Title of Lesson: What is a Lesson Plan? What are the Eight Elements of a Lesson Plan? Part Three

When mentoring our pre-service and in-service teachers we need to describe and model both research-based and clinically tested best practices. This is one of many lessons we will be sharing on teaching Judaic content, lesson planning, models of teaching, differentiated and individualized instruction and learning activities designed to transform the classroom into a Jewish community of cooperative learners. The title of this lesson is “What is a lesson plan and what are the eight essential elements of a lesson plan?.“ Since there are 13 elements in each lesson plan we will divide this lesson plan into three parts. Here are the first and second parts of this lesson on teaching mentees how to write lesson plans. The third part of this lesson follows.

Independent Activities: (Students practice new skill/s or strengthen previously learned skills outside of class.)

1. Students are to select a teacher or retired teacher whom they admire and with whom they would feel comfortable posing these three questions:

· What is a lesson plan?

· How do you write a lesson plan?

· How do you determine that your students have really learned the content that you have taught?

Note: Your teacher may tell you that he /she no longer writes formal lesson plans because he/she has taught the same lessons for many years, and his/her plans are memorized. You might then inquire about how he/she addresses the elements of a lesson plan (e.g. the objective or learning outcome, anticipatory set, assessments, closure, etc.).

2. Students then record the responses of the person they interviewed in their notebooks.

3. Students should be prepared to share what they had learned during the interview with their classmates.

Closure: (Activity that summarizes and ends the lesson)

1. The teacher summarizes the lesson by using the Ticket Out closure procedure. See the description of the Ticket Out closure procedure below.

Ticket Closure Procedure

· Teacher determines the question/s that individual students are to answer to summarize and end the lesson. In this lesson these are the closure questions:

· What is a lesson plan?

· What is an objective or learning outcome?

· What is an anticipatory set?

· What is an introductory activity?

· What are developmental activities?

· What does guided practice mean?

· What are assessments?

· What does closure mean?

2. The teacher then determines which question or questions individual students are to answer orally or in writing. When the students have correctly answered the teacher’s questions, instruction ends.

On the next post we will begin a lesson with this title: What are the Five Steps Involved in Backward Design Lesson Planning?