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In this workshop you will develop an understanding of how successful teachers plan for instruction. A lot of this work can be accomplished before your students take their first steps into your classroom or as part of your long term planning, knowing that this will likely be revised as the school year progresses.
This lesson will provide guidance on how you can use the curriculum in preparation for developing your instruction. Specifically, we will look at:
The video case study at the end of this lesson will focus on the logistics of setting up your classroom.
Knowing what, when, and how to teach are primary concerns for beginning teachers. In order to prepare for the school year, it is important that new teachers understand not only what subjects they will teach, but what topics comprise those subjects. This information is usually communicated via a set of curricular standards that are the centerpiece for instruction. From this source document, teachers are expected to design and deliver lessons so that each student meets or exceeds the standards. It is expected that teachers will reference the standards in every lesson plan and design lessons that present the curriculum in a manner that is accessible to, and memorable for, all students. Therein lies the essence of successful teaching.
The daily lesson plan is the most important educational document that the teacher will use during the school year. Lesson plans serve as an instructional road map that guides the teacher through the curriculum. Although the format for the actual lesson plan may vary by teacher, all should contain the same key elements: what the students are supposed to learn (objectives), the best way to teach the objectives, and methods of determining the effectiveness of the lessons (assessments). Effective lesson plans clearly indicate the procedures that will be undertaken during the lesson, identify the necessary materials and resources, and outline the specific activities that will be completed during the classes.
To create a lesson plan the teacher will need to have thorough knowledge of the content and the curriculum. The teacher will then weave those elements into an educational tapestry that will result in students’ mastery of the curriculum standards.
Schools look to hire teachers that have a historical record of success with students or can show an aptitude toward that end. The ability to communicate information to students, however, is but one piece of the puzzle. Classes must not be viewed as individual experiences in a student’s educational career, but closely connected and carefully aligned series of educational progressions. In other words, each teacher must pick up where a student’s previous teacher left off and provide enough information to prepare them for their next teacher.
This tall order might leave a new teacher with daunting questions, such as:
How much mathematics is taught in third grade and how does that prepare them for the fourth grade? In what order are the concepts taught?
Does the teacher begin with the American Revolution and provide a chronological treatment of American history or does the teacher select from content themes such as the economy, civil rights, or political perspectives?
Where does instruction begin and end? How much has to be taught and learned this school year? What has to be taught before the end of the first marking period, or by midterm?
How much can be taught in a single time period?
Fortunately, teachers are not left to their own devices to determine the topics to teach each year and the order in which they should be taught. Since the advent of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and now with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), most school systems have a standardized curriculum for each subject area. In some cases this may be as simple as a directive to “follow the table of contents for the textbook,” or as elaborate as a day-by-day description of what the teacher is supposed to teach and how it is to be taught every day of the school year. Most schools fall in a range somewhere between the two extremes.
Before writing a single lesson plan, you should locate the approved curriculum for your grade, content, and school and review it carefully to get an understanding of what has to be accomplished. If the school system requires system-wide exams, get a copy of previous exams to determine the depth to which topics are covered and the style of questions that are asked. The curriculum and the subsequent assessment, together with a firm knowledge of your students, form the foundation for all instruction.
Do not try to re-invent the wheel. Look for existing curricula and assessments and use them to plan lessons.
In the broadest sense, curricula define what the students are supposed to learn as a result of a specific educational sequence of events. More practically, a curriculum is a three-ring binder that contains the source documents detailing what the students are supposed to learn, sample lessons for each objective, special activities such as laboratory enrichments, approved school-wide assessments, a list of equipment and material resources available to teachers, and samples of student work to be used as anchor papers. The depth and breadth of the curriculum guide varies from school to school, from subject to subject, and even from teacher to teacher. Someone who has taught a subject for years has, in a sense, developed his own addendum to the approved curriculum that contains activities, assessments, and strategies that proved successful.
When interviewing for a teaching position, remember to ask the interviewers to describe the nature of their curriculum for the subject you may be teaching. A school that provides a complete and teacher-friendly set of curricular materials is most likely a school that supports its teachers and is interested in seeing them succeed. This information could be useful when choosing a place of future employment.
Most content areas have a curriculum that has been developed by national blue ribbon committees over the last several years in response to Common Core and ESSA. These curricula represent the best focused efforts of a broad range of educators, including classroom teachers, school administrators, and university experts. In most cases, these national curricula indicate the approximate grade level that certain curricular concepts are intended to be taught and mastered before moving to the next level.
