InTASC Standard 7: Planning for Instruction
“The teacher plans instruction that supports every student in meeting rigorous learning goals by drawing upon knowledge of content areas, curriculum, cross-disciplinary skills, and pedagogy, as well as knowledge of learners and the community context.”
Student success depends, in part, on the teacher’s sufficient preparation for each lesson’s instruction. Teachers must draw upon both their pedagogical and content knowledge when constructing their lessons in order to support their students’ learning goals. For example, educators can use backwards design to identify their unit’s learning goals, design appropriate assessments, and then design instructional lesson plans that will support their desired outcomes. An understanding of evidence-based instructional strategies and familiarity with effective assessment tools are essential to success in planning for instruction. Even teachers with the most detailed and well-thought out plans should be flexible and willing to make adjustments to their plans, on the fly, when they notice that their students need additional scaffolding and support.
The three artifacts I have included to demonstrate my understanding of the importance of planning for instruction are: a detailed lesson plan from my student teaching semester, a backwards design template used to develop a two-week research unit, and assessment data from my student teaching semester that shows the wide range of students’ prior knowledge and learning gains.
Lesson Plan Day One
Lesson Planning: I’ve had the opportunity to develop multiple units and many lesson plans throughout my Master of Arts in Teaching program. For my middle school student teaching experience, I created a two-week unit on how to conduct research and avoid plagiarism. As you can see from this detailed lesson plan, I take care to thoroughly plan out each lesson. By doing so, I make sure to differentiate instruction, offer activities that appeal to multiple intelligences, keep the end goals in mind, and move up to the highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Having detailed lesson plans allows me to look for weaknesses in my educational approach and keeps a record for the following school year.
Understanding by Design template
Backwards Design: One of the most important lessons I’ve learned while attending Hollins University is the benefits of backwards design when planning a unit. First, educators establish goals for their unit. These goals should be transferrable and not lesson-specific, because we want to teach our students skills that they can use to solve future problems, both inside and outside of the classroom. After goals are set, teachers design appropriate assessments that will help measure students’ mastery and understanding. Once goals and assessments are established, lesson planning for the unit can take place. By keeping the overarching, transferrable skills and goals in mind, it is easier to design a lesson that teaches 21st Century Skills and reaches the upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Click here to review an example of a backwards design template I filled out for a project-based learning unit that teaches research skills to high school students.
Pre and Post Assessment Growth Chart
Assessment Data: Each student brings a different level of prior knowledge to the table for whichever topic is being taught. Assessing where each student stands prior to starting a new unit is a valuable tool in the planning stage. As you can see from the snippet of an Excel spreadsheet pictured above, students’ prior knowledge about research, plagiarism, bias, and citations was extremely varied. By assessing my students with a short quiz that did not count towards their grade, I was able to see which areas were strengths (almost every student knew the definition of plagiarism), and which areas were weaknesses (evaluating and locating reliable sources). This data allowed me to properly tailor my instruction for maximum benefit and know which topics needed additional scaffolding and time. By assessing my students with the same mini-quiz after the unit concluded, I am able to determine which topics I should continue to develop and teach. However, this mini-quiz is not the sole measure of students’ learning outcomes. By designing a problem-based learning project as their summative assessment, students can demonstrate how they can utilize the information they have been taught and apply it in a real-world situation.