A "Good" Lesson Plan


Creating lesson plans is the 'meat and potatoes' part of teaching that gets me the most excited. After reading Christenbury, it reminded me that with the excitement that comes with lesson planning there is also the difficulty of not creating lesson plans that are too ambitious for your students. I believe that once you become well acquainted with your students, you will have a general idea of their abilities and discover their zone of proximal development. Personally, I believe this is one of the most crucial aspects of creating lesson plans due to the fact that you may have an incredible lesson to teach, but once in practice will be a complete flop. Students may be overwhelmed with information or content that they were expected to have prior to entering your classroom. However, with fluctuations of ability in your classrooms, this creates an opportunity to utilize them to your advantage.

A large part of what goes into a good lesson plan for me is relevancy. I find if you can connect to your students in a very real, relatable way that they can connect to the world around them, your students will be engaged and find value in what you're teaching them. Some of the most interesting lessons I have taught was showing the students multiple genres through short movie trailers that they would recognize. After each video we asked the students what about the trailers indicated that it was that particular genre through music, lighting, edits, etc. Which then led to placing the students in groups of three to take a classic children's book and create their own trailer but with a new emerging genre than the original. 

 This process of activating prior knowledge of genre, then viewing the trailers decoding which genre category it fell under, to then analyze the children's book to then create a new genre sounds like a whole lot of information into one lesson. Which it was but also wasn't at the same time!



We understood they had previously learned about genre a couple weeks prior therefore we knew this lesson would not be completely foreign information to them. We also took into account that we did not have to dive into each genre extensively due to their prior lecture based lesson in regards to the topic of genre. This lesson was simple (as in basic) because it was just activating some prior knowledge with fun, recognizable content and then giving them an opportunity to get creative and apply what they know from their previous lesson. This is more of a follow up lesson for them to engage in the concepts and analyze a low level text to then create their own trailer to show how the smallest changes in elements will create an entirely new story. Overall I find when creating lesson plans it is crucial to know their abilities, keep it simple, and engage with relevant/current material that can create a more 'student centered' learning experience of discovery.

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