Instructional Methods Strategies and Technologies to Meet the Needs of All Learners (Lombardi)

Why planning and preparing are important

Good lessons must be planned. Planning helps to make your lessons clear and well-timed, meaning that students can be active and interested. Effective planning also includes some built-in flexibility so that teachers can respond to what they find out about their students’ learning as they teach. Working on a plan for a series of lessons involves knowing the students and their prior learning, what it means to progress through the curriculum, and finding the best resources and activities to help students learn.

Planning is a continual process to help you prepare both individual lessons as well as a unit of lessons, each one building on the last. The stages of lesson planning are:

• being clear about what your students need in order to make progress
• deciding how you are going to teach in a way that students will understand and how to maintain flexibility to respond to what you find
• looking back on how well the lesson went and what your students have learned in order to plan for the future

Planning a unit of lessons

When you are following a curriculum, the first part of planning is working out how best to break up subjects and topics in the curriculum into sections or chunks. You need to consider the time available as well as ways for students to make progress and build up skills and knowledge gradually. Your experience or discussions with colleagues may tell you that one topic will take up four lessons, but another topic will only take two. You may be aware that you will want to return to that learning in different ways and at different times in future lessons when other topics are covered or the subject is extended.

In all lesson plans you will need to be clear about:

• what you want the students to learn
• how you will introduce that learning
• what students will have to do and why

You will want to make learning active and interesting so that students feel comfortable and curious. Consider what the students will be asked to do across the series of lessons so that you build in variety and interest, but also flexibility. Plan how you can check your students’ understanding as they progress through the series of lessons. Be prepared to be flexible if some areas take longer or are grasped more quickly.

Preparing individual lessons

After you have planned the series of lessons, each individual lesson will have to be planned based on the progress that students have made up to that point. You know what the students should have learned or should be able to do at the end of the series of lessons, but you may have needed to recap something unexpected or move on more quickly. Therefore, each individual lesson must be planned so that all your students make progress and feel successful and included.