Week 5: Lesson Planning
For our meeting this week we talked about lesson planning. More specifically, we discussed the various lesson planning techniques we have used in the past, and whether or not they were effective for us. We also talked about our personal experiences as students, and what we thought worked best for us in the classroom. To summarize, we all seemed to appreciate when professors structure their courses in a way that gets across why it is relevant, and that focuses on teaching things that directly relate to the exams they give. We also tended to like when instructors teach abstract concepts by providing examples of how they work in practice. A general theme seemed to be that good lesson plans are centered around good prep work, clarity of purpose, and content that connects to students.
After all of that preliminary stuff was out of the way, we broke into a rather lively discussion. I started it off by detailing a lesson planning technique I had discovered in my research, Madeline Hunter’s “Drill That Skill” technique, which basically centers around an instructor providing consistent guidance and repetitive examples so as to ensure that students learn material properly the first time they try it. The general reception to this technique was lukewarm at best, mainly because it lacks innovation, and because it might lead to students who know how to do something without knowing why they are able to do it.
Next I summarized the lesson planning technique known as “constructivism,” which is basically a fancy way of saying “the teacher or professor guides students through active learning techniques” in a way that eventually gives them the ability to “learn how to learn.” In our discussion of constructivism, we talked about how it is important to make students accountable for things they are supposed to learn on their own, which can be done either through constant pestering from the instructor, or a graded quiz or examination.
After that our discussion trailed off a bit after one GTC member had questions about how they could improve their sections. Numerous other members made helpful suggestions and tried to give them various techniques (many of which we had talked about earlier) that could help them better connect to their students and encourage more participation and excitement towards the course material.
We closed with a discussion of what was probably everyone’s favorite lesson planning technique: backward design. To put it simply, backward design basically requires you to look at your course...backwards. It is centered around establishing goals you want your class to reach, coming up with effective ways to measure their understanding, and implementing activities that allow your class to reach the initial goals you set. This differs from traditional lesson plans in that you are not just creating a list of things you want your students to know and praying that you are able to get all of that through to them by the time your course is over. Backward design promotes teaching with an endgame in mind, which is useful both for the instructor and their students.
All that said, the truth of the matter is that no one lesson plan is ever going to address the specific needs of all of your students all of the time. The key is to try and do the best you can to connect to as many of your students as possible, which hopefully we will all be able to do just a bit more effectively after this week’s discussion.
For more information on the lesson planning techniques discussed above, check out these links:
- Nick Garcia
A lesson plan is the educator's guide of what understudies need to realize and how it will be done viably amid the class time. Before you arrange your lesson, you will initially need to distinguish the learning goals for the class meeting. At that point, you can plan fitting learning exercises and create systems to acquire criticism on understudy learning.
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