Introduction
Why should I make a lesson plan?
When should I make a lesson plan?
The parts of a lesson plan
Objectives
Content Summary
Warm up/Engagement
Developmental Sequence
Formative assessment
Meeting individual needs
Practice/reinforcement
Evaluation
Wrapping it up
Example lesson plan

Introduction

For many beginner teaching assistants, their first course assignment is their first time in the classroom and even for those who have had some previous experience; most have not had formal education courses. When I began as a first year graduate student at Georgetown many of the other students were curious about my lesson plans, how I created them, why I needed them, and what was in them. While many college professors (and a fair number of public school teachers) do not use lesson plans, I find them a valuable way for beginning educators to plan for a lecture, manage time in the classroom, and have a fallback if they get flustered.

With that said, this guide is to serve as a tool to help new or experienced TAs generate effective lesson plans. The version I give here is my own creation, and is a combination of many models and theories including the cognitive domains, the 5-E model of engagement, Bloom’s Taxonomy, assessment tools, and the general public school lesson plan model.

One final note, as with most things education related, some of these ideas will work for you and some will not. My hope is that you can use this guide as a scaffold, discovering what works in your particular field and class and changing what doesn’t to meet your needs. However, I do hope you will find that once you create a solid set of lesson plans for a course, your work will be much easier in the future as you will have a pre-made document for each lecture as well as a set of notes on what went well or poorly in previous years.

Why should I make a lesson plan?

There are endless reasons why educators should make use of lesson plans, but I will focus on three that I feel are the most important. First is to think about and write what it is you actually want the students to get out of the class. Too often we simply start outlining a talk based off a text book chapter, or start putting pictures into PowerPoint without asking our selves “what is actually important” or “what do I want the students to remember a month, six months, or years from now?” Your goals need not be purely knowledge-based either, as you may realize you want students to appreciate a certain aspect of your discipline, or develop a skill or set of skills they can use in other aspects of their life. What’s important is that you put forth some serious time thinking about these goals, and use your class time as a vehicle to accomplish them.

Second, lesson plans can make the time you have with the class much more efficient. As stated above, it helps you concentrate on particular goals. However, well-created lesson plans also force you to sit down and think about how much time you want to spend on a particular part of an activity, discussion, or lecture. You will also find they make many activities more structured; for example, instead of a general discussion on a part of a novel, your questions should be pre-made and prepared to keep students focused toward achieving your aims.

Last, lesson plans are wonderful if you get rattled. Most instructors can recall two or three instances when a student has asked a question for which they’re not prepared, when an interruption occurred, or when they simply blanked on what they wanted to do next. With a lesson plan close at hand, you simply need to take a few seconds for a quick scan and you’ll find where you were in class, and where you were going.

When should I make a lesson plan?

Let’s be honest, most people don’t plan weeks in advance for a class they are going to teach. In fact, for a full time professor who has three classes a week, he or she may plan on a class by class basis allowing only a day or two to get his or her thoughts together. Realistically, you should try to work on a lesson plan approximately 4-7 days before the class you are teaching, but in the worst case scenario 2 days can be sufficient.

A lot of the work can be done away from the computer or pen and paper. Think of what kinds of activities you would like to do in the class, what are the main points, and how to evaluate the students’ understanding. Have you seen or given this lecture before? What went well or what did the students find confusing? What are your objectives? Thinking about these questions in advance will help reduce the time it takes writing out the formal document, without diminishing the quality.

One final note: unit plans (which consist of all lesson plans that make up a particular “section” of the course) require much more time to create then a single lesson plan. Because you are attempting to tie ideas from multiple class periods together on a larger scale, a unit plan can take weeks to create and must therefore be planned weeks (or months) in advance.

The parts of a lesson plan

So what makes up a lesson plan? Well, there are many parts, some related to the preparation of the course, some concerning the delivery of the content, and others related to assessment. The following is a list of the typical building blocks of a lesson plan, along with a short description of each.
Objectives – Goals you would like your students to achieve by the end of class. They fall into three categories: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor; each category having multiple levels.