Unless you are prepared to fight with the results of the national curriculum committees, consider their findings as final.
By defining a linear continuum of what the students are to learn in a given course or subject before proceeding to the next level, these national committees have created a very useful tool. However, national curricula tend to be very generic. In several cases, the wording within these curricula leaves room for a variety of interpretations. For instance, does “Understand the underlying reasons for the American Revolution” mean that the students are supposed to understand the economic, political, or social reasons for the American Revolution? Or, on the other hand, are the crafters of the objective intending something else entirely? Even given this minor drawback, the national curricula serve as an overall standard and new teachers should use it to review the subjects that they are expected to teach.
States are required to develop and administer assessments in specified subject areas to measure student growth. These statewide assessments are based on the state curricula. It is important for every teacher to be well versed on the contents of these curricula.
By capitalizing on the existence of national curricula, most states have created individual curricula that align with national standards but emphasize state priorities. The state level curricula are typically developed with greater assistance by classroom teachers, school administrators, and curriculum specialists—with less emphasis on university experts—to maximize local teacher involvement and minimize teacher resistance. State level curricula tend to be more specific than national curricula, making it easier for the teacher to accurately identify what the students are supposed to learn. However, even with increased specificity, the state curricula still are not always specific enough to use as daily lesson objectives.
Most school systems have taken advantage of state level curricula to develop a local version. Again, the local curricula align with that state’s curricula, which align with the national curricula, so the national umbrella provides direction for the locals. Local curricula are often developed by teachers with the assistance of curriculum specialists. This type of development presents district by district, system by system, and school by school differences upon how the state educational system is organized. Therefore, what may be important in one school may be of lesser importance in a school across a district line. When moving from school to school, teachers need to be aware of curricular differences within the same subject. Likewise, students that join your class may have transferred from a school that offered a different interpretation of, or assigned a different priority to, certain curricular areas than your school.
In the absence of a local or school curriculum for your subject, rely on the state curriculum for structure. This provides authenticity and accountability and justifies the basis for your lesson planning.
Because statewide assessments are based on statewide curricula, local curriculum developers are very careful to copy the intent, if not the actual wording, of the state level document for use in the local schools. Individual schools may reorganize components of the state curriculum to allow for unique features such as resource availability, but for the most part, the local curricula follow the state document very closely. Linking to nationally established and recognized curricula provides a measure of content validity to local curricula.
Statewide assessments determine success for students and schools as part of ESSA. For certain subjects, Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) is a measure of how well a school is accomplishing the intent of ESSA. This is a very important rating for the school and community. Quite often the rating and related commentary are prominent features in the local news. Check to see if your subject is used as a measure for AYP. These subjects tend to have an elevated position of visibility and therefore generally have more and better resources available for teacher use.
In some cases, AYP subjects have locally developed assessments that measure student progress during the year with intervention and remediation activities built into the model for struggling students. Learn as much about this procedure as possible, including a review of the actual assessment and review materials that mirror the assessments. It is the teacher’s responsibility to align instruction to meet the goals established by the school or school system.
Make absolutely sure that you understand the curriculum, so spend time studying it before school begins. In fact, you should not write a single lesson plan until you understand how your curriculum is structured and assessed.
School-based administrators and content specialists are usually willing to discuss curriculum with new teachers and to assist them with instructional planning, both as a professional courtesy and to prevent larger problems later. Keep in mind that secondary principals rely heavily on subject specialists, department chairs, and content supervisors for specific content expertise; elementary principals may rely on other professionals as well, but usually to a lesser extent.
The curriculum guides for most schools contain valuable information for the teacher. Typically they indicate the appropriate content, instructional timeline, and often contain sample lessons or resources for the teacher to use as needed. A careful review of the entire curriculum guide should give the teacher the school’s perspective on what has to be taught, to whom, by what deadline, and at what proficiency level. If your school does not have curricula at this level of sophistication, you may have to clarify the goals of instruction with a school administrator before beginning any lesson planning.
Once you have reviewed existing curriculum guides and assessments for a given unit and have a clear understanding of the parameters of instruction, your focus turns to instruction. The entirety of the curriculum needs to be mastered by your class, and accomplishing that goal is easier if you follow this sequence:
The ability to translate a printed document, like the curriculum, into an effective lesson is one of the miracles that teachers perform on a daily basis. The skill of translation is developed over time but may initially prove to be very difficult. It requires the teacher to consider the curriculum, the students, student progress, classroom limitations, and time constraints all at the same time. Though the task seems daunting, it’s accomplished successfully many times a day in every classroom.
