Fundamentals of Lesson Planning

The Blooms Wheel is a very useful tool in lesson planning. The verbs and matching assessment tasks show ways to evoke the different levels of thinking needed for a student to achieve deeper and higher learning. The different levels are hierarchical so the first level must be achieved before the second level can take place.

Prior Knowledge
Knowing the prior knowledge of a student is fundamental to the outcome of any learning experience. There are different types of prior knowledge, three examples are; what someone actually knows at the level of knowing, societal knowledge from a political and class viewpoint and cultural knowledge from the different communities that live in our society. In one class there can be students from many different backgrounds giving different viewpoints from the environments from which they come. Tacit knowledge is important in that students can know an enormous amount about a subject without knowing they know it. The first level of Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain (Bloom et al., 1956) is Knowledge – recall, recognise information or data. Key verbs that give the learner knowledge of what they have learned are - defines, describes, identifies, knows, labels, lists, matches, names, outlines, recalls, recognizes, reproduces, selects, states. A simple assessment task would be to ask students to make a list of what they know about a subject so that teachers can build meaning and understanding to a solid foundation of prior knowledge.

Outcomes
The Board of Studies Syllabus documents give the required Outcomes of all Key Learning Areas. Learning Outcomes need to be very precise in order for a lesson to go to plan regardless of what happens inside of the lesson. Two attributes in John Hattie’s paper Building Teacher Quality (Oct. 2003) are:-

A3. Expert teachers can anticipate, plan, and improvise as required by the situation.
B6. Expert teachers have a multidimensionally complex perception of classroom situations.

If the flow of the class takes a lesson in a different direction than the lesson plan but will give the same if not better outcome, then the teacher needs to be capable of allowing the change without loosing focus of the outcome.

The table below is a simple example of achieving Outcomes using Blooms Taxonomy. Blooms Taxonomy is hierarchical so the previous level needs to be mastered before going onto the next level. To ensure deeper, higher learning all levels must be used.

In a maths lesson students are asked to recall a list of mathematical symbols.

Category	Verb	Example
Knowledge	Recall, List	Recall prior learning’s of mathematical symbols and write a list.
Comprehension	Explain	Verbally explain what the symbol means using a story, skit, speech, analogy etc
Application	Demonstrate	Demonstrate the meaning of the symbol through a diagram, illustration, painting, game etc.
Analysis	Distinguish, separate, identify	Distinguish the difference in the symbols to understand the separate parts of an equation by a report, graph, word defined, etc
Syntheses	Combine, construct	Combine symbols to construct equations by games, book, play, graph
Evaluation	Evaluate, summarise	Evaluate the equation and give the reasoning behind the use of the symbols and their effectiveness in the equation by group discussion, debate, using comparisons, concluding

To know what Knowledge, Skills, Understandings, Values and Attitudes have to be covered in the lesson, the verbs in the Blooms model above can be referred back to. In this case it would be; recall, list, explain, demonstrate, distinguish, separate, identify, combine, construct, evaluate, summarise. Key words from the Affective Domain of Blooms Taxonomy may be included to describe values and attitudes, for example; acts, discriminates, displays, influences, listens, modifies, performs, practices, proposes, qualifies, questions, revises, serves, solves, verifies.

Strategies
Creating experiences to help students learn subject matter gives a much deeper meaning to what is being taught. I believe the most important strategy in any lesson is to construct a Zone of Proximal Development (“ZPD”). Lev Zygotsky stated that social interaction and social learning leads to cognitive development. Vygotsky focused on the connections between people and the cultural context in which they act and interact in shared experiences (Crawford, 1996). This interaction between peers creates the ZPD. Therefore I believe an equally important strategy in teaching is in group work. A lesson should consist of 1/3 teacher interaction, 1/3 individual student work and 1/3 group work. Creating group work that is effective and manageable can be a challenge for teachers. The SPRinG Project, a research study into group work, involves over 30 research teams with contributions from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Work began in 2000 and will continue to 2008/9. Below is an excerpt from a paper delivered in 2002.

There are three main contexts for learning in any classroom. First, there are those involving interactions between the teacher and pupils in the class. Second there are those when children are working on their own on a task. The third is when children are working with each other. If you go into any classroom it is likely that you will see quite a lot of the first and also of the second - we know from many studies of classrooms that children spend much of their time either listening to the teacher or working on their own - but it is likely that you will see very little of the third. They can be seated in groups, of course, but they are not often working AS a group.

Blatchford, P, Baines, E (2002) The SPRinG Project: The case for group work in schools Paper presented at the Institute of Education, University of London, May 2002, http://creict.homerton.cam.ac.uk/spring/current.doc

Having a Constructivist approach to lesson planning as a strategy allows students to construct their own knowledge, individually and socially, giving meaning to their learning. There is an enormous amount of creativity involved in students connecting ideas, thoughts, scenarios etc together that previously was not in their consciousness. Students create communities of self directed intentional learners which in turn create a distributed learning environment. Due to the pool of cognitive development within a distributed learning environment creative processes are heightened allowing for higher order thinking and learning. This is a very powerful learning process as it gives the student a sense of freedom, power and purpose. Again the ability to engage in group work is important.

Using Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence approach in lesson planning affirms within a child their own individual gifts. When students are able to creatively display their own understanding of their learning, whether it be via a spreadsheet or audio/visual experience, their own intelligence and self-esteem is enhanced. Students also need the opportunity to reflect on what they have learned and this can be done through assessing their work through their own particular intelligence. To assess what a student has learned in a lesson they may be asked to display their work in a graphic such as Inspiration, have a debate, create a play etc, all these methods of assessment cause a student to reflect on their work, not merely describe what they have done. Using the higher levels of cognitive development in Blooms Taxonomy, Analyse, Evaluate and Create, gives students the opportunity of reflectively assessing their own learning inside of their own intelligence.