Writing lesson plans is one of the most important skills a teacher needs to posses; in this series of articles, we will explore the process of writing lessons plans and how to unify them into a cohesive unit plan. We will be writing a lesson plan that will be differentiated into three levels: introductory, intermediate and advanced.

Setting Goals and Objects for the Lesson

There are many different ways to build the goals and objectives for a lesson, however one of the most widely used methods called Backwards Design. This methodology dictates that the goals and objectives be built before the actual lesson or unit is written, this is the methodology that we will be using in this article. Since we are differentiating this lesson, we will be setting three goals, one for each of the levels. The goals are the result that you want the students to be able to accomplish. These goals will be written in the form of an action or product that they will produce. Often a single goal will have multiple underlying steps that the student will need to complete; this provides a great opportunity for supplementary learning to bring students with lower knowledge levels up to higher levels of learning.

Having these steps are critical, because they will provide the student opportunities to check with the instructor to make sure that they are progressing accurately and allow the instructor to check for knowledge mastery. Below are several examples of well-written lesson/unit goals.

Lesson Goals

• Students will write an observation paper that follow Type VI writing rules and conventions in class and that will be assessed using the Observation Paper Rubric.
• Students will build a device that is capable of picking up an object of a given weight and move it to a target under its own autonomy with the period of one school week; the device will be scrutinized for target accuracy and autonomy.

What characteristics do we see in the two goals above? They both have three major components to them; 1) specific criteria that the student’s outcome has to meet, 2) the period that students have to work within and 3) the method of assessment that the students will judged on. These are all of the major pieces of information that students will need to know in order to complete a task successfully. This method gives the teacher a list of items or materials that need to be created and worked together to build the lesson materials. All of these items are centered directly on what the student will need to accomplish with the information that they have learned. This way students and teachers are not wasting time trying to do unnecessary work.

Setting Lesson Objectives

Lesson objectives are the broad purposes of the unit; they will dictate what the students will be doing during the course of the lesson. The objectives should be used as a rough outline of the lesson/unit and determine what types activities the students will complete in order to meet the goals set. These are more useful for the teacher than the students and can be used to help set goals.

By keeping your lesson/unit goals in mind while writing teaching materials, you can make your lessons and units more efficient and focused, which will keep students more interested because they not bombarded with extraneous information. Keep in mind that the purpose of a lesson goal is to define what your lesson is about and what types of skills or information that you want your students to learn in the lesson.

When writing new lesson or unit material, it is often wise to start with, your goals and objectives, since they will help you to design the structure of the material you are teaching and break it down into manageable sections for you as the teacher and the students. It does take a bit of practice to learn to write good effective goals and objectives, keep in mind that you as a teacher have the resource of your colleagues all around, be sure to tap that resources if you find yourself stuck or questioning a methodology.