Sometimes schools provide teachers with a combination grade book/lesson plan book at the start of every year that features empty blocks in which teachers can list their daily lesson plans. This form of lesson plan notebook is a holdover from a textbook driven approach to teaching when teachers simply recorded the pages to be covered in the text. In most cases, the blocks are too small to write anything other than the basic elements of a lesson plan and are therefore not very valuable as a classroom resource for the teachers. You may wish to create your own binder to hold your lesson plans in curricular order.
The remainder of this lesson is dedicated to methods, tips, and advice that will help you sufficiently plan and prepare for teaching your students. The following workshop, Pedagogy and Instructional Design, will focus on specific teaching strategies that you can use to communicate your lessons to your class. Together, these workshops will put you on the path to becoming an educational alchemist who can change paper standards into classroom strategies and successful students.
Ideally, your curriculum contains objectives that are specific enough to be used in class. If not, then you must analyze the intent of the curriculum and create classroom-level specificity in the daily lesson objectives. For instance, if the curriculum guide contains general objectives like, “Students will be able to write a complete sentence,” the teacher may have to develop more specific objectives. The gap between students’ prior knowledge and the curricular intent may be too large for this objective to be effective. A sample lesson objective from this theme might be “Students will be able to write a sentence that contains a noun and a verb.” This subset of the curricular objective is more specific–if the students can write a sentence with a noun and accompanying verb, then they are ready for subsequent objectives that can lead them toward writing a complete sentence.
This technique of utilizing sequential developmental objectives provides a framework for student understanding, “ramping them up” to reach the standards rather than requiring them to take large leaps of mastery that may be called for in the curriculum. Pre-testing the students and monitoring student progress with frequent quizzing and formative testing are necessary to determine whether the class needs additional intermediate developmental steps in order to reach the final desired curricular outcome of a standard.
Lesson objectives are vitally important, because they ensure that your lessons are aligned with the curriculum and accompanying assessments each and every day. They are equally beneficial for your students—they understand what they are supposed to learn as a result of the instruction. Well written objectives are of great value to teachers.
The primary purpose of an objective is to link the curriculum to daily lesson plans. To determine whether your objectives for a unit of study are written so that they can be effectively used in your class, ask yourself this question: Can the objectives be used as exam questions? If so, the daily lesson objective is well crafted; if not, reword the objective so that it is more focused on instructional intent. Specifically, you should make sure the objective is not too general. The objective “Students will be able to add basic integers” is not nearly as useful as the objective “Students will be able to add two-digit integers.” The latter translates more directly into exam questions.
Often, new teachers will confuse objectives with agenda items. A good objective explains what the students will be able to accomplish by the end of the lesson; an agenda item explains what the class will do during the class period.
For example, “Students will discuss the process of mitosis” is an agenda item—during the class period, this topic will be discussed. Notice that this agenda item does not translate well into an exam item: “Can you discuss mitosis?”
A better objective would be “Students will be able to identify the stages of mitosis and the characteristics of each stage.” The new objective presents itself as a viable essay question for an exam at the end of the chapter and clearly communicates what the students should know before they leave the room.
One major concern for new teachers is the proper pacing of their lessons—how much of the curriculum can be covered in a particular time period? Can you teach the entire alphabet in a single week? How many sentences can the class diagram in one period? Is there a limit to the number of arithmetic problems that you should plan to cover?
The answer is simple: The amount of curriculum that can be covered in one time period is equal to the amount of curriculum that the students can learn during that same time period on that day. This depends on a number of variables including:
Your ongoing task is to identify a discrete unit of content that can be reasonably covered in the time provided while maintaining maximum student retention of the material. It doesn’t do any good to teach elements of the curriculum if the students either don’t understand or are unable to remember what is taught. Keep in mind that the number of concepts students can process may vary from day to day. If the collective student body is concerned about an important after school event, just completed a lengthy exam in the previous class, or they know the next day is the start of a long holiday vacation, they may be less apt to concentrate and less willing to be productive.
Frequent quizzing and in-class assignments are helpful for monitoring student progress.
An easy way to begin translating curriculum into a lesson plan is to look for units within the existing curriculum. Typically they appear as natural breaks in the sequence of the curriculum. A single curricular unit represents a single major theme, skill set, or concept and is easily subdivided into smaller instructional units. Multiple units compose an entire school year of study. These units can then be broken down into monthly, weekly, and daily lesson plans depending on the size of the unit. The idea is to take large units and systematically subdivide them until the teacher is working with lesson-sized pieces without violating curriculum intent or the seamless flow of the curriculum.
