Planning For Instruction ... What’s the Plan?

What’s the plan? This is a common question presented during many situations. Whether we are planning a meeting or planning a family gathering, we want to know the details of how we are going succeed at meeting our purpose.

As a future educator, I ponder this question as I begin to develop learning objectives and interest approaches for unit and lesson plans.  Methods of Teaching Agriculture outlines three necessary components of learning objectives to planning:

These three requirements explain how learning objectives that outline performance, conditions and criteria helps to provide clarity for my students and I.  Methods of Teaching Agriculture shares how if teachers do not have a clear sight of where to go or how to get there, then the resulting instruction will become confusing and cause students to be lost. Overall, clarity tells students where we want them to end up, how we will measure if they made it there and the conditions that are expected during the performance.  Therefore, it is more desirable for me to have written instruction that includes action words, such as ‘identify’ and ‘measure’, verses ‘do’ or ‘can’. In addition, presenting the conditions and criteria with correct wording will allow for clarity. Being as clear as possible with instruction is essential to helping your students and me as a teacher answer "What's the plan?"

Once the objectives (plans) are created, it is time to create student interest by answering the question, “what is in it for me?” Although I will understand and know the importance of a topic as an educator, I have to share the relevance. However, it is important to create a desire in the students to want to learn about the topic. Methods of Teaching Agriculture suggested that to create an interest approach it is important to understand a true felt need for students to connect to from personal situations, so they can see the value. After reading this, I felt it is important to reflect back to last week’s reading because this importance is directly relates to in Caine’s Principles of Brain/Mind Learning Principle Two: The search for meaning is innate. Overall, the information I can learn about each individual student can easily be used for student engagement throughout upcoming lessons in my interest approach.

Knowing what is the plan, and what is in it for me helps create an outline of relevance to the importance of planning instructions, while developing students’ interest through interest approaches.

References

Mager, R.F. (1997) Preparing Instructional Objectives. (3rd ed.) The Center for Effective Performance. 
Reardon, M. & Derner, S. (2004) Strategies for Great Teaching. Chicago, Illinois: Zephyr Press