One key to effective teaching is combining

routine with variation in lessons​.

A lesson plan is the facilitator's road map of what students need to learn and how it
will be done effectively during class time. The purpose of this document on lesson
planning is to make teachers lives better by making them simpler. Do less and do it
better!

If we can help teachers reduce stress, it will have positive impacts on their students
(see this ​article ​about the correlation between teacher burnout and cortisol in
students).

While at first the idea of having a rigid and fixed framework for a lesson seems like
it’d quell creativity and make for stale teaching, I hope you can see from the
rationales below why this daily framework just kind of makes sense. And you’re sure
to be using it anyway, but perhaps not aware of it.

I’ll explain the acronym shortly, but first let me show you the basic teaching
principles that it’s based on, which include the fact that as a teacher I want…

… students to learn something new every lesson

… students to connect new learning to previous learning
… to check students’ new learning and their retention of prior learning
… to give students chances to extend themselves if they’re ready
… to plan activities that encourage the development of skills, as well as knowledge &
understanding
C.H.A.C.E.R
C = consolidate
H = hook
A = activity, acquire, access (choose the one that you like best!)
C = check-in
E = extend
R = reflect

Consolidate:
If students are learning something new every lesson we run the risk of burning
through the material too fast if we don’t give them enough opportunities to rehearse
learning. Also, sometimes it’s been a whole day, a couple of days or even after a
weekend that we see students again. Every lesson ideally should open with about 5 -
10 minutes of a consolidation activity that aims to get students to recap learning from
previous lessons. This gives us a chance to do a bit of informal formative assessment,
too.

There are lots of different activities that make great consolidators, including pub
quizzes, kahoots, crosswords, jeopardy, brain dumps, verbal tennis, group tennis,
traffic lights, one-sentence essays, connect the dots….etc…etc… Personally, I try to
recap key building blocks, as well as highlight the important relationship chains that
we’ve been through.

We know memory works through rehearsal, so giving consolidation (recapping) time

at the beginning of a lesson is pretty fundamental, I think.

Hook:
We want students to be engaged in a lesson and we want them to get excited about
what they’re going to learn, so we need to somehow try to hook them into our lesson;
not a new idea, by any means.

But sometimes I like to hook students into a lesson by just throwing a problem at
them or getting them straight into the next stage: activity. Students naturally love to
solve problems and puzzles, so sometimes if you do something like a murder mystery
activity, it doesn’t need much of a hook as the activity is the hook.

Or even posing the guiding question to students could be enough of a hook, if you
wanted it to be. Some students will want to learn regardless of how personally
engaging it is because they just want to do everything you ask and pass the test.
Sometimes, throwing a real-life example at them might strike a chord so they sit up
and listen.

It’s a pretty basic idea of teaching: that learning should be meaningful, purposeful
and relevant for all our students.

Activity/Access/Acquire:
If we want students to learn something new every lesson, we need to provide them
time to access new information, practice new skills, acquire new terminology, etc.

I believe that teaching is both, an art and a science. The science is in the careful
curriculum planning and design; the art is in the planning of engaging and
interesting lessons that engage your students. And there’s an art to being able to do
all those things great teachers do, like developing rapport and relationships with
students, designing interesting activities, integrating technology, etc.

Thus, let’s keep it simple: “We take care of the science, you take care of the art.” None
of us would ever claim to know the best way to teach. There are so many variables
that can’t be controlled for; hence, the delivery of the curriculum has to be left to
individual teachers.

Some teachers love to stand and talk and can tell heaps of interesting stories that
engage and interest kids; others love to use technology and social media; others a
combination, and every other possible variation. Regardless of what method we use,
it all has the same purpose: causing learning to happen. So at some point in a lesson,
we need to plan how we’re going to cause learning. And this is what this step in
CHACER is all about, quite simply.

Check-In:
If I’ve tried to teach students something new, at some point in the lesson I want to
see if they’ve learned it. Ideally, my activity should have resulted in some form of
product that students can share with me so I can see that they’ve met the objectives
for the lesson: they can demonstrate an understanding of a significant relationship in
response to the lesson’s guiding question. This could be from a worksheet, a
presentation, a diagram, a written answer, spoken answer, visual answer…etc. At
some point, I want to check learning.

Let’s be a bit realistic, we know that it’s impossible to check everyone’s learning every
lesson. It’s an ambitious goal, but the practicalities of daily classroom life mean that
it won’t happen every time as expected, especially if you’ve got more than about 15
students in your class.
Thus, a suggestion would be to try to develop a lesson that will have about a part of
students (usually 25%) finished the guiding question in a lesson or so and they’ll have
time to be extended. This caters for the fast finishers. It’s hoped that about 50% of
students will be able to be just finishing answering the guiding question, but you
won’t quite have time to check their work because the lesson isn’t much time. Again,
this is frankly a reality of teaching.

Another point is that all classes are mixed ability classes and there’ll be about 25% of
kids (these are very general estimates!) in a class that may not be able to understand
the relationship chain in the guiding question; they may be acquiring the language,
have processing or other cognitive difficulties or perhaps they’re just having a bad
day because of what’s happening in their personal lives. Again, this is the real world
we live in: but it’s hoped that they’ve at least got something out of the lesson, whether
it be a new building block, a chance to connect with other students in the class, some
reading practice and some thinking practice. If they’re practicing reading, writing,
speaking, listening and thinking in a lesson, this will be having effects that aren’t
immediately visible. We can also offer remedial strategies to help these students.

In this way, we’re maximising opportunities for learning to happen and trying our
best to formatively assess the learning.

Extend:
Not all students will process and acquire new learning at the same rate: ​fact​. This is
one way our ​differentiation ​comes in: we need to provide fast finishers with a
chance to extend themselves. As students demonstrate an ability to answer the
lesson’s guiding question, they then have a few options of how to extend themselves.

One way could be to move on to the abstract thinking level. If they can answer the
guiding question it means they can understand a significant topic, so now they’re
ready to think abstractly about that topic. Can it be applied to a new context? Does
the concept really exist? How do we know that concept exists? Is the evidence
credible? etc.

Or the classic paradigm, which still has merit: they can help other students. Peer
learning! Why not? We want learning to be collaborative and it’ll be the same
students finishing fast every lesson, you can almost guarantee it. Which means you’ll
probably have the same couple of students struggling every lesson – hopefully we can
develop empathy and cooperation by having students help one another.

Or offer them an inquiry opportunity. Get them to pose their own question they want
to investigate. Now you’re applying differentiation and offering inquiry at the right
moment.
Reflect:
A few minutes before the end of the lesson you’ll want students to take stock of their
learning. It’s a time for feedback/feedforward! A general expectation is that students
should be able to identify where they go to in the lesson in regards to the guiding
question (the lesson outcome) and plan their own home learning accordingly.
Homelearning is not necessarily the homework set by the teacher! It’s the student’s
personal responsibility to revisit the lesson taught and check for any gaps! Or as a
teacher, you could simply assign homework, such as reading the next lesson’s section
of the textbook, practising problems, completing an assignment, etc.

You might want to use an exit ticket, traffic lights or some other brief reflection
activity to get a general gauge of the overall effectiveness of the lesson. This will help
you as a teacher to get a realistic view of what was taught and learnt in the lesson.

And that’s CHACER. Pretty common sense and based on basic principles of teaching
and learning. But it does provide a tangible framework for teachers to base their
planning on. If done well it can strike a balance between structure/routines and
variation/engagement.