Module 8: Lesson planning

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As a teacher, lesson planning is extremely important because it helps you understand where you are
going, and it makes it easy to show the administration that you are following the curriculum.

For the latter reason, lesson plans have become more and more formal in recent years, and it is now more
important than ever before to understand what goes into a lesson plan as well as how your lesson plans
further your objectives.

To this end, this module will review all of the components of a strong lesson plan and how you can
prepare your lessons in a way that will be most effective and beneficial for your students.

Module 8: Lesson planning

8.1 Standards and objectives

8.2 Following a curriculum

8.3 Varying instruction

8.4 Teaching strategies

8.5 Meaningful assessments

8.1 Standards and objectives

Every time you create a lesson plan you need to create an objective and make sure that it is
aligned with a standard. We will first take some time to discuss standards, since they
should be the basis for all of your lesson plans.

8.1.1 Standards

Standards are a set of skills that students need to have by the time they leave your
classroom. These standards are not set by the teacher but rather accessed by the teacher
for use in their lesson plans. Depending on where you are teaching your students, the skills
that the standards require them to meet are going to be different. For the sake of this
module, we will focus on the general idea of standards and how they should inform
instruction. Let’s first look at the general skills that standards usually focus on.

Reading literature: Reading literature standards cover all of the skills that are required to
effectively read a piece of literature, including poetry, short stories, novels, and plays.
These standards typically focus on literary analysis skills, since reading comprehension
skills are covered in the next standard.
Reading for information: Reading for information standards cover reading
comprehension skills that a student would need to read a piece of nonfiction, such as an
article, a biography, or an academic journal.

Writing: Writing standards cover all of the skills involved in writing, including narrative
writing, expository writing, persuasive writing, and informative writing. Many of the
standards within this category will likely focus on a student’s ability to make a claim,
support his or her claim, and explain himself or herself thoroughly.

Speaking and listening: Speaking and listening standards focus on all of the skills that
students will need to present new ideas and attain information from spoken sources.
These standards are especially important during student presentations, class discussions,
and Socratic seminars.

Language: Language standards focus on the skills that students will need to develop their
understanding of language. As a TESOL teacher, these standards will be extremely
important, but they are also relevant to mainstream classes. These standards focus on
diction, grammar, usage, and other aspects of understanding a lesson.

8.1.2 Objectives

Once you have a clear understanding of the standards that you need to hit within a unit,
now it is time to start thinking about the learning objectives you are going to create.
Whereas standards tell you what your students need to achieve by the end of a unit or the
end of the school year, lesson objectives detail where you want your students to be at the
end of a lesson.

It is your job as a teacher to make sure that the lesson objectives you have throughout a
unit work towards helping your students master the skills outlined in the standards. Here
are some tips for writing effective lesson objectives.

 The first question that you need to ask yourself is “What do I want my students to be
able to do by the end of the lesson?” These objectives should be focused on skills
rather than content and cover skills that the students are going to develop through
the unit.

 Once you have written lesson plans for your entire unit, you should review your
learning objectives to make sure they all build towards meeting the standards for
the unit.

 Lesson plans need to be clear and measurable. At the end of a lesson, you should
be able to look back on the lesson and identify how many of your students met the
objectives with accuracy.
ypes of objectives

There are a few different types of objectives that you can frame your lesson plans around,
so let’s review each kind.

1. Cognitive objectives: Cognitive objectives refer to students enriching their

knowledge, demonstrating their knowledge, and practicing skills related to the
knowledge they are enriching. In cognitive objectives, students are expected to
comprehend, apply, and synthesize their knowledge.

2. Psychomotor objectives: Psychomotor objectives are less common in a mainstream

classroom, as they apply to dexterity and physical coordination. These types of
objectives are more common in early education and education for students who
struggle with coordination and dexterity (disabled students or students who have
suffered an injury).
3. Attitudinal objectives: These objectives are rare as lesson objectives and more
purposeful when used as classroom objectives. Attitudinal objectives require students
to behave in a certain way, which is more likely a concern for the classroom all year
rather than a concern for a specific lesson.

There are rules and guidelines that govern your creation of lesson objectives, and while
they vary depending on where you are teaching, we will cover some of the universal ideas.
Remember that lesson objectives are the backbone of your entire lesson.

