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STRATEGY
What to Include in Your Lesson Plans
The following list will help you as you begin to write your daily lesson plans. While there may be other items that you find useful to include, these will constitute a good beginning:
Objectives. Objectives indicate what the result of a lesson will be, not what activities students will complete. The objectives for a lesson should be stated in specific terms and must follow state and district guidelines. For example, an objective for students in a geography course might be "Learners will be able to identify forty-five of the fifty state capitals."
Necessary materials and equipment. You should determine what resources you need to teach innovative and interesting lessons.
Prior knowledge assessment. You must assess your students' prior knowledge before you begin teaching a lesson to determine exactly what you need to review or introduce. How to do this will be discussed in more detail later in this section.
Anticipatory set. Creating anticipation in your students should be an integral part of
the opening exercise in your class each day. An anticipatory set allows students to shift gears mentally from what they were doing before class began to the lesson they are about to begin. More information on anticipatory sets will be given in Section Eight.
Explanation or teacher input. Your input is necessary for a successful lesson. Carefully plan what you are going to do or say to make your points.
Student activities. Use a wide range of independent and guided practice activities that will appeal to students with a variety of learning styles. Be careful to include critical thinking activities.
Alternative activities. Allow for differences in students' ability and speed of mastery by preparing alternative activities that provide enrichment or remediation.
Closure. Close each class with an activity designed to reinforce learning. Allowing students to drift from one class to another without formal closure fails to make use of students' tendency to recall the beginning and ending of a lesson with clarity.
Homework. Homework assignments should arise naturally from the lesson. Because they are part of what you teach, you should record specific assignments in your plans.
Assessments. You should include a variety of assessments in each unit of study. Plan several small assessments before a test so that you do not have to deal with students who failed because they were not prepared.
Notes. Leave space in your daily plans to record your successes, failures, or any other information that will allow you to teach this lesson more successfully in the future.
Excerpted from Section Seven, "Design Effective Lessons," of The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide, by Julia G. Thompson. Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Thank you, Julia G. Thompson and Jossey Bass, for contributing this month's strategies!
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