral objectives state what is to be learned in language that specifies observable behavior. An example of a behavioral objective at the level of lesson would be:
Given a list, students will be able to list five problems of government under the Article of Confederation with 100% accuracy.
Descriptive objectives clearly describe what students are to learn without using language that specifies observable behavior. An example of a descriptive objective at the level of lesson would be:
By the end of the lesson, students will explain the problems of government under the Articles of Confederation.
Depending upon the nature of the subject you teach, you may utilize both types of outcome statements to guide student learning and your teaching. However, descriptive objectives are most common and are the type we will use in CIA.
Although there are various ways to classify learning outcomes, one common way was developed by Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues (1956). Bloom classified learning outcomes into three types: cognitive (i.e., knowledge), psychomotor (i.e., skill), and affective (i.e., attitude). Typically, most K- 12 learning objectives are aimed at the cognitive and psychomotor domains.
One of the challenges to writing clear and effective learning outcomes or objectives is selecting the appropriate level of generality or specificity. Course objectives are the most general statements of student learning; lesson objectives are the most specific; and unit objectives fall between the two extremes. It is important for teachers to be able to clearly and concisely express the outcomes of student learning at all three levels. The examples at the end of this handout illustrate these three levels.
Learning objectives/outcomes should. . .
Course Objective (Psychomotor)
By the end of grade three, students will. . .
become more proficient thinkers, careful writers, critical readers, and better able to discuss important and controversial issues.
Unit Objective (Affective)
By the end of the unit, students will. . .
appreciate the importance of citizen participation in a democracy.
Lesson Objective (Cognitive)
By the end of the lesson, students will. . .
compare and contrast authority and responsibility.
One useful tool the teachers commonly use to think about and classify learning objectives and questions is Bloom’s revised taxonomy.
Scroll through the brief sketch of the taxonomy below.
Like a good burger, like a good movie, like a good basketball game, a good lesson…an effective lesson…has three main parts: Beginning, middle, and end.
And like a burger, a movie, and a basketball game, when you assemble all the right ingredients such as objectives, questioning approaches, and activities, you get an effective lesson.
So, to get us started, time travel again. How did your super-amazing/cool/effective teacher in elementary, middle, or high school start his or her lessons? With a thought-provoking question? Bell work? A brief introductory activity? Why was it successful? You may not have noticed at the time, but as you reflect upon it today, did those lessons include a distinctive beginning, middle, and end?
So, how do you start? What are your goals for the beginning?
• Get their attention
• Get them to put away their cell phones
• Get them to stop talking to their friends
• Get them motivated to learn
You need a solid beginning. Wasting time at the beginning of your lesson signals to the students that there is, indeed, time to waste. And, so they gladly help you waste it. Some of those time-wasters can be taking attendance or lunch count or handing out papers and other materials. You need a system to get those necessary tasks done efficiently and effectively without losing teaching time.
You also need some way of capturing student interest and focusing it on your learning objectives. All lesson plan models ask teachers to plan for a good beginning. Lesson introductions are also called “anticipatory sets” or the “lesson hook.”
Read Richard Curwin’s “Your Lesson’s First Five Minutes: Make them Grand” and watch the video below.
Once you’ve established that class has begun and you’ve gotten their attention, you’ll be moving into the heart of your lesson–where students approach the content in full force…through activities to help them learn. Some principles are listed below:
Variety is important within and across lessons. Kids do not want to do the same thing every day or spend the entire class doing one thing. Lesson middles should include a variety of strategies and activities.
Research-based Teaching strategies are valuable components of any lesson. We will discuss here more thoroughly in Module 8, but you should considering how to incorporate:
Pacing can be an issue in the implementation of a lesson. The lesson can move too quickly or too slowly, and both can be equally problematic. Much like the fairy tale, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” the pacing needs to be just right.
Staying task-oriented and ensuring learning time are key to helping your students move through the lesson smoothly while addressing the objectives you’ve established for that lesson. And that includes managing time and keeping students focused. Check out the video below for helpful tips and examples.
Transitions from one activity–or portion of an activity–to another can be another stumbling block in the middle of your lesson. It’s that transition time where students can waste time, get distracted with other things, or generally just not understand that time in a classroom is a valuable thing.
And, finally, don’t overlook the power of your own enthusiasm. Students want to know that you’re excited about the lesson, and they’ll reflect the enthusiasm they see in you…and the tone of your voice…and your facial expressions and body language.
The thing about meaningful lessons is that they usually have meaningful endings. But how do you accomplish such an ending? The best lesson endings ask the students to demonstrate their new knowledge or skills in some novel way. Just like lesson beginnings, there is no one correct way to end a lesson. Think about some of the more accomplished teachers that you’ve had through the years. How did they wrap things up? How did they actively engage students and check for understanding?
Check out a teacher’s description of the end of the lesson, which is also known as lesson closure.
