Module 8: Lesson planning

As a teacher, lesson planning is extremely important because it helps you understand where you are going, and it makes it
easy to show the administration that you are following the curriculum.

For the latter reason, lesson plans have become more and more formal in recent years, and it is now more important than
ever before to understand what goes into a lesson plan as well as how your lesson plans further your objectives.

To this end, this module will review all of the components of a strong lesson plan and how you can prepare your lessons
in a way that will be most effective and beneficial for your students.

8.1 Standards and objectives

Every time you create a lesson plan you need to create an objective and make sure that it is aligned with a
standard.  We will first take some time to discuss standards, since they should be the basis for all of your
lesson plans.

8.1.1 Standards

Standards are a set of skills that students need to have by the time they leave your classroom. These
standards are not set by the teacher but rather accessed by the teacher for use in their lesson plans.
Depending on where you are teaching your students, the skills that the standards require them to meet are
going to be different. For the sake of this module, we will focus on the general idea of standards and how they
should inform instruction. Let’s first look at the general skills that standards usually focus on.

Reading literature: Reading literature standards cover all of the skills that are required to effectively read a
piece of literature, including poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. These standards typically focus on literary
analysis skills, since reading comprehension skills are covered in the next standard.

Reading for information: Reading for information standards cover reading comprehension skills that a
student would need to read a piece of nonfiction, such as an article, a biography, or an academic journal. 

Writing: Writing standards cover all of the skills involved in writing, including narrative writing, expository
writing, persuasive writing, and informative writing. Many of the standards within this category will likely focus
on a student’s ability to make a claim, support his or her claim, and explain himself or herself thoroughly.

Speaking and listening: Speaking and listening standards focus on all of the skills that students will need to
present new ideas and attain information from spoken sources. These standards are especially important
during student presentations, class discussions, and Socratic seminars.    

Language: Language standards focus on the skills that students will need to develop their understanding of
language. As a TESOL teacher, these standards will be extremely important, but they are also relevant to
mainstream classes. These standards focus on diction, grammar, usage, and other aspects of understanding a
lesson.

8.1.2 Objectives

Once you have a clear understanding of the standards that you need to hit within a unit, now it is time to start
thinking about the learning objectives you are going to create. Whereas standards tell you what your students
need to achieve by the end of a unit or the end of the school year, lesson objectives detail where you want
your students to be at the end of a lesson.

It is your job as a teacher to make sure that the lesson objectives you have throughout a unit work towards
helping your students master the skills outlined in the standards. Here are some tips for writing effective lesson
objectives.

 The first question that you need to ask yourself is “What do I want my students to be able to do by the
end of the lesson?”  These objectives should be focused on skills rather than content and cover skills
that the students are going to develop through the unit.

 Once you have written lesson plans for your entire unit, you should review your learning objectives to
make sure they all build towards meeting the standards for the unit.

 Lesson plans need to be clear and measurable. At the end of a lesson, you should be able to look back
on the lesson and identify how many of your students met the objectives with accuracy.

8.1.2 Objectives
Once you have a clear understanding of the standards that you need to hit within a unit, now it is time to start
thinking about the learning objectives you are going to create. Whereas standards tell you what your students
need to achieve by the end of a unit or the end of the school year, lesson objectives detail where you want
your students to be at the end of a lesson.

It is your job as a teacher to make sure that the lesson objectives you have throughout a unit work towards
helping your students master the skills outlined in the standards. Here are some tips for writing effective lesson
objectives.

 The first question that you need to ask yourself is “What do I want my students to be able to do by the
end of the lesson?”  These objectives should be focused on skills rather than content and cover skills
that the students are going to develop through the unit.

 Once you have written lesson plans for your entire unit, you should review your learning objectives to
make sure they all build towards meeting the standards for the unit.

 Lesson plans need to be clear and measurable. At the end of a lesson, you should be able to look back
on the lesson and identify how many of your students met the objectives with accuracy.

Types of objectives

There are a few different types of objectives that you can frame your lesson plans around, so let’s review each
kind.

1. Cognitive objectives: Cognitive objectives refer to students enriching their knowledge, demonstrating

their knowledge, and practicing skills related to the knowledge they are enriching. In cognitive
objectives, students are expected to comprehend, apply, and synthesize their knowledge. 

2. Psychomotor objectives: Psychomotor objectives are less common in a mainstream classroom, as

they apply to dexterity and physical coordination. These types of objectives are more common in early
education and education for students who struggle with coordination and dexterity (disabled students or
students who have suffered an injury).

