A lesson plan is your guide or road map for what you intend your students to learn, how they will learn it, and how the learning will be measured or evaluated. There are dozens of different lesson planning frameworks and adaptations, but almost all contain the same five key components.
Expandable List
The lesson begins by drawing the learners into the learning space. This could be done with an attention-grabbing story, contextualizing an abstract concept using an everyday example, sharing a news clip relevant to the topic, or simply reminding the learners of where the previous lesson left off.
The learning outcomes state what you intend for your learners to know or be able to do by the end of the learning experience. They help to clarify expectations for the learners and provide guidance for you as you select content and design learning activities and assessments. This is where you start when developing a lesson plan!
Learning activities provide opportunities for students to practice engaging with the learning content, especially the content at the heart of the learning outcomes, and may take various forms like solving problem sets, hands on experiments, writing exercises, debates, and written or oral reflections.
Learning checks can be informal (formative) knowledge checks before, during or after a learning activity, or they can be formal (summative) assessments conducted after a learning activity to determine how well the learning objectives are achieved.
Formative knowledge checks can be as simple as asking “Can someone tell me what we covered in yesterday’s class?” You can also stop during a lesson and see if the content is clear. You could ask “What questions do you have about what we just covered?” and get verbal responses, or you could have learners answer anonymously via an online poll.
These can help you understand if you might need to explain something in a different way, or if you made assumptions about learner content knowledge. Informal knowledge checks give you information about what the students already know about a topic or what they have retained from the lesson.
Check-ins can also be a good opportunity to learn about the unique perspectives, knowledge, and experience with the lesson content that the learners have. If you and they are comfortable, they can share in class to increase learning.
Summative assessments, or formal check-ins, may be quizzes, assignments, reports, and so on that are evaluative in nature. They are intended to indicate whether the learner has achieved the lesson’s learning outcomes.
The lesson draws to a close by repeating the key take aways or learning outcomes.