15 Developing lesson plans
Just as a syllabus provides a road map of the course for instructors and students, the lesson plan provides a guide for a single class. Creating a lesson plan will help you determine the critical knowledge, skills, and habits you want students to learn during the session and enable you to arrange them logically and according to importance.
We encourage you to use backward design for lesson planning to help you prioritize and edit the amount of material you can reasonably explore during the session. Lesson plans also ensure that you do mundane but critical tasks, such as “write goals on board,” “hand back Bill’s paper,” or “remind students about the quiz.”
It can be beneficial for learning to provide students with a short outline—three to five main points would be plenty—that you can write on the board to help students follow the arc of that day’s session. By clearly stating your learning objectives and linking them to the day’s activities, you can help students understand the purpose of this learning. These practices facilitate motivation and engagement.
After you complete each section of the day’s schedule, you can ask students to briefly summarize the material:
- What did you learn today?
- How does it relate to what you’ve learned in this course already?
- How do you think it will relate to what you will learn next?
Asking these types of questions helps students retrieve information, track their progress, and engage in retrieval practice. Pooja Agrawal describes it as “a powerful strategy that boosts learning by pulling information out of students’ heads (e.g., quizzes, clickers and flashcards), rather than cramming information into students heads (e.g., lectures). It’s a no-stakes learning opportunity that is flexible and quick, with a huge impact on long-term student achievement.” Retrieval practice helps improve metacognition and memory and decreases test anxiety (Agarwal et al., 2020, p. 9). To implement retrieval practice you might use index cards, clickers, exit tickets, or practice guides.
💡 When preparing a lesson plan, describe the lesson or activity in detail by answering the following questions:
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