3. Attitudinal objectives: These objectives are rare as lesson objectives and more purposeful when used
as classroom objectives. Attitudinal objectives require students to behave in a certain way, which is
more likely a concern for the classroom all year rather than a concern for a specific lesson.

There are rules and guidelines that govern your creation of lesson objectives, and while they vary depending
on where you are teaching, we will cover some of the universal ideas. Remember that lesson objectives are
the backbone of your entire lesson.

 Learning objectives should be focused on observable activities: To identify whether or not your
students have achieved the objective you have set out for them, the objective needs to be observable
or something that you can measure through observation. This idea will help you keep your objectives
specific and attainable.

 Learning objectives should be focused on student activities: Many teachers make the mistake of
thinking that lesson objectives should focus on what they hope to accomplish during the lesson. This
puts the focus on teaching rather than learning and does not really ensure that the students understand
the material but instead ensures that the teacher is delivering the material. Teaching may occur, but
learning may not. Your lesson objectives should always be about what the students are going to
accomplish.
 Learning objectives should be focused on student outcomes: Another mistake that many teachers
make is to create a learning objective that simply describes what the students are going to do during
the lesson. This is not the purpose of an objective and only measures whether or not the students have
complied with the teacher’s directions. As a student, I can comply with everything my teacher asks
without reaching the true objective of improving a skill or extending knowledge. There should be an
outcome tied to each lesson objective.

Good lesson objectives:

 Students will be able to make a judgment about the strength of a speaker’s argument
 Students will be able to determine which text best portrays the culture of the 1930s

Bad lesson objectives:

 Students will be able to write an essay

  Students will be able to hear about World War II

8.2 Following a curriculum

Depending on where you end up teaching, you may have a say in the creation of the curriculum, but it is more
likely that you will not. Gone are the years where a curriculum was just an amorphous general idea, and here
to stay is a culture where most schools have an extremely detailed and prescribed curriculum for each of their
teachers to follow. To truly understand how to follow a curriculum, we first need to look closely at the
components involved.

8.2.1     Curricular components

 Standards: As we discussed earlier in this module, all planning should start with the standards that you
want your students to be able to achieve during the curriculum.

 Essential questions:  Whereas the standards are focused on what the students are going to be able
to achieve or work on during a unit, the essential question is the thematic question that the students
should be exploring throughout the unit. For example, you may decide that you want your students to
work on a standard that focuses on using two informational texts to draw conclusions. You may want to
design a unit that covers World War II and ends with a discussion of the bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. You can have an essential question that asks something such as “Should there be rules in
times of war?”  Then your students could explore two nonfiction texts to draw conclusions about
America’s decision to drop atomic bombs to inform their understanding of the essential question.

 Assessments: As we discussed before, the summative assessment for the unit should assess how
well the students fulfilled the standards and objectives of the unit. However, a detailed curriculum will
also include formative assessments that help your students build skills and scaffold on their way to the
summative assessment.

 Model lessons: A thorough curriculum will also provide you with exemplar lesson plans that you can
either use, modify, or look to for guidance on how you should be framing your lessons.

 Exemplar texts: Your curriculum will likely also detail the texts that you can use for each unit. These
will be texts that are vetted to make sure they fit the unit thematically and are within the appropriate
reading level for the students in your class.

 Secondary material: Your curriculum should also offer secondary sources that fit within your units. In
an American English unit plan, there are typically suggestions of art and music to go along with the
literature that needs to be covered. 

8.2.2 Teaching to the curriculum

Although many school systems have adopted standard curriculums that do not budge very much, research
shows that the best model for curriculum is a plan that is fluid. In this section, we will discuss the way
curriculum should be used and followed in the classroom, even if many schools are not necessarily listening to
the research.

The best way to use curriculum is in a cycle, where the plan is in the hand of the teacher (or group of teachers)
and within reach of their revisions. The ideal curriculum cycle hinges on three parts:

1. Planning: The curriculum plan is initially created based on what the teachers and administrators
generally accept as the needs of the students. The units are designed to address the skills that are
layered in the standards while working thematically through a focus. Everything from the “Curricular
components” section above is created, and the plan is distributed to, and reviewed by, the teaching
staff.

2. Implementation: Members of the teaching staff each design their own lesson plans to work within the
structure of each unit in the curriculum plan. They make sure that their lesson objectives clearly
address the skills outlined in the standards of the unit and that each activity prepares the students for
the summative assessment. Ideally, teachers of the same curriculum have periodic time to meet.

