TE 407: Lesson Plan and Report

Note: Titles and parts written in plain text are meant to be included in your final report. Notes in red italics (including this one) are advice on writing the report that you can erase from the final version.

·  Your plans turned in before the lesson should include Parts I-IV.

·  Your report turned in after the lesson should include revisions in Parts I-IV and Part V.

Name: / Partner:
Mentor Teacher: / School:
Date:

Part I: Information about the Lesson or Unit

Topic:

Describe the subject for your lesson (e.g. life science, physics), the unit topic in which your lesson fits (e.g. genetics, forces), and the lesson topic (e.g. Punnett square, Newton’s 3rd Law)

Subject:

Unit Topic:

Lesson Topic:

Type of Class

Choose the appropriate descriptors from the lists or substitute your own descriptions.

·  Grade level(s): 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 High school basic elective/high track advanced (e.g., AP)

·  Type of school: Urban Suburban Rural

·  Tracking level: Untracked Lower track College bound Inclusion

Abstract

Write a short description (100 words or less) that provide a brief snapshot of the content and activities of your lesson. Include information about what your students will do as well as what you will do as a teacher.

Part II: Clarifying Your Goals for the Topic

This section lays out a general understanding of the topic at a level that is appropriate for your students. Note that Big Ideas, Objectives, and Experiences/Patterns/Explanations are rarely covered completely in an individual lesson. If necessary, you should add material not included in your lesson in order to develop a more complete picture of the content that you are teaching. It may be useful to use colors or italics to distinguish between content taught in the lesson and experiences or ideas that are not included in this lesson, but help to complete the topic.

In this section you should feel free to copy from the website or from resources such as state and national standards. As always, include appropriate citations for an material you use. Modify the text so that it matches your lesson. For a more detailed discussion of Clarifying Your Goals, including examples, see Teaching Science for Motivation and Understanding.

Knowledge: Big Ideas

Describe the most important patterns, models, and theories for this topic in 300 words or less. Use the language and ideas that you would like students in your class to be able to use. If appropriate, copy language from Benchmarks for Science Literacy or the National Science Education standards or other sources.

Big ideas are rarely confined to an individual lesson. If you are writing plans for a single lesson, you may need to include ideas from other lessons to write a coherent statement of the big ideas you want your students to understand.

Checklist for Big Ideas. Check to see if your big ideas meet the criteria below. Erase this section if you feel that you have met all the criteria. If you are having trouble meeting some of the criteria, use this section to explain your difficulties.

·  Do you have a coherent summary of the most important patterns, models, and theories for your topic? Big ideas should express the key patterns and explanations in student language, not just name them.

·  Have you used important ideas from Benchmarks for Science Literacy, the National Science Education Standards, or the Michigan Standards?

·  Is the language (e.g., vocabulary level) appropriate for students in your class? Big ideas don’t include every vocabulary word in the unit (though they should include the most important ones), and they don’t have many specific examples. The language you use in your summary of big ideas should be the language you would like your students to use.

·  The word “students” does NOT belong in your statement of big ideas. Think of big ideas as what you would like your students to be able to tell you after the unit or lesson is over.

Knowledge: Experiences, Patterns, and Explanations

Use the table to explain how you will help students extend their experience and reduce it to order. Use the first row to list:

·  Observations or data that you expect many or all of your students to have made before your lesson. These could be personal experiences or data that they collected in previous lessons or data that students get from demonstrations, websites, etc. They should be direct descriptions of objects, systems, or events in the material world.

·  Patterns that you expect many students to be aware of in their experiences.

·  Explanations that you expect students to have for the patterns that they are aware of.

Use the second row to list:

·  Observations or data that you want your students to be aware of and work with. These could be personal experiences or data that are collected during this lesson or data that students get from demonstrations, websites, etc. They should be direct descriptions of objects, systems, or events in the material world.

·  Patterns that you want your students to see or be aware of in the data.

·  Theories or models that you want your students to use to explain or understand the observations and patterns.

You may not be able to fill in every cell of this table. In particular, it will probably be hard to predict students’ initial patterns and explanations unless you have a chance to interview them or give them a pretest before doing the lesson. It is useful to think about what their patterns and explanations might be, though, as you plan your lesson.

In the Observations column, you may find it useful to group your examples into classes, naming the class and giving specific examples. For example: “Mass changes in growing plants (e.g., bean plants growing, bean plants making beans, oak trees growing, spirogyra (an alga) growing).” See Teaching Science for Motivation and Understanding for other examples.

Checklist for Experiences, Patterns, and Explanations. Check to see if your observations, patterns, and explanations meet the criteria below. Erase this section if you feel that you have met all the criteria. If you are having trouble meeting some of the criteria, use this section to explain your difficulties.

·  Are your observations/experiences specific real-world objects, systems, or phenomena? Observations focus on specific real-world objects, systems, or phenomena, not the concepts we use to explain them. For example, “light-dependent reactions” and “light independent reactions” are not good real-world examples for photosynthesis. Similarly, “temperature,” and “convection” are not good real world examples for heat transfer.

·  Are the observations experientially real to your students. They should be either systems or phenomena that your students have already experienced or that you could help them experience, first hand or vicariously. (This does not imply that your list should consist only of examples actually included in your class activities.)

·  Do your Observations, Patterns, and Explanations fit into a coherent whole? Your observations, patterns, and explanations should be connected to one another. For example, each model or theory that you list should have observations and patterns to go with it.

