Teaching by Principles Chapter 10: How to Plan a Lesson

Teaching by Principles Chapter 10: How to Plan a Lesson

Format of a Lesson Plan

1.Goal(s)

-Generalized but unifying theme

2. Objectives

- State explicitly what you want students to gain from the lesson.

 ˙Be sure that you indeed know what it is you want to accomplish.

 ˙Preserve the unity of your lesson.

 ˙Predetermine whether or not you are trying to accomplish too much

 ˙Evaluate students’ success at the end of, or after, the lesson.

-Terminal objectives: final learning outcomes that you will need to measure and evaluate

-Enabling objectives: interim steps that build upon each other and lead to a terminal objective

3. Materials and Equipment

-Good planning includes knowing what you need to take with you or to arrange to have in your classroom.

4. Procedures

- An opening statement or activity as a warm-up

-A set of activities and techniques in which you have considered appropriate proportions of time for (1) whole-class work (2) small-group and pair group (3) teacher talk (4) student talk

-Closure

5. Evaluation

-Evaluation is an assessment, formal or informal, that you make after students have sufficient opportunities for learning.

-Assessing the success of your students

-Making adjustments in you lesson plan for the next day.

6. Extra-Class Work

-Application or extensions of classroom activity that will help students do some learning beyond the class hour.

Guidelines for Lesson Planning

1. How to begin planning

-Look over the textbook chapter

-Determine the topic and purpose of the lesson and write it down as the overall goal.

-Draft out terminal objectives for the lesson

-Decide whether or not change, delete, and add some exercises, based on the objectives.

-Plan step-by-step procedures for all techniques; state the purpose(s) of each technique and/or activity as enabling objectives. 

-Partial Scripting

 ˙Introduction to activities

 ˙Directions for a task

 ˙Statements of rules or generalizations

 ˙Anticipated interchanges that could easily bog down or go astray

 ˙Oral testing techniques

 ˙Conclusions to activities and to the class hour

2. Variety, Sequencing, Pacing, and Timing

- Variety: a number of different activities for the lively and interesting lesson

- Sequencing: progressive building toward accomplishing the ultimate goals

-Pacing

 ˙Neither too long nor too short

 ˙flowing

 ˙Transition

-Timing

 ˙If your planned lesson ends early, have some backup activity ready to insert.

 ˙If your lesson isn’t completed as planned, be ready to gracefully end a class on time.

3. Gauging Difficulty

-Make your directions crystal clear by writing them out in advance.

-Give an example yourself or solicit an example of a subtask within a technique

- The linguistic difficulty should be optimal, when exposed to i+1 input.

4. Individual Differences

 -Easy and difficult

 -Responses to easier items from the below; harder item from the above

 -All students’

 -Grouping: heterogeneous/ homogeneous

 -Extra attention to the below and the above

5. Student Talk and Teacher Talk

- Give students a chance to talk, to produce language, and even to initiate their own topics and ideas.

6. Adapting to an Established Curriculum

-Learner factors

 ˙Who are the students?

 ˙What are their specific language needs?

-Institutional factors

 ˙practical constraints

 ˙supporting materials

7. Classroom Lesson “Notes”

-No more than one page of a lesson outline and notes

-Manageable minimum

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1. objectives: terminal, enabling(cognitive)

2. warm-up: relate new to old (schema)

3.T-S, S-S interactions

4. individual-pair-group-whole class activities

5. variety

6. sequencing: easy to difficult; comprehension to production; form to function; presentationà practice à performance

7. pacing

8. transition (summary + introduction)

9. four skills

10. closure: summary and homework assignment (application, apply to the real life)