3. Reflection: After implementation of the curriculum, teachers meet with each other to discuss the
strengths and weaknesses of the plan. The teachers use data they have collected from the formative
and summative assessments and not just anecdotal evidence to inform their discussions. Teachers
share the different strategies they used during each unit to try to identify if the struggles their students
had were because of their own unique instruction or were in line with the other students who had
different struggles.
4. Revision: This is the most important part that many schools are not giving their teachers the freedom
to use. Teachers use what they found in their reflection to inform revisions to the curriculum. If the
students had difficulties or skills they did not attain, then the teachers rewrite unit plans to ensure these
problems are addressed. Without the revision process, the reflection process is not very effective. Next
 year the teachers go through the same process and make sure their planning and instruction are
constantly improving.

8.3 Varying instruction

If there is one thing that educational theorists agree on nowadays it is that the best way to reach the most
students is by varying and differentiating your instruction. We will begin by first discussing one of the basic
ideas behind the efficacy of varied instruction, which is the idea of multiple intelligences.

8.3.1     Gardner’s multiple intelligences

A Harvard professor named Howard Gardner penned the theory that there are multiple types of intelligence,
each valuable in its own way. If you accept this theory, which many do, this means that the students in your
class will all have specific strengths and weaknesses that you can access through varied instruction. Here are
Gardner’s multiple intelligences:

 Visual-spatial: People who are intelligent in this area are very good at understanding their environment
and reasoning spatially. They respond to any activities that allow them to problem-solve, organize, or
create with their hands.

 Bodily-kinesthetic: People who are intelligent in this area are very controlled with their body and are
prone to athletic and/or dexterous tasks. They respond to activities that require them to move, act, and
learn with their hands.

 Musical: People who are intelligent in this area are usually natural musicians who understand sound
and rhythm more than most. They respond to rhythmic activities and anything that involves music or
creating sound.

 Interpersonal: People who are intelligent in this area have an easy time connecting with people and
love to help others. They respond to anything that involves working in a group, participating in a
discussion, or any activities that require them to make connections with the people around them.

 Intrapersonal: People who are intelligent in this area are very in tune with themselves and are good at
setting goals and keeping themselves on track to accomplish them. They respond to much more
independent and self-driven learning because it allows them to take control of their own progress.

 Linguistic: People who are intelligent in this area are very good with words. They understand the
language and how to use it to their advantage. They respond to activities that require them to read, use
words creatively, and/or solve word puzzles.

 Logical-mathematical: People who are intelligent in this area are very good at reasoning and
calculating things. They respond to activities that require them to work logically, reason things out, and
solve puzzles.

8.3.2 How to differentiate

Here is where you find a point of contention in the educational community. Differentiation is a buzzword that
politicians and administrators love to throw around without actually helping teachers understand what it is.
Teachers often fear differentiation because they are afraid of the amount of work that idea brings with it.
Differentiation does not have to be scary, however. Here are some simple steps you can take to differentiate
your instruction and appeal to students of different abilities and learning types.

 Get to know your students: There is no way to vary instruction to better accommodate your students
if you do not first find out some information about them. There are a few different ways that you can
research your students’ learning styles. The first way is to ask the students. This strategy works better
with older students, but it often yields the most honest results. The second way is by giving your
students benchmark assessments early on in the year. This strategy can give you a lot of information,
but it can also be skewed by such things as apathy, distractions, and poor testing abilities. The third
way you can find out information about your students is through observing them during classroom
activities. You may have guessed that the best course of action is not one of these strategies alone but
rather a combination of all of them. As a teacher, you need to use everything at your disposal to better
understand what works best for your students.

 Be prepared with a toolkit of teaching strategies: Now that you have a good understanding of each
of your students and how they learn best, you need to be able to access your vast repertoire of
teaching strategies to facilitate your students’ needs. These teaching strategies should also be very
diverse, covering a wide array of teaching styles, including:
 o Direct instruction: People like to discount this old-school, traditional method of teaching, but it
works in the classroom as long as it is not the only strategy that you are using.

o Cooperative learning: Cooperative learning is a very trendy teaching style because it allows

students to take responsibility for their learning, and it is conducive to a student-centered learning
environment.

o Inquiry-based learning: According to many experts, this is one of the most rigorous forms of

teaching because it requires students to create their own questions or hypotheses, research,
experiment, or explore these questions or hypotheses, and then draw conclusions based on their
findings. The skills involved in this process are very complex, and if you are able to help your
students get used to successfully going through this process, you will see significant results.
o Information-processing strategies: These types of lessons ask students to practice and
deepen their core skills to become better writers, readers, and thinkers. Students are getting the
practice they need in the skills that are most important.

