10 Steps To Developing A Quality Lesson Plan

This guide is not meant to be the one and only way to develop a lesson plan; however, it is going to provide you with at least some good methods to start with. A general overview highlights the key points of creating a useful and working lesson plan.

Below is a list of the steps that are usually involved in developing a quality lesson plan as well as a description of what each component should be. They will be listed in 10 of the best points.

1. The first thing that you will have to consider, obviously, is what you want to teach. This should be developed based upon your state or local school standards. You also need to be aware of what grade level you are developing the lesson plan for. Record a time estimate for your lesson plan to help you to better budget your time.

Once you have chosen your topic, you can begin choosing how you want to teach the topic in general. If you didn't use the state standards to help in developing your topic, you will want to refer to them now to see what specific standards your lesson plan can fulfill.

Having your lesson plan properly set up with state standards, helps to prove its worthiness and necessity later. It also helps to assuring that your students are being taught what the state requires.

If you are able to blend your lesson plan with the local school standards, record links to those standards in your lesson plan in writing for reference later. If you are however, writing this lesson plan for a website, you will want to be sure that you include a title that properly reflects your topic.

2. Develop clear, specific objectives to be sure that your lesson plan will teach exactly what you want it to. You must note that these objectives should not be activities that will be used in the lesson plan. Rather, they should be the learning outcomes of those activities.

As an example, if you wanted to teach your class how to add 1 + 3, the objective may be that "the students will know how to add 1 + 3" or more specifically "the students will demonstrate how to add 1 + 3."

Your objectives should also be directly measurable. What this means is that you need to make sure that you will be able to tell whether these objectives were met or not. You can certainly have more than one objective for a lesson plan if you feel that this would be more useful.

In order for you to be able to make objectives more meaningful, you may want to include both wide and narrow objectives. The wide objectives would be more like ambitions and they would include the overall goal of the lesson plan, for example, in order for you to gain familiarity with adding two numbers together.

The specific objectives would be more like the one listed above, in such a manner, as "the students will demonstrate how to add the numbers 2 and 3 together."

3. You would probably find out exactly what materials you are going to use later, however, they should be shown early in your lesson plan. This way if someone else decided to start using your lesson plan, they would know in advance what materials would be required.

4. You may also want to write out an Anticipatory Set, which would be a great way to lead into the lesson plan and develop the students' interest in learning what you are getting ready to teach. A good example deals with a lesson on fractions. The teacher could start by asking the students how they would divide a pizza to make sure each of their 3 friends got an equal amount of pie, and tell them that they can do this if they know how to work with fractions.

5. At this point you need to write the systematic procedures that will be performed to reach each of the above mentioned objectives. These don't have to involve every little thing that the teacher will say and do, but they should list the relevant actions that the teacher needs in order to perform them. For the adding 1 + 3 lesson, you may have procedures such as:

A. The teacher will give each child 2 cubes.

B. The teacher will ask the kids to write down how many cubes they have.

C. The students should then write a + sign below the number 2.

D. The teacher will now pass out 3 more cubes to each student.

E. The students will be asked to write down how many cubes they were handed. They should write this number below the number 2 that they just wrote,

F. Students should now be told to draw a line under their 3.

G. Now the students need to count how many cubes they have and write this number just below the 3

H. Ask students how many cubes they had to start with, how many they were given to add to that, and how many they have after the teacher gave them the 3 cubes.

6. After these procedures have been completed, you may want to provide your students with time for independent practice. For the example of above, students could have some time to add different numbers of cubes together that a partner would provide them with.

7. Just before you start moving on to the assessment phase, you should be prepared to create some sort of closure for the lesson plan. A good idea for this is to return to your anticipatory set, for example, you can ask students how they would divide that pie now that they know how to work with fractions (check step 4).

8. Now you want to write your assessment/evaluation. Many lesson plans don't really need them, but most of them should have some sort of evaluation of whether or not the objectives were met. The key to doing this is to make sure that the assessment specifically measures whether the objectives were reached or not.

Because of this, there should be a direct correlation between the objectives and the assessments. This is of course, assuming that the objective were able to add two single digit numbers together, an example would be to have students approach the teacher and add two single digit numbers on paper using cubes as a guide.

9. You should make different directions for students with learning disabilities and extensions for others. Examples of this would be adding 1 cube to 1 cube for students with learning disabilities and adding 9 cubes to 13 cubes for the more advanced students and somewhere in between for everyone else.

This is most effective when you use specific adaptations for specific students and take into account their individual differences.

10. It's a good idea for you to include a "Connections" section, which really shows how the lesson plan could be integrated with other subjects. An example of this would be to have students paint 2 oranges, then 3 more oranges below them, etc. so that they can learn how to integrate Art into the lesson plan.

A better way to do this would involve creating 2 or 3 different types of textures on those oranges for example using newspaper with different textures. Putting a lot of work into this can really help to develop complete thematic units that would integrate related topics into many different subjects.

That's really all there is to creating a lesson plan! If you followed all the instructions above, you've successfully written a very thorough lesson plan that will be useful for any other teachers wanting to teach a subject like math or whatever.

One of the most helpful tips in writing your first lesson plans would be for you to look at lesson plans that are already completely developed to get a better idea of what needs to be in the lesson plan.
 

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