InTASC+7+Planning+for+Instruction

All good teachers plan lessons and units, but the most effective instructors carefully consider standards, goals, and learners during the process. When teachers first start to plan the units that will comprise their school year, they should carefully consider the Common Core State Standards and any curriculum guide that they have been given. By doing so, teachers can create unit goals that align with national, state, and county expectations. Through backwards mapping, teachers can scaffold their lesson objectives so that students will be prepared to meet the unit goals and achieve the curriculum standards. Once teachers have their lesson objectives formulated, they can then create appropriate assessments. While it is important that objectives and assessments cover the same topic, it is equally vital that these two factors be at the same rigor. Otherwise, the assessment does not accurately portray if the students master the objective. An appropriate objective and assessment create the framework for a lesson, and from this point, teachers can develop activities to teach the desired skills and concepts. When planning the activities that comprise a lesson, teachers ought to consider their students, particularly their developmental abilities and interests. Teachers should plan activities that slowly remove the scaffolding for students, moving them from guided practice to independent world. For example, if I were teaching a lesson on symbolism, I would begin by modeling how I would interpret a picture of a common symbol like a dove. Then, I would split students into groups and have them interpret pictures of symbols. Finally, I would ask students to independently interpret one of the symbols from the novel. Moving from guided learning to independent learning, I can better prepare my students and give them the developmental support they need. Again, by using a variety of activity types, I can responsibly plan for the different types of learners in my classroom, giving them multiple ways to demonstrate their knowledge. When planning activities, it is also important to consider students’ interests. In this way, teachers can motivate their students, encouraging them to take ownership of the learning process. While it can be hard to center an entire unit on students’ interests, incorporating them can be as easy as making practice grammar sentences about things they enjoy. Finally, it is important to remember to always assess. Assessments should not only occur at the end of a unit or lesson; instead, teachers should constantly be using quick formative assessments such as thumbs up or down to determine if students are prepared to move onto the next activity. Otherwise, if teachers continue instructing when their students do not comprehend the previous material, only frustration occurs and less learning can take place.

For my Reading and Writing in the Secondary School course, I developed a Directed Reading Lesson that demonstrates my ability to plan effectively. This artifact can be found in Appendix I of this e-portfolio. I used the Common Core Standards for Reading to guide my lesson objectives. Specifically, my chosen standard dictated that students would “determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text. . . [and] analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone” (CCR 4). Using this as a guide, my lesson objectives were threefold. The first of these objectives ensured that students comprehended the reading selection. The other two objectives focused on defining diction and evaluating how it can impact the tone of the piece, a direct correlation to the Common Core Standard. Directly after writing these objectives, I created assessments for them. For the first objective, I used the graphic organizers they filled out while reading, ensuring that they comprehended the text. Students’ vocabulary journals were collected to determine if students correctly defined ‘diction’. Finally, for the third objective, students were asked to respond to the following questions: why did certain words cause you to feel particular emotions and do you think that you would feel the same emotion if the author changed the words, why or why not? After creating objectives and assessments that aligned with each other, I made activities that would scaffold students through the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy from the comprehension needed for objective one to the evaluation needed for lesson three. In order to appeal to a variety of students, I used an array of activities including discussion, independent writing, silent reading, and literature groups. In this way, students had multiple forms of instruction and multiple ways of demonstrating that they mastered the objectives. Furthermore, I actively tried to incorporate student interests into the lesson to motivate them. Specifically, when discussing mood, I used a Harry Potter example to show how mood can vary throughout a story. Overall, through my careful planning, I students should be successful in learning, meeting both lesson objectives and Common Core Standards.