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.