Planning the perfect lesson

There are 4 critical parts in planning:
1. The levels of performance of the students at the start (prior achievement).
2. The desired levels at the end of a series of lessons or at the end of the term, or at the end of the year (targeted learning).
3. The rate of progress from the start to the end of the series of lessons (progression).
4. Teacher collaboration and critique in planning.

a. Prior Achievement: The levels of students at the start
Any planning must begin with developing a deep understanding of what students already know and can do. In addition to learning what students know, you also need to learn how their students learn as well. Since you want all of your students to reach the same high level of thinking, this will require you to be particularly attentive during peer-to-peer discussions and will really require that you to listen as well as talk in order to learn about your students’ learning.
In addition to prior achievement, students also bring attributes and dispositions that affect their ability to learn. For example, these might include motivation to learn, strategies to learn, and confidence to learn. Teachers need to know which self-attributes students bring to the lesson so they can enhance these attributes and thereby increase the learning.

For example, one self-attribute is self-efficacy
– the confidence that we can make our learning happen. Those with high self-efficacy see challenging tasks as opportunities to learn something new and those with low self-efficacy may avoid difficult tasks and deny personal agency. Teachers need to know this information about students so they can enhance student confidence, help students to accept rather than reject feedback, and help them compare their work to academic goals not to other students’ work. Teachers can actively teach these dispositions. It particularly helps if teachers understand the attributes and dispositions their students bring to class.

b. Targeted Learning: The desired levels at the end
In planning, there are two parts to consider in thinking about the targeted learning – or where you want students to end up.
The first is being clear about what is to be learned – the learning intention or objective.
The second is having a way to know that the learning has been learned – the success criteria. These both must be visible for you and the students. You must be clear about the goals in order to keep the class on track toward the objective. Further, you need to know not when the students have completed the activities, but rather, when they have learned the concepts and understandings.


DEFINITION - Learning Intentions/Objectives
Effective planning involves deciding on appropriately challenging goals and then structuring learning situations so students can reach those goals. Having clear learning goals is vital if we want to develop a good assessment and provide accurate feedback to students about how to be successful. If we want students to achieve learning goals, we must start by communicating clear goals to students. We must help students develop a deep understanding of what they are supposed to learn, help them understand what success will look like, how tasks relate to the intention, and at the end of the lesson, how much closer they have come to achieving the success criteria.


DEFINITION - Success Criteria
Success criteria let students know when they have achieved the learning goal. Imagine if you were told to get in your car and you would be informed when you had successfully arrived at your destination. School feels like this for too many students. It’s not a surprise that they get turned off of learning. Furthermore, we can do more than sharing success criteria with students, we can involve them in making the success criteria. The idea is to get students engaged in and enjoying the challenge of learning that will keep them invested in and committed to school. Below are five components of learning that relate to the learning intentions and success criteria:
o challenge,
o commitment,
o confidence,
o high expectations, and
o conceptual understanding.


Challenge – Creating a challenge is one of the most essential roles of the teacher because this is the essence of how students learn. However, this is incredibly tricky. Challenge depends on what students already know, so you must know students’ prior levels of achievement and dispositions. Furthermore, challenge should not be too difficult. To take on a challenge, students need to know about 90 percent of what they are aiming to master in order to enjoy and make the most of the challenge. In reading it is even higher – students must know about 95 – 99 percent of the words on a page before they can enjoy it!

Commitment – Creating lessons in which students are committed to the learning often comes from creating lessons that are challenging. Two of the most powerful ingredients in planning are commitment and challenge. Peers are also a major source of commitment to school learning through pressure, modelling, and competition.

Confidence – Having the confidence that they can achieve the learning goals is a vital component of success. This confidence can come from four sources:
1. the student (from past success in learning),
2. the teacher (from quality teaching and feedback),
3. the tasks (from appropriate scaffolding),
4. or peers (from feedback).

High expectations – The influence that was highest in all of Visible Learning was self-reported grades. Students have reasonably accurate understandings of their levels of achievement. Across six meta-analyses (about 80,000 students), the effect was d = 1.44 or a correlation of about 0.80 between students’ estimates and their subsequent performance in school tasks.
What this suggests is that we should be providing students opportunities to predict their performance once they are given clear learning goals and success criteria.

Seeing learning through the eyes of students

I see learning through the eyes of my students

 

Mind Frames     I am an  evaluator/ activator   I am a change agent   I am a seeker of feedback   I use dialogue more than monologue   I enjoy challenge   I have high expectations for all   I welcome error   I am passionate about and promote the language of learning

A cooperative and Critical Planner   I use learning intentions and success criteria   I am for surface and deep outcomes   I consider prior achievement and attitudes   I set high expectation targets   I feed the gap in student learning

An Adaptive Learning Expert   I create trusting environments   I know the power of peers   I use multiple strategies   I know when and how to differentiate   I foster deliberate practice and concentration   I know I can develop confidence to succeed

A Receiver of Feedback   I know how to use the three feedback questions   I know how to use the three feedback levels   I give and receive feedback   I monitor and interpret my learning/teaching

 

I help students to become their own teachers

 

The Best Teachers

The best teachers…

o      Build relationships with students.

o      Know when a student is successful.

o      Have sufficient understanding of the student’s understanding.

o      Demonstrate a willingness to explain material and help students with their work.

o      Know enough about the content to provide meaningful and challenging experiences.

o      Passion reflects the thrills as well as the frustrations of learning.

o      It requires more than content knowledge, acts of skilled teaching or engaged students to make the difference—it requires a love of the discipline being taught.

o      Provide clear learning intentions

o      Provide challenging success criteria

o      Use a range of teaching strategies

o      Know when students are not progressing

o      Provide feedback

o      Visibly learn themselves.