 Learning objectives should be focused on observable activities: To identify

whether or not your students have achieved the objective you have set out for them,
the objective needs to be observable or something that you can measure through
observation. This idea will help you keep your objectives specific and attainable.

 Learning objectives should be focused on student activities: Many teachers make

the mistake of thinking that lesson objectives should focus on what they hope to
accomplish during the lesson. This puts the focus on teaching rather than learning and
does not really ensure that the students understand the material but instead ensures
that the teacher is delivering the material. Teaching may occur, but learning may not.
Your lesson objectives should always be about what the students are going to
accomplish.

 Learning objectives should be focused on student outcomes: Another mistake

that many teachers make is to create a learning objective that simply describes what
the students are going to do during the lesson. This is not the purpose of an
objective and only measures whether or not the students have complied with the
teacher’s directions. As a student, I can comply with everything my teacher asks
 without reaching the true objective of improving a skill or extending knowledge.
There should be an outcome tied to each lesson objective.

Good lesson objectives:

 Students will be able to make a judgment about the strength of a speaker’s

argument

 Students will be able to determine which text best portrays the culture of the 1930s

Bad lesson objectives:

 Students will be able to write an essay

 Students will be able to hear about World War II

8.2 Following a curriculum

Depending on where you end up teaching, you may have a say in the creation of the
curriculum, but it is more likely that you will not. Gone are the years where a curriculum
was just an amorphous general idea, and here to stay is a culture where most schools have
an extremely detailed and prescribed curriculum for each of their teachers to follow. To
truly understand how to follow a curriculum, we first need to look closely at the
components involved.

8.2.1 Curricular components

 Standards: As we discussed earlier in this module, all planning should start with the
standards that you want your students to be able to achieve during the curriculum.

 Essential questions: Whereas the standards are focused on what the students are
going to be able to achieve or work on during a unit, the essential question is the
thematic question that the students should be exploring throughout the unit. For
example, you may decide that you want your students to work on a standard that
focuses on using two informational texts to draw conclusions. You may want to design
a unit that covers World War II and ends with a discussion of the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can have an essential question that asks something such
as “Should there be rules in times of war?” Then your students could explore two
nonfiction texts to draw conclusions about America’s decision to drop atomic bombs
to inform their understanding of the essential question.

 Assessments: As we discussed before, the summative assessment for the unit

should assess how well the students fulfilled the standards and objectives of the
unit. However, a detailed curriculum will also include formative assessments that
 help your students build skills and scaffold on their way to the summative
assessment.

 Model lessons: A thorough curriculum will also provide you with exemplar lesson
plans that you can either use, modify, or look to for guidance on how you should be
framing your lessons.

 Exemplar texts: Your curriculum will likely also detail the texts that you can use for
each unit. These will be texts that are vetted to make sure they fit the unit
thematically and are within the appropriate reading level for the students in your
class.

 Secondary material: Your curriculum should also offer secondary sources that fit
within your units. In an American English unit plan, there are typically suggestions of
art and music to go along with the literature that needs to be covered.

8.2.2 Teaching to the curriculum

Although many school systems have adopted standard curriculums that do not budge very
much, research shows that the best model for curriculum is a plan that is fluid. In this
section, we will discuss the way curriculum should be used and followed in the classroom,
even if many schools are not necessarily listening to the research.

The best way to use curriculum is in a cycle, where the plan is in the hand of the teacher (or
group of teachers) and within reach of their revisions. The ideal curriculum cycle hinges on
three parts:

1. Planning: The curriculum plan is initially created based on what the teachers and
administrators generally accept as the needs of the students. The units are designed
to address the skills that are layered in the standards while working thematically
through a focus. Everything from the “Curricular components” section above is
created, and the plan is distributed to, and reviewed by, the teaching staff.

2. Implementation: Members of the teaching staff design their own lesson plans to
work within the structure of each unit in the curriculum plan. They make sure that
their lesson objectives clearly address the skills outlined in the standards of the unit,
and each activity prepares the students for the summative assessment. Ideally,
teachers of the same curriculum have periodic time to meet.

3. Reflection: After implementation of the curriculum, teachers meet with each other to
discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the plan. The teachers use data they have
collected from the formative and summative assessments and not just anecdotal
evidence to inform their discussions. Teachers share the different strategies they used
 during each unit to try to identify if the struggles their students had were because of
their own unique instruction or were in line with the other students who had different
students.

