leson+plans+and+narratives

Back to Places in the World activity

There are at least two ways to develop lesson plans. In one approach, teachers specify and write procedures for students to follow. These procedures are often coupled with behavioral objectives, lists of resources, and descriptions of assessment activities. The resulting lesson plan takes form as an outline. Outlines are good because they convey the essentials of a plan for instruction in a well understood format.

Sometimes, teachers need to probe our pedagogical understandings more deeply than an outline will permit. For these occasions, teachers can write instructional narratives, which go into more depth exploring some theme or idea being explotred in the teaching and learning experience. Often, instructional narratives focus on subject content knowledge and how the teacher selected and developed certain pedagogical strategies to enable students to learn specific subject matter content. The focus of a lesson narrative is to provide a description of activities that goes beyond a list of procedures. A person who reads an instructional narrative may still need an accompanying lesson plan in order to implement the lesson, but they will know much more about the thinking that went into the planning after reading the narrative.

//Lesson plans//

Outline lesson plans typically contain five or six sections. 1. Objectives 2. Related standards and curriculum goals 3. Materials being used 4. Procedures (sometimes including a separate lesson opening and closing) 5. Assessment strategies

The sequence of these lesson plan elements is quite logical. When planning a lesson teachers must first consider what they want students to learn. These take form as behavioral objectives or learning goals that specify observable actions students must demonstrate to indicate that learning has occurred. Well crafted behavioral objectives typically include four parts 1) The skill/knowledge to be gained; 2) The action student undertake when demonstrating their skill or knowledge; 3) The conditions under which the student will exhibit their skill or knowledge; and 4) The criteria which inform the quality of students’ skill or knowledge based behavior is to done. Objectives need to encompass relevant subject matter which has been selected for the lesson and should be situated within the expectations of standards and curriculum. The process of planning activities for enabling students to be successful in learning about subject matter should result in specific materials being elected as well as a set of procedures being devised to facilitate students learning. These are typically recorded in a lesson plan as a list of items need for the lesson and a sequence of teacher and students actions. Most lesson plans include a separate section detailing specific assessment strategies and the criteria for evaluating students’ work.

//Lesson narratives//

Lesson narratives are much more impressionistic than lesson plans. A good lesson narrative tells the story of a lesson idea. Narratives have a beginning, middle and end as does the process for planning and implementing a lesson. Using narrative structure, teachers can describe the processes they undertook as they developed subject matter knowledge and transformed that knowledge into pedagogical subject matter knowledge. While they may lack the sequential detail of a lesson plan, a well-written lesson narrative can be very enlightening. Teachers can reveal their thinking, ambitions, and expectations in lesson narratives. A fully-formed lesson narrative should include an introduction which addresses the emergence of the teacher knowledge about the subject matter of the lesson. The narrative should continue to explore the teacher’s ideas about what students in her class should learn and why as well as how the featured subject matter fits with standards and curriculum. The narrative should provide some description of how the lesson address subject matter. Lesson narratives should flow from section to section, with the writer describing procedures as events that are interwoven and purposeful. Within the overall description of class events, an accompanying description of assessment and plans for evaluation and reflection should be described. Lesson narratives might be written before or after a teaching episode.