There are many different approaches to developing Lesson Plans, and they are useful when beginning teaching. Most experienced teachers develop a very abbreviated approach that blends into unit planning, but at this stage of your initial teacher education, we will be focusing on your lesson structure, sequencing, timing, and differentiation. In these aspects, lesson plans excel in forcing you to plan and reflect on how you are teaching.
Technologies Education has a strong focus on Project Based Learning, and in it's full articulation, with student initiated and managed projects, lesson planning becomes more about identifying the needs of individual students or groups, and dynamically meeting these needs. However, before you can fly, you need to be able to walk, and every teacher needs to be able to manage and teach a class in a tightly controlled, teacher centred way, even if it is hoped you will quickly progress from this to include other pedagogical approaches to teaching.
You must submit your lesson plans BEFORE your tutorial each week. During tutorials you will have 3 minutes to orally explain your two lesson plans (Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies), and then 2 minutes to receive brief feedback from each of the peers in your group.
To assist you in developing lesson plans that can be easily modelled in the simSchool simulation tools, and that will help develop the concepts we are focusing on in this course, a template is provided for you structure your lesson plans. You will also use this structure to submit your four best lesson plans to your Portfolio of Learning assessment task.
While many lesson plan templates rightly include other elements important in teaching, this template focuses just on those aspects we are learning about in Technologies Education.
Show timings in real minutes and simulated seconds in brackets. 1 minute lesson time is 10 seconds simulation time, i.e. 10 minutes is 100 seconds in the simulation.
1. Students take notes
2. Play a game
3. Analyse a text, video, designed solution, computer program, database, etc. (Design and Computational Thinking)
4. Create a graphic, infographic, concept map, database, etc. (Computational Thinking: Data)
5. Compare and contrast approaches. (Systems Thinking)
6. Design a solution to a problem. (Design Thinking)