Individualized Lesson Planning: A Differentiated Approach
In classrooms and homes across the United States, teachers are supplementing instruction with programs that allow students to practice their academic skills, offering teachers the ability to see how well or poorly the students perform on a given standard. These, often engaging programs, allow teachers to select topics for the class to practice at a whole group level. The eLearning format, which allows users to proceed at their own pace, gives the students the freedom to practice anywhere. These programs have been widely adopted, but what if we could take this a step further? [...]
Lesson Planning + Technology = Success
When developing lesson plans, there is a large array of information that needs to be considered; standard criteria, student learning modalities, differentiated delivery, areas of strength and weakness, and all of this before even arriving at the content of the lesson. Utilizing technology to aid in lesson planning is a first step to a more comprehensive solution to teacher effectiveness and student success. As demands increase, resources are developed to help curb those demands. The ability to create customized assessments from a repository of performance-aligned questions, pinpoint areas in need of improvement with standards-based assessments, and supplement education with individualized eLearning, can truly help teachers focus on optimizing student learning. [...]
Planning for Change
With all of the dynamic changes in education over the last few years, planning has never been more crucial. The common core shift, paired with enhanced focus on teacher effectiveness has left educators in a unique position that requires calculated balance. In order for teachers to maintain or even increase student performance while introducing new methods of teaching, for both student and teacher, they must find a way to reduce that learning curve while meeting and exceeding expectations. Luckily, as quickly as education initiatives transform, so does the technology designed to help teachers achieve their goals more efficiently and in a fraction of the time. [...]
Lesson Planning Tip: Plan Alternative Activities
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! ~Robert Burns You don’t have to be an English teacher to relate to Robert Burns’ “tim’rous beastie” in his poem To a Mouse. Though you’re not likely to have a farmer come and [...]
Establishing Objectives for Your Lesson Plan
There are more than 3.1 million teachers working in the public school systems throughout the United States, and each one of those teachers is required to write dozens of lesson plans on a daily basis. Though this has been a job requirement of teachers for years, but recently the process of creating an effective lesson [...]
Log Your Lesson Plan
Lesson planning is a crucial component of teaching. In fact, if you think about how many lesson plans are floating around in the world, the number is pretty staggering. Considering that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are almost a million high school teachers and 1.5 million kindergarten and elementary school teachers, lesson [...]
Effective Planning: Step 4
I have developed goals, mapped my approach, and administered an assessment, now what? [...]
Effective Planning: Step 3
I write assessments all the time, but how do I know they are valid measures of student understanding and mastery?
The diagram below depicts the flow and the core guiding questions effective teachers utilize when planning for instructional and learning success.
Each of these core guiding questions is answered by instructional decision making based on the needs of individual students, their data, desired outcomes, standards, and available tools and resources. [...]
Effective Planning: Step 2
There is an abundance of activities that could accompany my lesson plans, but how do I choose the right ones?
The diagram below depicts the flow and the core guiding questions effective teachers utilize when planning for instructional and learning success.
Each of these core guiding questions is answered by instructional decision making based on the needs of individual students, their data, desired outcomes, standards, and available tools and resources. [...]