How To Create Lesson Plans

Clarify what you want to teach. Develop your lesson plan based on your school standards. See what specific standards your lesson plan can address. Aligning the lesson plan with school standards helps to prove its relevance and importance and assures that your students are being taught what your school requires. Also, keep in mind what grade level you are developing the lesson plan for. Record a time estimate for your lesson plan to help in time budgeting. Once you have your topic, you can begin determining how you want to teach it.

You need to determine the knowledge and skills required of the students before they take the new lesson. The teaching aids/materials should also be shown early in your lesson plan. This way, if someone else will use your lesson plan, they would know in advance what basic know-how and materials are required. Be specific: make sure the teachers will have everything they need.

Write an anticipatory set to lead into the lesson plan and to develop the students' interest in learning what is about to be Develop clear and specific taught. objectives. Use a motivational or warmTo make sure your lesson up plan will teach exactly what activity to introduce the you want it to, develop lesson performance-based where student involvement is objectives. Objectives are the learning outcomes of the key. The opening activity activities to be used in the should tie lesson plan. up the lesson objective with Objectives should also be students’ interests and past directly measurable so that learning experiences. Use you can tell whether these creative strategies to get objectives students’ attention and are met or not. To make motivate them to keep track objectives more meaningful, of the lesson. you may want to include both broad and narrow objectives. Write the step-by-step procedures that will be Find out exactly what the performed to reach the prerequisites are and the objectives including the specific materials you are key discussion points. going to use. You should list the relevant actions the teacher and the

students need to perform and the key learning points (KLPs) that they need to grasp and apply. Around 20% of the KLPs are concepts and 80% are how-to’s. Develop your students’ higher-order thinking skills by using a set of relevant guide questions. It stimulates the interaction between and among the students and the teacher. Include extension ideas to show how the lesson plan could be integrated within the world of work. Putting a lot of work into this can develop complete thematic units that would integrate related topics into many different subjects and career connections. This integration can be extremely helpful in ensuring retention of the key learning points and fostering cooperation and team spirit among working groups.

Have some sort of closure for the lesson plan Just before moving on to the assessment phase, you should provide a sense of closure to the session. A good idea for this is to return to your anticipatory set or opening activity/statement. Write your assessment of students’ learning

You should have some sort of evaluation of whether or not the objectives were reached. The key in developing your assessment is to make sure that the assessment specifically measures whether the objectives were reached or not. Thus, there should be a direct correlation between the objectives and the assessments. Provide time for independent practice After the procedures have been completed, you may want to provide time for follow-up practice or homework to enable your students to immediately apply the knowledge and skills taught within or outside the classroom. Take into account the individual differences of students. Adaptations should also be made for students with learning disabilities and extensions for others. Give remediation to slow learners, reinforcement to average learners and enrichment for fast learners. Quality lesson plans produce quality students and teachers. (Adapted from: [email protected])