Learning About Lesson Plans

This page gives a good overview of the kinds of thinking that have to go into a good lesson plan. The three basic questions, which can be thought of as "What do you want the students to learn? What will you do to help them learn it? How will you tell if they've actually learned it?" are absolutely essential. The rest of this webpage will help you see how to flesh out the answers to those questions in a way that will facilitate your ability to effectively plan lessons.

This is another site that outlines the kind of thinking that goes into the creation of a comprehensive lesson plan. The primary difference here is that it includes some more specific references/examples to illustrate, for instance, how to write the step-by-step components of the plan.

This site is interesting in that it allows you to simply answer a series of questions, after which it puts your work together in an easily-printable format. The questions it asks are, generally, good ones that resonate with the ideas from the lesson plan sites earlier in this trail. What strikes me as odd, however, is the ordering of the questions; the placement of the activities/steps seems much later in the process than I would normally expect. You might consider using the questions here as a way of creating a template for your own work, even if you don't use this site directly.

Alice Christie is an educational technology professor at Arizona State University West, and she's put together a list of links to various online lesson plan banks. Not all of the links take you to terrific examples of lesson plans, so look carefully at each one you visit. Don't assume that just because it's published on the web, it's a good model; use your critical faculties in evaluating these.

While this lesson plan isn't a great model (it's a little skimpy on the details of precisely what happens during class work on the project), it does a good job of showing how a basic writing assignment can be adapted in ways that will support students whose first language is not English. You might consider this sort of adaptation/accommodation as part of your assignment sequence.

This site isn't ideally suited to your particular task, as it describes the kind of sequencing that facilitates writing assignments at the university level. However, if you ignore the specifics of the examples provided, and think carefully about the underlying concepts, you'll see that most of this can apply as easily to grade-school kids as it does to college work.

This is another site for college writing instructors, so once again it will require some mental flexibility on your part to adapt the ideas here to your chosen grade level and content area. One particularly useful aspect of this site is its suggestions for reconsidering the written work by strategically changing particular aspects of it. What happens if the audience is changed? What if a different genre is chosen for the writing? These are things that you might think about yourself as you consider your assignment sequence.