·  Are your observations, patterns, and explanations connected to your big ideas? The key models, laws, and theories in the big ideas statement should be listed in summary form in the Patterns or Explanations column of your table.

Observations or experiences (examples, phenomena, data) / Patterns (laws, generalizations, graphs, tables, categories) / Explanations (models, theories)
Initial Student EPE
Goal EPE
Application: Model-based Reasoning
Inquiry: Finding and Explaining Patterns in Experience

Possible Objectives for Student Learning

Use the table below to list one or two Michigan Objectives and a small number of specific lesson objectives that you will be addressing during this lesson. The Michigan Objectives should be copied from the Michigan HSCEs or GLCEs available in your reading packet or on the course website. For each objective, use the second column to say what type of objective it is.

Checklist for Objectives for Student Learning. Check to see if the objectives in your table meet the criteria below. Erase this section if you feel that you have met all the criteria. If you are having trouble meeting some of the criteria, use this section to explain your difficulties.

·  Does each objective describe student learning—something that your students will be able to do after the class is over—not just a teaching activity to be completed in class? For example, “Conduct an experiment on plant growth under different environmental conditions” is a good learning activity, but not a good objective. It doesn’t say what students will learn to do as a result of conducting the experiments.

·  Does each objective relate to a set of examples, not just a single example? For example, “Explain how plants get their food” is a better objective than “Explain how an oak tree gets its food.”

·  Are your objectives connected with your Big Ideas and Experiences/Patterns/Explanations? Does each objective describe ways that you would like your students to connect experiences, patterns, and explanations?

·  Do you have a small number of objectives that describe significant learning? Do not write too many small objectives. Even a unit that is several weeks long should be organized around a small number of significant objectives.

Objective / Type
Michigan Objective(s)
1. / Choose one:
Inquiry
Reflection/Social Implications
Identifying SP
Using SP
2.
Specific Lesson Objective(s)
1. / Choose one:
Inquiry
Reflection/Social Implications
Identifying SP
Using SP
2.
3.

Part III: Classroom Activities

This section contains your plans for the activities that you will actually do in the classroom. They should be real plans for real activities, not made-up plans that you will not actually carry out.

Materials

List materials you will be using. Attach the files of materials that you have in electronic form.

Checklist for Materials. Check to see if your materials list meets the criteria below. Erase this section if you feel that you have met all the criteria. If you are having trouble meeting some of the criteria, use this section to explain your difficulties.

·  Have you included everything you will need to teach?

·  Do you have the materials ready before your lesson?

·  Have you attached files for materials that you have in electronic form?

Presentation materials (Overhead transparencies or PowerPoint presentations, etc): (attach files)

Copied materials (Handouts, worksheets, tests, lab directions, etc.): (attach files)

Pages in textbook: Book:______Pages:______

Laboratory materials: For the teacher or the class as a whole: (attach files)

For each laboratory station: (attach files)

Other materials: (attach files)

Activities

Describe the activities that you will be doing in the lesson. These may be based on your mentor’s lesson plans and materials or on ones that you developed yourself. They should reflect, though, your best understanding of what you will be doing. If you would have preferred to do something different, describe what you would have done in the “Improvements in Parts I-IV” section below.

·  Include important handouts or teaching materials, either as part of this file or separately.

·  Share your plans with your mentor and course instructor in time to get comments before you teach.

Introduction (-- minutes)

Describe introductory activities that will:

• Get the class off to a well-managed start

• Make conceptual connections with previous lessons

• Help students anticipate problems and activities of the class

Main Teaching Activities (--minutes)

Describe teaching activities, including:

• Key examples, patterns, models or theories

• Key questions that you will use to start discussions

• What the students AND the teacher will be doing

• Embedded assessment activities that will indicate students’ understanding at different points in the lesson

• References to materials you or the students are using during this activity

• Procedural details, including transitions, materials management, etc.

Conclusion (--minutes)

Describe concluding activities that will:

• Make sure students and materials are in order before students leave

• Help students review or summarize what they have learned

• Help students anticipate problems and activities of future classes

Part IV: Assessment of Focus Students

This section includes your plans for assessment of three focus students (see Part V for more details on which students to choose).

Focus Objective

Choose one objective to focus on for your assessment and copy it here.

Developing Assessment Tasks

Include an assessment task that will reveal your focus students’ understanding of your strand: their relevant experiences and intellectual resources, their theories or conceptions, their strategies for sense-making or habits of mind. This task might be a single question or a series of questions. It might take many forms, including: (a) embedded assessment tasks such as worksheets, journal questions, or lab reports, (b) questions or tasks for clinical interviews, or (c) formal assessments such as test questions.

Include the actual task, don’t just describe it. If it requires special materials that cannot be copied into this section, attach them as Appendices or separate files.

Checklist for Assessment Task. Check to see if your assessment task meets the criteria below. Erase this section if you feel that you have met all the criteria. If you are having trouble meeting some of the criteria, use this section to explain your difficulties.

·  Have you included the actual questions that students will answer or prompts they will be able to respond to?

·  Will you learn from incorrect answers? Can your students respond in ways that show ways of making sense of the topic even if they don’t know the scientific answer?

·  Is the task relevant to the focus objective? Does it engage students in the practice described in your focus objective?

·  Would a scientist respond to the task with the concepts, patterns, or models that you are interested in?

·  Is the task worded in a way that will be clear to the students? Will they understand what you are asking?

·  Would a good answer to the task require students to relate some of the theories, patterns, and examples from Part II?