Lindsey Hancock Warden
Lesson Planning
At the end of the planning process, after long-term planning has been completed and individual unit plans written, I begin to write my lesson plans. I prefer to write lesson plans two weeks in advance and to prepare ten lessons and attachments at a time, or enough for two weeks of learning. In planning lessons for my students, I must draw deeply on my knowledge of my content area, curriculum, cross-disciplinary skills, and pedagogy.
Table of Contents
Two Week Planning Cycle
As I plan lessons in two week cycles, I follow a structured process that begins with writing a planning sheet. Next, I write aligned assessments that I will use to check my students' understanding. I follow the assessments with my written lesson plans, which describe the daily activities for the two week cycle. Finally, I locate or create appropriate activities to support those described in my lesson plans.
This artifact depicts the planning sheet template I use to pre-plan my daily lessons. By drawing on my knowledge of curriculum expectations, including my familiarity with my state's scaffolding documents and achievement assessment, I access maximum learner outcomes through my pre-planning.
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In essence, the planning sheets provides me with a quick view of all the skills my students will need to master during the two week cycle, as well as how the state will assess those skills in the spring. This leads to effective planning on my part and mastery of learning goals for my students because the daily lessons are aligned to state curriculum expectations.
A common misconception regarding lesson planning is that writing or acquiring assessments comes at the very end of the process. I find that it is a better pedagogical process to write assessments early in the process because assessments inform the rest of my planning.
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By drawing on my knowledge of curriculum to determine how the state will assess my students in the skills I am teaching, I ensure that my planning and curriculum are aligned. The formative and summative assessments adjacent test my students' mastery of content, but every question stem is also aligned to the state achievement test. This method of planning for instruction helps me support every learner in meeting their goals because my instruction is aligned, and I can target problem areas for students early.
Adjacent, please view my lesson plans for a two week cycle over RL 7.7 and RL 7.9. Each set of plans sets my students up for success by including essential questions or skills, the connected objectives, both teacher and student activities, activities for remediation, methods of assessment, and required materials. By planning each step of the lesson explicitly, I draw on broad knowledge of pedagogy and content. Through the daily remediation and enrichment strategies, and the differentiated instruction planned on Wednesdays and Thursdays, I additionally ensure that I am supporting all learners in meeting rigorous learning goals. You can view samples of my differentiated group work in the next artifact.
My application of knowledge of cross-disciplinary skills is evident on pages 10 and 11 (above), where students must compare and contrast a primary source document to a fictional account. Encouraging the application of both social studies and English Language Arts skills helps my students receive critical practice as they work to meet rigorous learning goals.
This artifact contains all of the attachments, worksheets, and differentiated group work necessary to the teaching of the lesson plans and the mastery on the assessments attached above. Designing or locating supportive materials for my lessons is always the last step, as I prefer to imagine effective activities and methods of formative assessment, and then create supporting materials, rather than choosing worksheets from a textbook and then writing lesson plans. Creating my own activities for use in my classroom allows me to tailor lessons directly to the unique learners in my classroom, thus ensuring that I effectively apply knowledge of my learners and our community.
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This artifact includes a copy of the bellwork sheet that students use weekly to answer bellwork questions in my classroom. There are also samples of sheets that are used in tandem with the lesson plans on direct instruction days. For example, pages 2-4 guide students in viewing a filmed version of a short story we read previously in class. These activities support direct instruction, when we might pause the film to find examples of vocabulary, or discuss character traits with a partner. Planning for direct instruction most closely supports my knowledge of content and curriculum.
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On pages 5-7, there are examples of differentiated activities. Group 1 receives a remediation activity, Group 2 receives a grade level activity, and Group 3 receives an enrichment activity. I work directly with Group 1 to move them to understanding, while the students in Groups 2 and 3 work with each other, respectively. When students master a formative assessment at their level (as determined by benchmark assessments), they can attempt the next level's assignment. In this way, I explicitly plan to move every student to mastery and thereby support each of them in meeting rigorous learning goals.
Planning for Reteaching
Frequently, I teach a lesson over a particular skill or objective and realize after assessment that my students need remediation. In these situations, I replace a lesson over a new skill with a remediation lesson in order to guarantee that my students will be able to meet their goals. My knowledge of pedagogy and curriculum assists with the planning of remediation lessons since I must come up with innovative ways to reteach skills and objectives for greater mastery.
This artifact demonstrates a reteaching lesson plan. I utilize the same planning sheet that I use for a typical lesson cycle to identify central essential questions, based on the misconceptions I have noticed among students.
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Next, I plan instruction using my lesson plan template. This lesson, which remediates RL 7.1, focuses specifically on annotation. After noticing that my students performed poorly on RL 7.1, which is citing textual evidence, on a benchmark assessment late in the year, I looked through their tests and realized that very few had bothered to mark up their passages. Therefore, I reviewed annotation skills in this remediation lesson. Planning for remediation is a pedagogically sound practice and supports learners in meeting their goals, even if they fail the first time. This lesson moves from the teacher modeling the skill, to students attempting it as a group, to students attempting the skill independently. By planning three different modes of practice into my remediation lesson, I effectively support my learners in their RL 7.1 growth.