Planning+the+lesson

Planning the Lesson This week my class has been focused on planning for lessons—what will students learn, how will they demonstrate what they’ve learned, what are the best ways to deliver content, and how do we lock it in? The first issue is developing goals for learning. There are standards, like the NETS-S (National Educational Technology Standards for Students) and the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). If you read the TEKS (as I suspect we all have), you’ll see that an awful lot of sentences begin with the phrase “The student will demonstrate—“ and that’s how you select your lesson goals. . . This merges immediately into the second, which is how you expect them to demonstrate whatever it is that they have allegedly learned. We should be planning just how they demonstrate learning right from the first, not “as an afterthought”, as the reading observes. And do we allow more than one way for them to demonstrate that learning has occurred? There are all kinds of strategies to help kids acquire and integrate learning—technology offers multiple channels for delivery (see my last post on UDL—Universal Design for Learning) and the thing that seems to stand out no matter what else you use is Feedback—students need immediate and ongoing feedback. They get it from computer games, from IM’s, from their MP3 players, from all over their preferred environment. If you can give them frequent “dollops” of feedback (not my word), then you can refine their skills, focus the direction of their progress, and reinforce their efforts. An interesting number came up in the reading; apparently students need to practice a new skill twenty-four times on average to reach 80% mastery. How do you get a kid to do something twenty-four times? That's the problem to solve over and over.