1. Content summary - A short paragraph summarizing what you plan to do during the class period
2. Materials needed – A list of any lab materials, overheads, handouts, etc. that you plan to use in class
3. Warm up/engagement – A short activity at the beginning of class to focus students and get them interested
4. Developmental sequence – A detailed, step-by-step description of everything you plan to do in class
5. Formative assessment – A short evaluation to get an idea of how well your students met the objectives
6. Meeting individual needs – A place to consider how students with strong or weak backgrounds, different learning styles, and different personalities can be accommodated
7. Practice/reinforcement – An assignment or activity geared at getting students to re-think the class material, put it into their own framework, and internalize it
8. Evaluation – How you will ultimately decide how much the students learn; this usually comes in the form of an exam.

Objectives

Objectives are the most important part of a lesson plan, and are thus the most complex and take the most thought to create. An objective is a goal for the course, something you hope the students will understand, be it knowledge, appreciation, or skill. These are not trivial; you should have on average between two and four for a class and you need to ruminate on the truly important aspects of the course. Do you really want students to know vocabulary? Is it more important for them to know how certain concepts are linked rather then the details of each?

Objectives fall into three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. Here I will focus only on the cognitive domain, as the affective and psychomotor are fairly complex and beyond the scope of this guide.

The cognitive domain: This domain deals with the recall or recognition of knowledge and the development of intellectual abilities and skills. This is the domain in which most of the work in curriculum development has taken place.

Levels of the cognitive domain:

1. Knowledge: Remembering, recalling, memorizing, recognizing
2. Comprehension; Interpreting, translating from one medium to another, describing in one’s own words
3. Application: Problem-solving, applying information to produce some result
4. Analysis: Breaking something down to show how it is put together, (and being able to put it back together!), finding an underlying structure, identifying motives
5. Synthesis: Creating a unique, original product that maybe concrete or abstract.
6. Evaluation: Making value decisions about issues, resolving controversies or differences of opinion

(from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

If the above list looks familiar, it is also known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. As you ascend (or descend in our case) the list, the levels require greater amounts of cognitive mastery and understanding, although each level can be considered an important objective in your class.

Let’s take an example. If I were creating two objectives for this guide in the cognitive domain, I may come up with the following:

1. Readers will be able to recall the parts of a lesson plan.
2. Readers will be able create their own lesson plan, adding sections they feel are valuable, and removing those which are not.

The first objective falls strictly in the knowledge level. It doesn’t require the reader to understand or use the knowledge in any way, but simply be able to recite. The second objective uses both synthesis and evaluation. It asks the reader to use the knowledge given to them and create an original product, as well as asking them to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the system I propose, and tailor it to their own needs. When creating objectives, you should strive to make them as high level as possible, as it requires students to integrate and apply what you are teaching, rather then simply recite.

Content Summary

The content summary is a short one paragraph description of what you plan to do during the class period. After deciding their objectives, most people begin here, writing a short outline of the types of activities they plan to do, how they will deliver the material, etc.

You need not write specific detailed instructions. For example, you would be better off describing a group activity as “Students will break into groups and discuss questions on a particular topic” rather then detailing how you will group students, how long it will take, what the questions are, and other more precise details. You can put in these and more details in the “Developmental Sequence” section of the lesson plan.

Content summaries are also a good place to spot check where you are in any given lecture. Look at where you are in a class and what is coming next; it will make the transitions smoother for both the instructor and student.

Warm up/Engagement

Warm ups and engagement activities are often neglected and missing from classes, though they should be a valuable component of any course. The benefit of these activities is twofold. First, when students arrive to class, especially over weekends or breaks, they often need to make a shift in attention from their social lives and their friends sitting around them to “thinking mode.” When a teacher begins diving straight into course material it often takes students a few minutes to begin processing the information coming at them. Second, engaging the students early on in class is a powerful way to promote active learning. When instructors lecture for half of a period and then expect students to discuss or process information, it requires time to get them from the “passive observer” to “active participant” state of mind. By setting the tone of the lesson with some kind of activity which forces students to think and/or discuss, it promotes that behavior throughout the rest of the class.

So what kind of a warm up or engagement activity is acceptable? It’s really up to the creativity of the instructor. They can range from a short five minute discussions of confusing topics from the last class to debates about a hot topic in the media. The goal here is not necessarily the content (although discussing the latest relationships in sitcoms probably won’t get your students in the frame of mind you want), but simply to get them focused, thinking, and generating ideas. Any given warm up activity should take between 5 and 10 minutes optimally.

