Teaching Guide: Writing Lesson Plans

There are many approaches to writing lesson

plans. Some instructors develop their plans
independently from scratch, while others
borrow plans from a shared curriculum. Some
carefully write out all the details for their
lesson, while others use a brief outline.
 Your approach to writing lesson plans will depend on
various factors:

how well you know the material you're teaching, how long
you've been teaching, the kinds of teaching you've done,
and the students you expect to have in your class. There is
no single formula for writing lesson plans, but this guide
will help you think through some of the processes that
other instructors have found valuable to their own lesson
planning.
Guidelines for writing lesson plans:
•Consider Your Destination
•Sequence Your Objectives
•Know Your Time Frame
•Create Activities to Meet Your Objectives
•Check for Understanding
•Sample Lesson Plan Format
 Consider Your Destination

Where do you want students to end up?

•What is the overall goal for this assignment? What is the

assignment asking students to do?
•What knowledge do students already have that will help them
meet the goals for writing this assignment?
•What skills and concepts will students need to meet the goals
for this assignment?
From these questions, create a list of smaller
objectives to use as stepping stones for your
destination. If you are planning writing
assignments for student portfolios, your list of
objectives may include:
•Portfolio 1 - Objectives for Teaching
Summary/ResponseStudents will think about their
purpose, audience and context for writing.
•Students will use critical thinking skills and critical reading
strategies to become better writers.
•Students will practice writing academic summaries.
•Students will practice writing different types of response.
•Students will learn to develop a claim and support that
claim with reasons and evidence.
•Students will learn to value revision through workshops
and other peer review activities.
 Sequence Your Objectives
While sequencing your objectives, consider how
each one builds off another. How might one
objective prepare students for learning
another? If reading critically helps students
summarize an argument, you might address
your critical reading objective before teaching
summary.
Know Your Time Frame
While sequencing your
objectives, be aware of the
amount of time allotted for
each portfolio.
•Portfolio I - Sequence and Time Frame for Objectives:
Week 1Students will begin to think about their purpose, audience and context
for writing. (day 1)
•Students will use critical thinking skills and critical reading strategies to
become better writers. (day 2)
•Week 2Students will practice writing academic summaries. (days 3 - 4)
•Week 3Students will practice writing different types of response. (days 5 - 6)
•Week 4Students will learn to develop a claim and support that claim with
reasons and evidence. (day 7)
•Students will learn to value revision through workshops and other peer- review
activities. (day 8)
Develop Activities to Meet Objectives
Once you've sequenced your objectives
within a given time frame, the next
step is to create activities that will
help students meet each objective.
Two questions that you should
always keep in mind when
constructing activities are: "What
do my students already know that
will help them meet a desired
objective?" And, "What activities
will best help students meet a
desired objective?"
Objective: Students will use
critical thinking skills and
critical reading strategies to
become better writers.
1.Activities:Define critical reading and provide a list of
strategies on an overhead (this is useful because many
students do not know what critical reading is).
2.Model critical reading strategies (show students how to
implement critical reading strategies).
3.Have students practice critical reading strategies with
their homework.
4.Ask students to respond to an in class writing, describing
their experience with the critical reading assignment. Have
them speculate as to how this process of critical reading
will influence their own writing. As a group, discuss the
connection between reading and writing.
Check for Understanding
The final step in planning lessons is to
make time for assessing students'
learning. How will you check to see
that students understand the new
concepts you're teaching? When will
you revisit the material that they didn't
quite grasp?
Intervention along the way can
help you learn what students are
struggling with. Many instructors
collect homework once a week, or
assign quizzes and short writing
exercises to assess their students'
progress.
 If students' homework indicates that
they're having trouble summarizing main
points, you may spend the first fifteen
minutes of the next class reviewing this
concept. Addressing such struggles early on
will help students face the more
challenging objectives that follow.
 If students' homework indicates that
they're having trouble summarizing main
points, you may spend the first fifteen
minutes of the next class reviewing this
concept. Addressing such struggles early on
will help students face the more
challenging objectives that follow.
PERFORMANCE AND
PORFOTLIO-BASED
ASSESSMENT IN
TEACHING WRITING
Performance Assessment
Performance assessment, also known as alternative or authentic
assessment, is a form of testing that requires students to
perform a task rather than select an answer from a ready-made
list. For example, a student may be asked to explain historical
events, generate scientific hypotheses, solve math problems,
converse in a foreign language, or conduct research on an
assigned topic. Experienced raters--either teachers or other
trained staff--then judge the quality of the student's work based
on an agreed-upon set of criteria. This new form of assessment
is most widely used to directly assess writing ability based on
text produced by students under test instructions.
Open-ended or extended
response exercises are questions or
other prompts that require students
to explore a topic orally or in
writing. 
Extended tasks are assignments that require
sustained attention in a single work area and
are carried out over several hours or longer.
Such tasks could include drafting,
reviewing, and revising a poem
•Portfolios are selected collections of a variety of
performance-based work. A portfolio might include a
student's "best pieces" and the student's evaluation of
the strengths and weaknesses of several pieces. The
portfolio may also contain some "works in progress"
that illustrate the improvements the student has made
over time.
•WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY? 
•Active learning. Research suggests that learning how and where
information can be applied should be a central part of all curricular
areas. Also, students exhibit greater interest and levels of learning
when they are required to organize facts around major concepts
and actively construct their own understanding of the concepts in a
rich variety of contexts. Performance assessment requires students
to structure and apply information, and thereby helps to engage
students in this type of learning.
•Curriculum-based testing. Performance assessments
should be based on the curriculum rather than
constructed by someone unfamiliar with the particular
state, district or school curriculum. This allows the
curriculum to "drive" the test, rather than be
encumbered by testing requirements that disrupt
instruction, as is often the case. Research shows that
most teachers shape their teaching in a variety of ways
to meet the requirements of tests. Primarily because of
this impact of testing on instruction, many practitioners
favor test reform and the new performance assessments.
•Worthwhile tasks. Performance tasks should be
"worth teaching to"; that is, the tasks need to
present interesting possibilities for applying an
array of curriculum-related knowledge and skills.
The best performance tasks are inherently
instructional, actively engaging students in
worthwhile learning activities. Students may be
encouraged by them to search out additional
information or try different approaches, and in
some situations, to work in teams.
•Providing
feedback on
mechanic errors
•Providing feedback on mechanic errors
There are generally three headings under which
written errors will fall. The first of these is
mechanical errors. Mechanical errors include
misspelled words (or misused homonyms that
have been spelled correctly and thus not caught
by a spell-checker), grammatical errors (e.g.,
subject/verb agreement), and punctuation errors.
•Providing
feedback on
micro-level
content errors
A second category of written errors refers to the
structure of ideas within a particular paragraph.
We term this category micro-level content errors.
Such errors require active rewriting on the
student’s part, based on constructive comments
from the teacher. This requires lengthier feedback
than for mechanical errors, and such feedback
appears best presented using a word processing
“insert comments” feature.
Providing
feedback on
macro-level
content errors
The third and final category of written errors
includes problems that detract from the
manuscript as a whole. We term these errors
macro-level content errors. Examples include
faulty document structure and erroneous
reasoning. These errors also require active
rewriting based on teacher feedback, but in
addition may require that the writer think about
the document as a whole and possibly reorganize
or rewrite multiple sections simultaneously.