Question:
Does anyone have information what constitutes a good lesson plan? What
should be included in a lesson plan rubric for elementary teachers and
for high school subject teachers? Is there a internet site that shows
good examples?
Answer:
I would consider flexibility to be a key factor just like any
other "plan" we might have in our lives. My itinerary plan written
last Thursday scheduled me to be at Colorado ISD tomorrow, but five
phone calls today and three e-mails for help from other districts
makes me reconsider my plans or at least the amount of time I will
spend in my "planned" visit.
There's also a side issue about "good" lesson plans...namely how
many great lessons can anyone conceivably document who might have
anywhere from 500 to 600 lesson plan segments per year in the typical
classroom? And even if a teacher collects hundreds of neat lesson
plans that will work in their classroom that doesn't always mean they
will work year after year with different students. So a really smart
teacher is constantly refining and collecting new materials.
And how many principals have experienced the teacher who has one
or two master lessons and uses those same ones repeatedly for
evaluations in consecutive years? I've seen quite a few pull that
unprofessional stunt in the past few years and never get called on it
by the principal. I even saw one teacher who needed two evaluations
have both principals come evaluate the SAME day on the same lesson!
I also have a serious problem with teachers spending enormous
amounts of time on the record keeping of lesson plans. Some do it out
of personal need, others do it to impress the principal. Perhaps that
huge amount of time some spend on lessons could be spent more
effectively in actually preparing for the lesson itself or doing other
needed instructional duties.
In my early classroom career I was a secondary substitute and
spent over 250 assignments filling in for teachers. I saw every kind
of lesson plan in virtually every subject. The best ones in my opinion
were not the most highly detailed five page documents explaining every
step of the lesson. I feel the failure of such detailed lesson plans
was because they lacked the flexibility factor. And of course many
lessons are still based on barebones knowledge recall actions.
This emphasis on subject matter isn't surprising because despite
our preference for instructional methodology like Bloom Taxonomy and
buzz words like paradigm shifts we are still driven to produce state
test scores higher and higher. And there is definitely something to be
said for producing a high school graduate who can actually count out
my change correctly without having to rely on a calculator or a young
travel agent who actually knows New Mexico is a state and not a
foreign country. *;-)
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