Developmental Sequence

Although objectives generally require the most thought to produce, the developmental sequence requires the most time. The developmental sequence is a step-by-step list of what you plan to do in the class, along with the allotted time for each activity. Where the content summary was a short paragraph, developmental sequences are often extensive lists detailing every question you wish to ask, everything you plan to hand out, and each topic you plan to cover.

The system is valuable in that it forces you to think critically about how much time every aspect of your class will take. You will have an itemized list of what you plan to cover, an order for those events, and a time schedule for each. While in class, this allows you to stay on track. If you see one particular topic is taking longer then expected, you can move on to the next topic or cut something short rather than see the students pack up their notes to leave and realize you’ve only finished half of the material. Here is an example of a developmental sequence for a short set of activities:

Developmental Sequence:

1. The students will generate a list of what they feel are defining characteristics of animals. (5 minutes)
2. The five current characteristics of animals will be displayed and applied to a number of organisms via PowerPoint. (5 minutes)
3. The teacher will give an overview of the lecture, and explain how the phylogenetic tree will be used to enhance student understanding. (2 minutes)
4. Using PowerPoint, the instructor will introduce the two models of animal phylogeny and the current view of the origin of animals (5 minutes)
   

Formative assessment

At the end of any given lesson, you should allow time for a short formative assessment activity. Formative assessment is non-graded and allows you to evaluate how well you completed your objectives. It is also a great time to catch any topics which confused students, so they may be added into the following lesson or warm up activity.
Formative assessments come in a wide array of shapes and sizes, and you should use whatever works the best for your group of students. You may want to ask them to write for one minute on what they thought was the most important information they learned in class and then turn it in to you, give them a non-graded quiz, or ask them to demonstrate a skill they were taught.

What’s important is that these assessment activities give the instructor instant feedback. If everything in the class went well, that’s great! If not, you can make an effort to clear up problems in the next class or two while the material is fresh in the students minds, rather then finding out after an exam that may be a month in the future.

Meeting individual needs

This is a place to think about the wide variety of students in your class, their strengths and weaknesses, and their learning styles. Are there parts of the class that allow strong students to voice opinions and be engaged? Are there places where struggling students can receive help or extra practice? Do you allow auditory and visual learners chances to have their learning styles met in the class?

The goal of this portion of the lesson plan isn’t necessarily to rework everything you’ve just done trying to please every possible student; it’s simply not possible. But it is worth it to sit down and think for a few minutes if there are places you could accommodate a group of students that would otherwise be left out.

Practice/reinforcement

Students obtain large amount of information during class periods and sometimes get to practice or use that knowledge, but it is also important for students to re-visit the class material on their own time. First, it allows students to integrate the knowledge into their own framework and internalize it. Second, the more often they see the material the more comfortable they will be with it. Having one lecture and then not studying the notes until the night before the following exam will certainly lead to more problems then referring to their notes in successive days after the class while they complete reinforcement activities.
While these activities are difficult to plan for every lecture (and students already do a tremendous amount of work) they do not need to be written questions and answers. A reinforcement activity could be an online discussion in Blackboard, something they do in the laboratory portion of class, or something you plan for the warm-up on the following day.

Evaluation

This is how you ultimately plan to measure how well your students learned your objectives. Most often evaluation comes in the form of a quiz or an exam, but it does not have to. Independent research projects, reports, skill demonstrations, and group work, to name a few methods, all fall under this topic. When creating an evaluation, try to match it with the way the class material was given. If you are teaching a lab skill, a multiple choice exam may not be the best way to measure student learning.
What evaluation might work best for the objectives in your class can be a rich area for discussion. CNDLS staff members are always available to help you think through what you would like to accomplish with your students, and the CNDLS library in Car Barn 314 contains many journal articles/books available that are good resources as well.

Wrapping it up

So is all this work worth the effort? Absolutely. Time management and staying focused is one of the hardest parts of teaching and any activity that forces you to plan in advance will aid you on those fronts. The cyclical nature of this model also aids in student learning. Material is presented in class, reinforced outside of class, and revisited during a following warm up allowing students to familiarize themselves with content three times before seeing it on exam. Finally, a lesson plan is a great scaffold to fall back upon if you get rattled or flustered. Simply head back to the content summary or developmental sequence, and you can easily find your place.

