When teachers oversee a class they need to have a plan, rushing into a lesson with no prior planning can be fun in that students may be engaged in the spontaneity. Although, this tactic is not always successful just as anything else in life. Educators should follow a curriculum and lesson plans for their classroom. This chapter discusses how to make a lesson plan that follows the standards of the school, keeps students engaged, and properly evaluates the children.
Topics of interest:
- Lesson Development
- Assessing and Evaluating Students
- Approaches to Lesson Planning
- Student Learning Objectives
- Understanding by Design
1.)
2.) Individuals that finally become educators keep many of the habits of teachers that they've had over the years. New teachers may give long lectures, assign hours of homework, or any number of teaching strategies. What many new educators struggle with is how to properly evaluate the students in their classroom. The book provides several different strategies, none of which are the "perfect" way but can be useful in what they are trying to accomplish. Some of the ways to evaluate students may be obvious such as classes that prepare for standardized testing and others that are more customized to helping students creativity grow. An interesting topic brought up in the book states that technology is a very important and successful tool for assessment but, for elementary it may not be as effective. This is due to the fact that a good portion of what children learn in elementary school can not be given an exact percentage. So standardized testing was put into place to get accurate percentages but setting a bar that not all students can reach does not seem like the best course of action either.When broken down to its core schools and educators should be making curriculums that give students a hunger to learn more about a particular subject. Standardized tests have their purpose but they do not always accurately define the level of intellect that a student is at. James Popham states it best, "We must evaluate students so we can make more appropriate decisions about how to educate them." (2010,p.5)
3.) When organizing a lesson plan a teacher has to choose whether it will be following one of two approaches: the Student Learning Objectives approach or the Understanding by Design (UBD) approach.
Student Learning Objectives provides guidelines that students have to follow. The teacher tells who,what,when, how much, and lastly how it will be evaluated. It is the more commonly used of the two types of lesson planning because it has been used for a much longer time. UBD which is different in its approach, is very interesting and was first discussed by two educators, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (1998,2007, 2011). It has three distinct stages, the first has the teacher find the enduring understanding which is the "big idea of the lesson and then the essential questions which is just a way of organizing information for students. The second stage has the teacher making assessment strategies to show what the students will have learned once they complete the lesson. Finally, the last stage actually has the same steps as the Student Learning Objectives approach. Understanding by Design may take some more time to complete but though the help of technology it is much more
beneficial for the students.
References:
beneficial for the students.
References:
- Maloy, R. (2011). Designing Lessons and Developing Curriculum with Technology. In Transforming learning with new technologies (2nd ed., pp. 74 - 95). Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.
Great eMaze and like that you shared your reflections and thinking about the habits of teachers. It is true that we tend to do what is comfortable to us, which includes what we've learned from our own experiences. In the case of teaching, it is not unusual that even new teachers rely back on their old learning! ;) As a future teacher, it is best to learn new strategies and techniques to better transform learning opportunities for your students. Your quote from James Popham is well targeted (but not listed in resource section?)
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