So, what constitutes a unit of study? Each unit is bookended by assessments, beginning when the preceding unit is assessed and ending when a summary quiz or test is given for the unit itself.
Don’t forget the larger issue of pacing—you should stay as close as possible to the pace set by other teachers of the same content. This requires constant communication between you and established teachers, who (in many cases) have taught the same class multiple times and have a better sense of how long each unit should last. Asking colleagues for help in this matter is not a sign of weakness, nor a sign of poor preparation. Rather, it demonstrates that you have the best interest of your students at heart and you want them to learn the same volume of material that they would if their teacher weren’t new to the school or profession.
Deciding what to teach and how to assess that instruction are two sides of the same coin, and you must answer both questions at the same time. Assessments are periodic measuring devices that indicate student growth and verify successful lessons. They are an integral part of instruction. The feedback from student quizzes, tests, and other assessments arms the teacher with important information. From this data, the teacher can make informed, educational decisions, such as:
Teaching calculus is very different than teaching baseball. Math is based on a set of skills, each of which build upon previously-taught skills. A good teacher would break calculus instruction into small, discrete, easy-to-understand units with their own set of lesson objectives. Each of these units may require an assessment to determine if the students understand the material well enough to continue. Small assessments may then be followed by a cumulative assessment to determine if the students remembered, and are able to apply, previous instruction as well as more recent lessons.
Teachers of skill-oriented subjects like art (or baseball) usually prefer to clump instruction into performance units, units that contain similar skills or require similar proficiencies. Different types of instruction require different assessment schedules.
Scheduling assessment can be tricky. As you plan a series of daily lesson plans to reflect instruction for a curricular unit, you need to integrate regular and periodic assessment windows to measure how well the students are retaining the instruction. Problems arise when teachers rigidly lock in a particular day for the assessment before the actual instruction begins.
For instance, you could announce that the quiz on a curricular concept will be next Wednesday and then as you begin to teach the daily lesson plans, you may notice that the students are struggling with a concept and need an extra day to really understand it. Similarly, a rigidly-planned assessment schedule can be ruined by a fire drill, an impromptu school assembly, a hazardous weather day, and even a mild outbreak of the flu. Giving the exam before the students have been taught or had the opportunity to master the material is a mistake.
Flexibility is a virtue.
Experienced teachers remain flexible in their planning. It is acceptable to announce that the quiz is likely to be next Wednesday with the understanding that it will not occur before next Wednesday, but may be later depending upon the progress of the class. Students seldom complain if the test date is postponed. On the other hand, students may mutiny if a test day is moved forward without sufficient notice. Students need time to prepare for exams, so be sensitive to their schedules as well as your own need to move swiftly through the curriculum.
We have looked at the relationships between the curriculia, objectives, and assessments. Developing a thorough understanding of curricular intent, including the scope, sequence, and timeline of the curriculum, is an essential part of each teacher’s planning and preparation. Once the objectives for the lesson have been established, the teacher knows what the students are expected to learn and how their understanding of that material will be assessed.
Then the hard part begins and the teacher must plan the agenda for that lesson. In planning the agenda, the teacher must mesh curricular intent, available resources, room configuration, assessment of progress, and the nature of the students. Different classes require different approaches to instruction. It is not likely that a first grade student will gain much from a lengthy lecture on the quadratic equation—both the content and the methodology are inappropriate. Therefore, it is best to learn as much about the students as possible before school begins.
Networking with colleagues about the students provides useful information and also helps to establish a new teacher as a member of the school community.
Administrators are typically the best source of data because they have access to better information and, having been teachers themselves, understand what you’ll need to know. They can also provide some insight into what will and will not work in a lesson. For instance, the administrator might discourage small group project work until after the teacher has explained the class rules and gained control of student conduct. Other good sources of information are guidance counselors (who often look at students with a different perspective) and experienced teachers (who have stood in your shoes and understand the task ahead).
Lesson plans should allow for maximum exposure of the important aspects of the lesson, as much repetition as possible, and the opportunity for the students to practice. It is the teacher’s difficult task to determine the best methodology to present the content in a manner that the students will understand and remember. In the next workshop, Pedagogy and Instructional Design, we will look into how students learn and discuss specific strategies for communicating curricular concepts to your students.
The following is a list of resources that relate to the topic of successful teachers.