Lesson Plan Design

Lesson Plan Design

PLANNING*

Planning involves several stages; the major two with which we are concerned at this point is UNIT PLANNING and LESSON PLANNING. Unit planning will be covered at a later point; at this stage, we will deal with individual lesson plan design.

At the Pre-Planning stage, before you actually plan your lesson, be sure you have sufficient information about the students' past and present knowledge and achievement levels.  Much of the research indicates that students who are not successful in learning a lesson fail to learn because they lack the pre-requisite skills.

Try to visualize your lesson from beginning to end:

* what materials will be needed

* how much time does the lesson take

* is the lesson appropriate for the students' level of comprehension

* are you addressing a variety of learning styles and teaching at more than the basic level of recall

* are you comfortable with the content - do you know the content well enough to teach it

At the Active Planning Stage, you are at the point where content - WHAT you will teach, becomes very important.

We will be using the HUNTER Model for the planning of our lessons; Madeline Hunter taught at the lab school at UCLA and was very involved in researching the methods that good teachers use in presenting their lessons.  Dr. Hunter developed a planning model which will become clear later; the model of the lesson plan that you will use is based on her work.

Your lesson plan is intended to serve as YOUR guide when you teach the lesson; consequently, vague statements in your plans similar to the following are not going to assist you, "I will review the steps to develop a database." If the purpose of the lesson plan is to help insure proper planning and appropriate delivery of the lesson, you must think about the steps that students need to follow and then include those steps in your plan.  The latter is especially important in light of our limited working memory; when we...