4. Revision: This is the most important part that many schools are not giving their
teachers the freedom to use. Teachers use what they found in their reflection to
inform revisions to the curriculum. If the students had difficulties or skills they did not
attain, then the teachers rewrite unit plans to ensure these problems are addressed.
Without the revision process, the reflection process is not very effective. Next year the
teachers go through the same process and make sure their planning and instruction
are constantly improving.

8.3 Varying instruction

If there is one thing that educational theorists agree on nowadays it is that the best way to
reach the most students is by varying and differentiating your instruction. We will begin by
first discussing one of the basic ideas behind the efficacy of varied instruction, which is the
idea of multiple intelligences.

8.3.1 Gardner’s multiple intelligences

A Harvard professor named Howard Gardner penned the theory that there are multiple
types of intelligence, each valuable in its own way. If you accept this theory, which many do,
this means that the students in your class will all have specific strengths and weaknesses
that you can access through varied instruction. Here are Gardner’s multiple intelligences:

 Visual-spatial: People who are intelligent in this area are very good at
understanding their environment and reasoning spatially. They respond to any
activities that allow them to problem-solve, organize, or create with their hands.

 Bodily-kinesthetic: People who are intelligent in this area are very controlled with
their body and are prone to athletic and/or dexterous tasks. They respond to
activities that require them to move, act, and learn with their hands.

 Musical: People who are intelligent in this area are usually natural musicians who
understand sound and rhythm more than most. They respond to rhythmic activities
and anything that involves music or creating sound.

 Interpersonal: People who are intelligent in this area have an easy time connecting
with people and love to help others. They respond to anything that involves working in
a group, participating in a discussion, or any activities that require them to make
connections with the people around them.
  Intrapersonal: People who are intelligent in this area are very in tune with themselves
and are good at setting goals and keeping themselves on track to accomplish them.
They respond to much more independent and self-driven learning because it allows
them to take control of their own progress.

 Linguistic: People who are intelligent in this area are very good with words. They
understand the language and how to use it to their advantage. They respond to
activities that require them to read, use words creatively, and/or solve word puzzles.

 Logical-mathematical: People who are intelligent in this area are very good at
reasoning and calculating things. They respond to activities that require them to
work logically, reason things out, and solve puzzles.

8.3.2 How to differentiate

Here is where you find a point of contention in the educational community. Differentiation
is a buzzword that politicians and administrators love to throw around without actually
helping teachers understand what it is. Teachers often fear differentiation because they are
afraid of the amount of work that idea brings with it. Differentiation does not have to be
scary however. Here are some simple steps you can take to differentiate your instruction
and appeal to students of different abilities and learning types.

 Get to know your students: There is no way to vary instruction to better

accommodate your students if you do not first find out some information about
them. There are a few different ways that you can research your students’ learning
styles. The first way is to ask the students. This strategy works better with older
students, but it often yields the most honest results. The second way is by giving
your students benchmark assessments early on in the year. This strategy can give
you a lot of information, but it can also be skewed by such things as apathy,
distractions, and poor testing abilities. The third way you can find out information
about your students is through observing them during classroom activities. You may
have guessed that the best course of action is not one of these strategies alone but
rather a combination of all of them. As a teacher, you need to use everything at your
disposal to better understand what works best for your students.

 Be prepared with a toolkit of teaching strategies: Now that you have a good
understanding of each of your students and how they learn best, you need to be
able to access your vast repertoire of teaching strategies to facilitate your students’
needs. These teaching strategies should also be very diverse, covering a wide array
of teaching styles, including:
 o Direct instruction: People like to discount this old-school, traditional method
of teaching, but it works in the classroom as long as it is not the only strategy
that you are using.

o Cooperative learning: Cooperative learning is a very trendy teaching style

because it allows students to take responsibility for their learning, and it is
conducive to a student-centered learning environment.

o Inquiry-based learning: According to many experts, this is one of the most

rigorous forms of teaching because it requires students to create their own
questions or hypotheses, research, experiment, or explore these questions or
hypotheses, and then draw conclusions based on their findings. The skills
involved in this process are very complex, and if you are able to help your
students get used to successfully going through this process, you will see
significant results.

o Information-processing strategies: These types of lessons ask students to

practice and deepen their core skills to become better writers, readers, and
thinkers. Students are getting the practice they need in the skills that are most
important.

