Planning

· Start with clearly conceived Student Learning (Behavioral) Objectives.

· Know the learning outcomes you are trying to help students master.

· Concepts

· Skills

· Information/Content

· Procedures

· Select the most authentic means to accomplish your objectives

· Let your objectives determine the best way to teach your lesson.

· Have a lesson design for each of the type of learning outcomes list above.

· When will the students get to “put it all together?” Or is each lesson a disconnected chunk? Synthesis is motivating as well as cognitively essential.

Lesson Delivery

· Good directions (think about the S’s and the N’s). Make sure that both the big picture and the specifics are clearly explained.

· Use anticipatory activities (put new information into a larger context)

· Model interest in the topic. Why is it meaningful and relevant?

· Teach your students not just your lesson outline.

· Focus on what they are learning not on what you are presenting

· Modify if necessary. If your lesson or your curriculum is not working, try something that you feel would be more effective.

· Don’t be afraid to re-teach.

· Have activities that address the range of ability levels.

· Develop techniques for keeping the students “on the hook” cognitively.

· Use questioning effectively

· Calling on students Randomly vs. Volunteers

· Calling on students in Random vs. Fixed patterns

· Don’t use questioning as a form of public embarrassment

· Become a master of Wait Time

· Responding to student answers (think about the social learning model)

Maintaining Lesson Flow (Kounin)

· Preventing Misbehavior

· Withitness

· Overlapping

· Managing Movement

· Momentum

· Smoothness

· Maintaining Group Focus

· Group alerting

· Encouraging accountability

· High-participation formats

· Avoiding Momentum problems

Assessment Choices that promote motivation and efficiency

Remember, how you assess defines success in a very real and material way for your students.

· Assess that which is most meaningful and/or related to what you want students to learn. Use “authentic assessments” as much as possible.

· As much as possible assess learning over which students have control.

· Have explicit targets (if they are clear and standing still, your students will reach them).

· Communicate a clear purpose for each assessment to your students (and ask yourself, is my purpose for this assessment going to help them learn. If not why do it?)

· Give your students as much control over their own assessment data as is possible. Ask yourself, who is assessment data for?

· Consider assessing the quality of participation formally or informally.

· Keep formal assessment private.