Weekly Investment: Learning to Write Lesson Plans

How do we Design and Plan Instruction?


Finally we begin talking about one of the most important aspects of teaching: How are you going to teach every day?

It brings back a memory one of my teachers in high school once told me: Teaching is like acting. Everyday you have to read a new script and hope that your students enjoy the show.  

 

As I read the pages trying to glean some new information I instead decided that I should hit the web and look at some lesson plans to better understand everything:

Unit Plans: These are the big concepts you want to cover. So for example in a Dairy Foods Class I may want to cover these questions:
  • Where does milk come from?
  • What is the difference between milks?
  • How is butter made?
  • How is ice cream made?
  • How is yogurt made?
That would be a Unit. A Lesson would be taking one of those big concepts and breaking it down. For example I could have a class with a 30 minute lecture on ice cream making. Followed by a couple of days making ice cream using different techniques.  The Lesson would be titled Ice Cream Production (or something like that).

The point is Lessons only cover part of the unit. Lesson Plans are a tool to help me keep everything organized.  Having spent time in 4-H I understand the importance of lesson plans and the basics that go in lesson plans. When I wrote lessons for 4-H I had the following:

  1. Unit Title
  2. Lesson Number
  3. Lesson Title
  4. Main Concept
  5. Objectives
  6. Supplies Needed
  7. Intro to Lesson
  8. Main Lesson
  9. Recap of Lesson
  10. Test for understanding

After doing the readings I see that some of these things I was doing are very important to a lesson plan but now I also see the point to a lesson plan as well.  For example I never wrote transitions before and now I can see the importance of writing transitions out. Keeping a lesson focused and planed will help you succeed as a student teacher and as a teacher in the real world.

Its not just a script its a way to follow a main teaching principle which is students learn best when instructional time is focused and organized.

I hope that this week I can learn more about instruction and what really is expected in each part of an actual lesson.

To Be Continued . . .



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