A Framework for Lesson Planning

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Teachers may verify that their activities fit with what they want students to know by using learning intents and success criteria. At an urban high school, I work with approximately 65 teachers as an instructional coach. My goal is to assist instructors in a variety of areas in incorporating reading into their classes without interfering with their classroom goals.

How Lesson Planning is an important aspect of achieving Classroom goals for Teachers?

I frequently assist our new and student teachers by reviewing lesson plans and recommending literacy skills that support their learning intentions and success criteria, which are defined by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey as “what you want students to know and be able to do by the end of one or more lessons.”

“Lessons wander and students grow confused and dissatisfied” without learning aims and success criteria, they write.

When I ask new instructors what their classes are about, they frequently explain the activities they’ve prepared. For example, I recently worked with a student-teacher who was excited to educate her freshman about the Bill of Rights. She began our discussion by saying that she would read real-life scenarios from various perspectives and invite students to go to the front of the classroom if they agreed with the scenario and to the back if they disagreed. She would then ask pupils to justify their choices.

What she intended from the project was for her pupils to understand what the Bill of Rights is, where to get it, why it’s essential, and why we still need it now. Because she was so eager to perfect her activity, she hadn’t yet developed a learning purpose and the related success criteria. But without them, she was left with nothing but an activity that had nothing to do with her day’s objectives.

Success Criteria And Learning Intentions

It takes time and effort to create a high-quality learning purpose. Teachers frequently utilize an activity as their learning aim, but a learning intention is much more than that. It focuses on the learning objective—what we want our pupils to learn and do.

Students can stay attentive and engaged if they have a learning aim.

Construct the learning objective first, then define the success criteria for students to utilize to measure their understanding—and then, create the exercise and some open-ended questions that will help them learn.

We took a step back when I was working with the teacher on her Bill of Rights lesson to define the learning objective and success criteria. “I can describe the Bill of Rights, its purpose, and its relevance to my life,” was the learning goal. Students’ ability to annotate and paraphrase the Bill of Rights, as well as explain its significance in general and in their personal lives, was a key criterion for success.

Annotating, paraphrasing, and analyzing are ACT College and Career Readiness Standards and Common Core State Standards abilities that may be smoothly integrated into the course with little effort.

All disciplines benefit from learning aims and success criteria. “I can grasp the structure of a coordinate grid and link the technique of charting points in quadrants to the structure of a coordinate grid,” for example, might be a learning goal in algebra. Students may be able to explain and write about the technique using the right terminology, plot and label points in each quadrant on a coordinate grid, and construct a rule concerning coordinates for each quadrant as success criteria for this goal.

If the learning objective in environmental science is “I can recognize the history, interactions, and trends of climate change,” the success criteria might be that students can find credible research about the history of climate change and share it with their peers, that they can demonstrate and explain the value of climate change interactions, and that they can show and explain the trends of climate change using a graph.

A Methodology For Focusing On Lesson Planning

Although it is important to engage students in their learning, a student-teacher with whom I worked became painfully aware of the importance of the skills she was aiming to help students acquire and why those abilities, rather than the activity, should drive instruction.

She put the learning objective and achievement criteria where students might see them in her next session. She then asked her pupils to summarize the success criterion to ensure that they fully comprehended what they were about to perform. Throughout the course, she referenced the learning goal and success criteria multiple times so that students could assess their level of knowledge and, if necessary, select which skills they had mastered and which still required assistance. She followed up with an exit ticket, in which she asked pupils what they had learned in the lesson, how they had learned it, and why it was necessary to learn it.

Ask yourself these questions when you design your lessons or think about Lesson Planning, no matter what subject you’re teaching:

  • What is it that you want your pupils to learn? What is the significance of this?
  • Is there any method for them to learn this information? How?

Only after you’ve given some thought to your responses should you start crafting your learning goal and success criteria. Keep the activities you’ve prepared, but don’t make them the focal point or the lesson’s purpose. Spend time creating a learning objective and success criteria that will help your students learn and develop skills that they can use in many aspects of their academic lives.

About the article

A lesson framework is a series of steps that you should follow throughout your class. Different frameworks are used for different sorts of teaching and Lesson planning strategies. Teachers may verify that their activities fit with what they want students to know by using learning intents and success criteria. In this article, we discussed a framework for lesson planning.

Carter Martin
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