 Identify which strategies will work best for your students: So you know what
your students need to succeed, and you have a toolkit full of teaching strategies.
Now it is time to put it together and match teaching strategies with your students’
needs.

 Vary your instruction: Here is the part where many teachers and administrators
slip up. People often think that varied or differentiated instruction means that you
always have your students doing group work and working independently.
Sometimes, direct, teacher-centered instruction is appropriate. The point of varied
and differentiated instruction is that you balance different types of instruction
throughout your curriculum. When it is appropriate, you use direct instruction, and
when it is appropriate, you use cooperative learning. The point is that you use all
types of instruction to appeal to every different kind of student and to make the
most impact you can.

 Assess and adjust: As we discussed when we covered following a curriculum, you

need to be able to assess your students, reflect on your teaching, and then adjust
your teaching strategies to better serve your students. Teaching is a growing
experience, and you need to constantly question and adjust your strategies to
become more effective.
8.4 Teaching strategies

Going through all the existing teaching strategies would take an entire course, so we are
instead going to focus on a few effective strategies that appeal to students with different
learning styles.

1. Jigsaw: A jigsaw is a great cooperative learning strategy because it gives students

the opportunity to take control of their learning, but it also is a natural scaffold. In a
jigsaw, you group your student to interact with new knowledge and give them a
short amount of time to focus on a specific topic. Each group has a different topic,
so at the end of this short period of time, you rearrange the groups, and students
become experts on their original topic. For example, you can split your class of
twenty-five students into five groups of five students each and have each group
researching a different European country. Then you can go to each group and give
each member a number from 1 to 5 and have the students rearrange based on
those numbers. Now you have five groups, each containing one student who has
researched each European country. Now the students teach each other.

2. Think-pair-share: This is a very versatile strategy because it can be used for a 5-

minute initiation or for a class-long activity. Put simply, you give your students
something to think about, then you ask them to get into pairs, and then you ask
them to share what they came up with. This can be done as formally or informally
as you would like, and it works with all different types of content.

3. Fishbowl: This is a modified Socratic seminar that asks students to participate in a

discussion and evaluate each other’s performance during the discussion. Essentially,
students are structured into two circles, one inside the other. Inside the circle,
students are given a topic, question, or idea to discuss. In the outer circle, students
are paying attention to the inner circle and evaluating the strength of their
discussion. The most effective fishbowls ask the students in the outer circle to focus
on specific parts of the discussion. Teachers can either ask each outer student to
focus on one inner student or ask each outer student to focus on one skill, idea, or
form of discussion.

4. Testing a hypothesis: As we mentioned in the previous section, asking students to

pose hypotheses, test their hypotheses, and then draw conclusions is asking them
to access very high levels of thinking. This does not have to be a strategy that only
works in science classes. In an English class, you might ask students to read a
selection from an author and then create a hypothesis that guesses what another
piece by that author is going to focus on. This will require the students to
understand the piece at a high level and be able to use that understanding to make
predictions about a related text.
8.5 Meaningful assessments

We discussed assessments in the previous module, so we will not discuss them ad

nauseam here. To ensure that your assessments are authentic and meaningful, you need
to make sure that they align with the standards you are trying to meet and the objectives
you have set out for your students to help them reach those standards. To make an
assessment truly meaningful, though, it needs to be reflective of something that students
might see in whatever career they end up in, and your assessments should also give
students many different ways to display their knowledge. Here is an example of the
different types of assessments you can create:

 Writing: Your writing assessments do not have to be traditional essays (although do

not discount these classics). You can find many different ways to be creative with
your writing assignments. You can have your students create such things as
storybooks, poems, and journals.

 Performance: Having your students create a presentation, a performance, or

something that requires them to stand in front of the class and create something
informative and entertaining is a great way to find out how much your students
know. These types of activities are creative, entertaining, and really allow students
to have fun with their learning.

 Art: Students can also display their understanding of a concept by creating

something artistic. Whether you ask your students to create an illustration, draw or
build a diagram, or create a visual project, you should allow them to access their
creativity to display their understanding of the material.

 Teaching: Asking your students to teach material to a class is a great way to truly
judge whether or not they know it. As you know or will soon find out, you cannot
effectively teach something unless you understand it inside and out.