 

 

In their everyday practices they ask:

Who did I teach well, who not so well?

What did I teach well, what not so well?

Where are the gaps/strengths or achieved/to be achieved?

 

 

Expert teachers don’t rely on what has been done before, but question, interrogate, challenge and seek improvement.

Some inspiration

Vygotsky - my hero!

Vygotsky's Social Development Theory points out the importance of communication to learning. Language used in social relationships is central to Vygotsky's ideas about intellectual development. Zone of Proximal Development, or "ZPD," is an important part of this theory. ZPD distinguishes between a person's ability to solve problems alone and a person's ability to solve problems with someone's help. This help is sometimes called scaffolding. Vygotsky viewed scaffolding as a social process. Through scaffolding, the learner externalizes higher cognitive functions with help from someone else. The learner then internalizes these functions. Learning environments influenced by Social Development Theory bring learners together in purposeful interactions with adults and knowledgeable peers. These environments shouldn't be about random communication. Rather, the adult or knowledgeable peer should have a clear idea about what the learner should achieve. Language should be used to help the learner accomplish the task.

Communication is also essential to Situated Learning. This theory is often attributed to Lave. Situated Learning Theory holds that learning can't be effectively accomplished in isolation. Rather, effective learning takes place through social interaction. This interaction must occur in environments where the learning is tied to the context of a situation. This type of learning is often structured as group problem solving, or "anchored instruction." Anchored instruction is a learning activity centered on an interesting problem, story, or situation. Activities influenced by Situated Learning feature relevant problems that students solve by working together in cooperative groups. The communication about the problem is instrumental to the students' learning. Some models of Situated Learning feature mentorships or apprenticeships. Knowledgeable others help less knowledgeable members of the group become full members of the group. These members in turn become mentors themselves.

Constructivist Theory reflects both Social Development Theory and Situated Learning Theory. Constructivist Theory is influenced by the work of John Dewey, Jerome Brunner, Piaget and others. This theory holds that children internalize learning through an ongoing process of connecting new information to existing ideas. Communication is a vital part of this process; children must test their understanding of new concepts by interacting with others. Constructivist learning situations may include Socratic dialogues, discussion groups, problem solving, group task performance and round table sharing sessions. Such activities should be designed to help students connect new information to what they already know.

Learning something for the first time can be very scary!

Finding the 'sweet spot' for learning

The zone of proximal development "is the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers." (Vygotsky, 1978) In other words, it is the range of abilities that a person can perform with assistance, but cannot yet perform independently.
Vygotsky believed that peer interaction was an essential part of the learning process. In order for children to learn new skills, he suggested pairing more competent students with less skilled ones. When a student is in this zone of proximal development, providing them with the appropriate assistance and tools, which he referred to as scaffolding, gives the student what they need to accomplish the new task or skill. Eventually, the scaffolding can be removed and the student will be able to complete the task independently. It is important to realize that the zone of proximal development is a moving target. As a student gains new skills and abilities, this zone moves progressively forward.
To apply the concept of the zone of proximal development, teachers instruct in small steps according to the tasks a child is already able to do independently. This strategy is referred to as scaffolding. The teacher should also support and assist the child until she can complete all of the steps independently.
Before teachers can begin guiding students through the steps necessary to learn a concept, they should get a grasp of how these tasks, referred to as scaffolds, are applicable to everyday life. The teacher then builds on these scaffolds to develop the child's zone of proximal development. To most effectively teach by using the zone of proximal development, teachers should stress the connections between the learner's prior knowledge of a task in everyday contexts with the new task or concept being learned. For example, let's say a teacher is instructing students about the water cycle. If a teacher has already taught a lesson on the concept of evaporation, the teacher should use this prior knowledge of evaporation when introducing information about condensation. The child will then be able to make connections between the different phases of the water cycle.
Connections between the task being learned and how it's applicable to the skills needed in everyday life might not become apparent immediately; in fact, they might take several lessons to develop. Through further reading and coursework, children continue to make associations between ideas and everyday experience. For example, a student might not immediately grasp how learning addition might apply to his or her everyday life. However, when asked to add the number of apples in one group to the number of oranges in another group, the student might then be able to make the connection between the theory of addition and counting everyday objects. In some cases, the teacher might not be the most effective person to convey a concept. Group work and collaborative projects with peers who have mastered a task or concept might prove effective as well.
Here's a look at the step-by-step process by which a teacher can apply the zone of proximal development:
o First, a teacher should identify what a student already knows. By identifying this prior knowledge, the teacher can build on that skill set when introducing new concepts.
o Next, the teacher can build on this knowledge through scaffolding; the scaffold will help students move from what they already know to what they should know by the end of class. When planning lessons, teachers should keep in mind the scaffolding process by integrating guided practice in their lesson plans.
o Last, teachers can help students connect their new learning to their prior knowledge. For example, if a math teacher has just taught children how to master dividing decimals, the teacher might then relate this concept back to multiplying decimals.
o All in all, through applying the concept of the zone of proximal development, the teacher identifies what a child already knows, teaches him or her something new to add to it, and then relates this back to his or her prior knowledge so that he or she can now understand the new concept with assistance.