What Every Teacher Should Know About Instructional Planning

How will teachers know when students understand? This lesson planning guide provides the answers based on current, quality research on instructional planning.

The essential guide to lesson planning in the standards-based classroom! Use this clear-sighted guide to keep your focus on what your students need to know and be able to do. Based on state-of-the-art research, this guide will take you from pre-planning through reflection, evidence of learning, and teaching for transfer to real-life situations. Topics include: Pre-planning tools and backward design Using standards Building effective declarative objectives Designing behavioral objectives Helping students organize and store knowledge Evidence of learning: Do they understand? Can they use the information? Planning meaningful learning experiences Building connections between old and new knowledge Putting lesson planning into practice Specific parts of the lesson Declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and reflection Building a model for lesson planning Vocabulary pre-test, post-test, and summary Bibliography and Index

The essential bag of tools for teaching the standards-based curriculum for higher-level student learning and achievement! This concise collection of effective teaching strategies will be an invaluable guide for every teacher who knows that the way we teach is just as important as what we teach. Chapters cover: Making good decisions about instructional objectives Teaching tools for beginning activities Teaching tools for working with declarative information: vocabulary, facts, data, and more Teaching tools for procedural activities: constructing models, using procedural knowledge, and more Thinking tools and graphic organizers Verbal tools such as brainstorming, Socratic seminars, real world applications, and more Guidelines for lesson planning Vocabulary pre-test, post-test, and summary Bibliography and Index

Are you ready to plan your best lessons ever? Planning Powerful Instruction is your go-to guide for transforming student outcomes through stellar instructional planning. Its seven-step framework—the EMPOWER model—gives you techniques proven to help students develop true insight and understanding. You’ll have at your fingertips: the real reasons why students engage—and what you must do to ensure they do a framework to help you create, plan, and teach the most effective units and lessons in any subject area more than 50 actionable strategies to incorporate right away suggestions for tailoring units for a wide range of learners downloadable, ready-to-go tools for planning and teaching

Designed to help trainers navigate teachers through a complete cycle of 10 training sessions, this dynamic guide is a must for professional staff developers!

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

Exploring brain-compatible teaching strategies, six signs of bias to avoid, and how culture affects learning styles, this rich collection of materials provides a root cause analysis of why so many students are failing in America's public schools (Mary Reeve, Director, Services for Exceptional Students).

This essential guide is for classroom teachers who work with diverse learners-English language, urban, and underprivileged-to help close the achievement gap.