 Identify which strategies will work best for your students: So you know what your students need to
succeed, and you have a toolkit full of teaching strategies. Now it is time to put it together and match
teaching strategies with your students’ needs.

 Vary your instruction: Here is the part where many teachers and administrators slip up. People often
think that varied or differentiated instruction means that you always have your students doing group
work and working independently. Sometimes, direct, teacher-centered instruction is appropriate. The
point of varied and differentiated instruction is that you balance different types of instruction throughout
your curriculum. When it is appropriate, you use direct instruction, and when it is appropriate, you use
cooperative learning. The point is that you use all types of instruction to appeal to every different kind of
student and to make the most impact you can.

 Assess and adjust: As we discussed when we covered following a curriculum, you need to be able to
assess your students, reflect on your teaching, and then adjust your teaching strategies to better serve
your students. Teaching is a growing experience, and you need to constantly question and adjust your
strategies to become more effective.

8.4 Teaching strategies

Going through all the existing teaching strategies would take an entire course, so we are instead going to focus
on a few effective strategies that appeal to students with different learning styles.

1. Jigsaw: A jigsaw is a great cooperative learning strategy because it gives students the opportunity to
take control of their learning, but it also is a natural scaffold. In a jigsaw, you group your student to
interact with new knowledge and give them a short amount of time to focus on a specific topic. Each
group has a different topic, so at the end of this short period of time, you rearrange the groups, and
students become experts on their original topic. For example, you can split your class of twenty-five
students into five groups of five students each and have each group researching a different European
country. Then you can go to each group and give each member a number from 1 to 5 and have the
students rearrange based on those numbers. Now you have five groups, each containing one student
who has researched each European country. Now the students teach each other.

2. Think-pair-share: This is a very versatile strategy because it can be used for a 5-minute initiation or for
a class-long activity. Put simply, you give your students something to think about, then you ask them to
get into pairs, and then you ask them to share what they came up with. This can be done as formally or
informally as you would like, and it works with all different types of content.

3. Fishbowl: This is a modified Socratic seminar that asks students to participate in a discussion and
evaluate each other’s performance during the discussion. Essentially, students are structured into two
circles, one inside the other. Inside the circle, students are given a topic, question, or idea to discuss. In
the outer circle, students are paying attention to the inner circle and evaluating the strength of their
discussion. The most effective fishbowls ask the students in the outer circle to focus on specific parts of
the discussion. Teachers can either ask each outer student to focus on one inner student or ask each
outer student to focus on one skill, idea, or form of discussion. 

4. Testing a hypothesis: As we mentioned in the previous section, asking students to pose hypotheses, test
their hypotheses, and then draw conclusions is asking them to access very high levels of thinking. This
does not have to be a strategy that only works in science classes. In an English class, you might ask
students to read a selection from an author and then create a hypothesis that guesses what another piece
by that author is going to focus on. This will require the students to understand the piece at a high level
and be able to use that understanding to make predictions about a related text.
8.5 Meaningful assessments

We discussed assessments in the previous module, so we will not discuss them ad nauseam here. To ensure
that your assessments are authentic and meaningful, you need to make sure that they align with the standards
you are trying to meet and the objectives you have set out for your students to help them reach those
standards. To make an assessment truly meaningful, though, it needs to be reflective of something that
students might see in whatever career they end up in, and your assessments should also give students many
different ways to display their knowledge. Here is an example of the different types of assessments you can
create:

 Writing: Your writing assessments do not have to be traditional essays (although do not discount these
classics). You can find many different ways to be creative with your writing assignments. You can have
your students create such things as storybooks, poems, and journals. 

 Performance: Having your students create a presentation, a performance, or something that requires

them to stand in front of the class and create something informative and entertaining is a great way to
find out how much your students know. These types of activities are creative, entertaining, and really
allow students to have fun with their learning.

 Art: Students can also display their understanding of a concept by creating something artistic. Whether
you ask your students to create an illustration, draw or build a diagram, or create a visual project, you
should allow them to access their creativity to display their understanding of the material.

 Teaching: Asking your students to teach material to a class is a great way to truly judge whether or not
they know it. As you know or will soon find out, you cannot effectively teach something unless you
understand it inside and out.