How can you, as a teacher, promote your students’ learning? Designing your lesson beforehand helps create meaningful learning situations and achieve better learning results. Teachers can always change their plans, but planning lessons in advance helps build more developed and beneficial lessons for your students.
The process of designing a lesson contains the following steps:
We will walk you through this process step by step. To read more, press any step..
Things to consider before planning:
All these preconditions have an impact on what you can actually do with your students during the lesson.
The most important thing to remember while
designing a lesson is:
What is the learning goal of this lesson? What do you want your
students to learn during this lesson?
Learning goals include:
· The subject content of the lesson
· The skills that students are supposed to acquire and practice (i.e.
teamwork skills, interaction, acquiring and analysing information, collaboration, problem solving etc.)
The learning goals also lay the basis for evaluation.
You should also decide the contents that you are
going to cover during the lesson as well as the instructions and assignments you are going to give to the
students. Try to give the students as understandable instructions and assignments as possible. Giving
appropriately challenging (not too easy, not too difficult) assignments to students is the means to
successful learning.
When designing tasks for students, it is important to remember that they
should promote understanding rather than memorising. Helping students understand the phenomena instead of
memorising facts is the key to deep learning and good learning results.
Adjust the amount of contents and the scope of assignments according to
your time limits.
The lesson structure is a description of the different phases of the
lesson. For instance, a lesson can consist of the following parts: beginning the lesson, checking the
homework, teaching new contents, activating students, practicing / applying new contents, assigning
homework, ending the lesson and so forth.
Many good lessons include the following parts:
1. Orientation
2. New knowledge of the topic (either given by the teacher, or the
students themselves can look for knowledge)
3. Students actively working by themselves (applying new information,
solving problems, doing group work etc.)
4. Reflection
Please note that not every good lesson is constructed this way! There is
no a single right structure for every lesson. Different lessons can have very different structures and
consist of different parts, but they can all still be excellent.
In LessonApp, we call these different phases of lessons “building
blocks”. Different lessons consist of different building blocks: the amount of building blocks as well as
their order can vary depending on the goal of the lesson.
You can see examples of different lesson structures here.
After deciding the general lesson structure, you must determine how to
carry out each phase of the lesson in practice. Choosing the teaching methods for each phase of the lesson
Is an essential part of lesson planning.
There is no right way for choosing the teaching methods. However, it is
recommended to use versatile methods. Different methods promote different skills, and different methods suit
different learners. To give learners of all kinds the possibility to experience the joy of learning, you
should have many different types of methods in your lessons.
In LessonApp, you will find dozens of different teaching methods for each
phase of the lesson.
After deciding what kinds of methods and building
blocks you think would promote the learning goal of the lesson, you should consider the timetable: how much
time can be dedicated to one section or building block of your lesson?
Don’t make the timetable too tight! Learning takes time: it’s better to
do things well than to do too many things too quickly. Also, pay attention to breaks: sometimes small breaks
during lessons promote learning.
You still need to think what resources, materials, teaching aides, devices etc. you need during your lesson, as well as make them available.
It's time to put your planned lesson into practice! Despite the good beforehand planning, you don't actually have to stick to the plan. If you see on the spot that something else would promote learning even better, then do it! You can always reflect the lesson’s success afterwards. Don't be upset if everything doesn't go according to your plan: sometimes the actual lesson can be better than the one you planned in advance!
The most successful teachers always reflect and
evaluate their lessons afterwards. The key questions of evaluation are 1) how well did the students reach
their learning goals, and 2) what could be done better next time.
You should concentrate on evaluating your own actions and plans: how
did they promote learning? It is vital for a good teacher to learn from their experiences! Good luck!