This week I created and taught a lesson on Benjamin Franklin. This experience of planning was really neat because the idea of objectives and backwards planning finally connected with me after talking with Dr. Freytag for a while. You want to center you lesson around an overall idea or concept, some overall goal that you want to students to learn or accomplish throughout the lesson. Then the activities are built and centered around that concept. In this case, I wanted my students to understand the contributions of Benjamin Franklin and how it helped people (society). I wanted to encourage them to connect his contributions to their daily life today as well. I then centered my lesson around this concept through the activities and material presented or organized for my students.
My objectives should be centered through this idea of backwards planning as well.
Ex. Today we will learn…
We will do this by…
We will know you have learned this by…
I believe that most of this year I have been using the activities that I plan for my students to support what we are learning that day and supporting the activities with Bloom’s verbs. Instead I should have been using the activities to support the learning processes used to learn the content of the day. I think that by thinking differently about the way that I plan my lesson, my students are better engaged within the content and are more focused on the “what” rather than the “how.”
***One thing that I want to continue working on is pacing. Once I get a better feel for the time allotted to my lesson, I will start to plan according to the time presented and my lesson will run more smoothly, also contributing to my classroom management.