Putting all the pieces together, you should be able to generate a very complete lesson plan. There are a few additional things I would like to mention. First, keep any lesson plan you do, as it may be useful in the future if you teach a similar class again. Second, after each class make notes on what went well or poorly in the lecture. Did the warm up take too long? Did the group activity turn into chaos? Having a record will allow you to edit and refine basic and specific elements of any class, especially if you will be teaching the same course again. Additionally, take out and add any necessary components to the model I have provided. I am continually evolving the way in which I prepare for classes, and you should do the same. Talk it over with fellow TAs, professors, lab assistants, or even former students. Last, it may be difficult to use this model depending on your specific teaching assignment. If you are in charge of a small group of students in lab, or are only teaching one or two class lectures throughout the semester, it may not be possible to give homework, write exam questions, or revisit material. This may be due to the nature of the course (such as a 200 student lecture vs. a small advanced course) or by constraints issued by the supervising professor. In these cases, simply use what works and scrap the rest. At the very least you will still plan ahead of time and have a roadmap of the class period.

Example lesson plan

The example below is a lesson plan I used when teaching one lecture in a 200 student freshman biology class. I would have rather not relied so heavily on PowerPoint but it was the standard set by the professor. The plan is by no means perfect, and in fact looking back on it there’s vast room for improvement, but I wanted to give you an example of something I created when I was starting out. It will show you how the pieces go together, and the particular format I use when writing.

Douglas J Blackiston Level: Freshman March 7

Subject: Introductory Biology II Topic: Introduction to Animal Evolution

Objectives:

1. Given a handout and using a PowerPoint presentation, students will understand the four major branching points of animal evolution.
2. Students will appreciate the incredible diversity of the animal kingdom.
3. Students will be able to complete daily dozen homework problems with 2 or fewer mistakes.

Content summary: Class will begin with an introduction of the instructor and his background. There will then be a short discussion of the characteristics of an animal and the correct list will be written on the board. Following the discussion, volunteers will be asked what they believe are major branching points in animal evolution, and why these advances are important. A PowerPoint presentation will then be given; outlining the 4 major branching points as well as showing a wide variety of animal diversity and students will fill in missing information as the talk progresses. Effectiveness will be examined through a formative assessment at the end of the class. Finally, daily dozen problems will be assigned as homework to apply the concepts learned in class to novel situations.

Materials Needed: PowerPoint presentation of animal evolution. Class worksheet on diversity.

Warm up: Students will be prompted to list what they feel are the characteristics of an animal. After a list of 10 is generated, the class will then debate (with supervision) if there are exceptions to any listed characteristics. The instructor will then list the 5 current characteristics of animals:

1. Multicellular heterotrophic eukaryotes
2. Lack cell walls
3. Nervous and muscle tissue
4. Blastula stage
5. Hox genes
   Finally, two or three very different animals will be displayed and the instructor will show how the 5 characteristics apply.

Developmental Sequence:

1. The students will generate a list of what they feel are defining characteristics of animals. (5 minutes)
2. The five current characteristics of animals will be displayed and applied to a number of organisms via PowerPoint. (5 minutes)
3. The teacher will give an overview of the lecture, and explain how the phylogenetic tree will be used to enhance student understanding. (2 minutes)
4. Using PowerPoint, the instructor will introduce the two models of animal phylogeny and the current view of the origin of animals (5 minutes)
5. Using PowerPoint, the instructor will detail the four major branches of animal evolution, and provide examples of animals at each branch (20 minutes).
6. The instructor will give a brief overview of the Cambrian diversification. (5 minutes)
7. Students will be shown three organisms, and be asked to show where on the phylogenetic tree they belong by raising their hands in response to questions (5-10 minutes).

Formative Assessment: At the end of class, three organisms will be displayed. The instructor will ask the class if the organism belongs to the left or right of each branch of the three, and the students will vote by raising their hand for one answer or the other.

Meeting individual needs:

• Low – An outline of the important material will be provided and will act as a study guide, along with a vocabulary list. A review session will be offered by Dr. Armbruster for additional reinforcement.
• High – Students will have an opportunity to express their own ideas and creativity during the warm-up, and may ask questions throughout the class.

Practice/Reinforcement: 12 “daily dozen” questions will be assigned for optional homework that reviews and expands upon the material learned in class.

Evaluation: Comprehension will be judged by the scores on the midterm exam.

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This resource was developed by Douglas J. Blackiston, Biology Ph.D. student and a CNDLS Graduate Associate from Fall '04-Spring '05.