Lesson Planning
Only once I have a clear sense of long-term and unit plans can I begin the day-to-day task of planning individual lessons. My lesson-planning template follows a fairly simple model that focuses on objectives aligned to curriculum goals and content standards. Assessment is a critical component of my lesson-planning process, as evidenced by its prominence in my template. I generally find or create exit tickets that align to my lesson objectives and then plan backwards from these formative assessment tools. Moreover, I regularly and systematically adjust my plans for subsequent lessons based on formative and summative assessment data so that my instruction is always optimized for meeting both short- and long-term goals for my scholars.
Example Lesson Plan. Note the presence of a fun "hook" on the first page and the reference to the small-group instructional plan on the second. Much of my instructional time is spent with students working in collaborative small groups at stations around the room, so whole-group instruction is usually limited to 15-20 minutes and is designed to set students up for success at the stations.
After a short “do now” activity, warm-up problem, or other "hook," I usually guide my students through brief notes about the day’s topic so that they have a blueprint for success on subsequent exercises. I plan these notes meticulously; indeed, I often go through multiple drafts of a notes document in order to condense them down into the essential information that my students and I will write in our math composition books.
Comparison between a draft version of class notes (left) and a final version (right). The final version was written in class under a document camera so that my students and I could work through the key concepts together. Notice that the final version is substantially more concise and straightforward than the draft. I try to make sure that I never ask students to write down non-essential information in their notebooks. By holding myself accountable to this standard, I build a spirit of shared enterprise in my classroom that allows me to hold students accountable for being engaged during note-taking.
My school prioritizes small-group instruction, so my students spend roughly two-thirds of their class time in differentiated groupings. Groupings are generally based on students' prior knowledge, areas of interest, and/or previous assessment scores. Typical small-group workstations include making progress through the i-Ready intervention on computers, practicing a new skill (like using a compass and a protractor to perform a rotation), delving into a challenge problem with guidance from me, and working collaboratively with other scholars to build fluency or complete a problem set.
Because my students spend so much time working in small groups, it is essential for me to plan this time carefully. My small-group plans actually look like unit plans in miniature, complete with sections in which I identify the relevant standards, predict student misconceptions, and plan out the questions that I will ask during a lesson. They also usually feature “must-do” and “can-do” problems for each group to complete during collaborative work time. I create and share these plans with the special educator and math interventionist who support my classes so that we can coordinate the sorts of support that all of our scholars are receiving during the school day. Different learners have different strengths and needs, and careful small-group planning ensures that these needs are met so that all scholars can build the necessary knowledge and skills during a lesson.
Small-group instructional plan from my featured lesson. I prepare a plan using this template for each lesson that I teach so that supporting educators always know what will be happening in my classroom on a given day and can align the support that students receive accordingly.
Different small groups within my classroom frequently work on different tasks during their station rotations. They almost always receive some sort of targeted, differentiated instruction from me, but they also generally have different sets of "can do" and "must do" problems at student-led stations. I cultivate these problems carefully so that they align with students' present levels of understanding and ability. Individual learners have individual needs, so it is only appropriate that the work they are assigned is responsive to those needs.
Samples of the wide range of student work completed during a recent seventh-grade class period. Each of these four tasks is aligned to Common Core State Standard 7.EE.B.4, but they target slightly different skills within the standard. For example, students struggling to set up algebraic expressions worked on the top left assignment while students who had mastered that skill applied it to their prior understanding of percentages in the top right assignment. Students who needed extra practice using variables to represent quantities and then substituting numbers for them got it through the assignment on the bottom left, and students who needed extra practice decoding word problems worked on the task on the bottom right. All of these assignments come from the Eureka math workbooks that my students use, but I selected and assigned them strategically to give each scholar additional practice based on his or her individual needs.
The eighth-grade geometry lesson featured on this page did not follow exactly the same model as some of my lessons because I designed the computer-based performance task within it to be such an in-depth exploration of computer programming and basic rigid motions. I spent a long time building my own familiarity with the Scratch coding program and creating instructions that my students could use to navigate it. Rather than progressing through three or four stations, my students spent about three-quarters of their rotation time working on a set of programming challenges. I pulled them in small groups for about 15 minutes at a time to practice key concepts with which they had struggled during earlier lessons (as evidenced by formative assessment scores), but I was also careful to move through the room periodically to help students with the programming. I was assisted in this endeavor by the middle school special educator, who was in the room providing coding guidance as well. In the end, lengthening the coding activity rather than having the usual three or four rotations paid off handsomely in the gains that my students were able to make during the lesson.
Sample student packets from the coding activity. Students worked through several exercises that taught them how to code using the Scratch program before continuing on to challenge problems that required them to create sequences of basic rigid motions. Building my own fluency with Scratch and designing a logical sequence of instructions and tasks was a significant component of my planning for this lesson.
Despite its slightly unusual format with respect to station-based rotations, the featured class ended with an exit ticket that asked students to apply what they had learned by giving a precise sequence of instructions that would map one figure onto another. This class period was their first introduction to such sequences of rigid motions, so their exit ticket scores were lower than usual. However, this provided an excellent benchmark for future lessons (and the subsequent module, which covered geometric similarity). I found that students were very motivated by the PARCC-style (1 to 5) scoring of their exit tickets; they were eager to demonstrate the next class period that they could move up a level based on their new knowledge.
Sample exit tickets for each possible score. Students were very motivated to improve their "PARCC score" on similar formative assessments taken during subsequent classes.
Analyzing lessons after they occur is a critical component of reflective pedagogical practice. Different lessons prompt different sorts of reflections. For example, my students really enjoyed the warm-up activity at the beginning of the lesson featured here. It was such a success that they asked to use it as a warm-up for multiple later lessons in the unit. Likewise, the computer programming activity was an engaging way to connect the somewhat dry geometry about which we had been learning to a real-world skill that many of them want to develop. Students with an interest in visual art, graphic design, and computer science were particularly enthusiastic about the activity, but the entire class had a lot of fun with it. And, in my experience, that sort of student enjoyment starts with strong lesson-planning that takes students interesting into account and then finds ways to connect those interests to curriculum goals and content standards.