LESSON PLANNING

A lesson plan is the instructor’s road map of what students need to

learn and how it will be done effectively during the class time. Then,
you can design appropriate learning activities and develop
strategies to obtain feedback on student learning. Having a
carefully constructed lesson plan for each 3-hour lesson allows you
to enter the classroom with more confidence and maximizes your
chance of having a meaningful learning experience with your
students.
A successful lesson plan addresses and integrates three key
components:

 Learning Objectives
 Learning activities
 Assessment to check for student understanding

A lesson plan provides you with a general outline of your teaching

goals, learning objectives, and means to accomplish them, and is
by no means exhaustive. A productive lesson is not one in which
everything goes exactly as planned, but one in which both students
and instructor learn from each other. You may refer to an example
of a 3 hour lesson plan here.
BEFORE CLASS: STEPS FOR PREPARING A
LESSON PLAN
Listed below are 6 steps for preparing your lesson plan before your
class.

1. Identify the learning objectives

Before you plan your lesson, you will first need to identify the
learning objectives for the lesson. A learning objective describes
what the learner will know or be able to do after the learning
experience rather than what the learner will be exposed to during
the instruction (i.e. topics). Typically, it is written in a language that
is easily understood by students and clearly related to the program
learning outcomes. The table below contains the characteristics of
clear learning objectives:
The Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (link) is
a useful resource for crafting learning objectives that are
demonstrable and measurable.

2. Plan the specific learning activities

When planning learning activities you should consider the types of
activities students will need to engage in, in order to develop the
skills and knowledge required to demonstrate effective learning in
the course. Learning activities should be directly related to the
learning objectives of the course, and provide experiences that will
enable students to engage in, practice, and gain feedback on
specific progress towards those objectives.
 As you plan your learning activities, estimate how much time you
will spend on each. Build in time for extended explanation or
discussion, but also be prepared to move on quickly to different
applications or problems, and to identify strategies that check for
understanding. Some questions to think about as you design the
learning activities you will use are:

 What will I do to explain the topic?

 What will I do to illustrate the topic in a different way?
 How can I engage students in the topic?
 What are some relevant real-life examples, analogies, or
situations that can help students understand the topic?
 What will students need to do to help them understand the
topic better?

Many activities can be used to engage learners. The activity types (i.e.
what the student is doing) and their examples provided below are by no
means an exhaustive list, but will help you in thinking through how best to
design and deliver high impact learning experiences for your students in a
typical lesson.
It is important that each learning activity in the lesson must be (1) aligned
to the lesson’s learning objectives, (2) meaningfully engage students in
active, constructive, authentic, and collaborative ways, and (3) useful
where the student is able to take what they have learnt from engaging with
the activity and use it in another context, or for another purpose.
3. Plan to assess student understanding
Assessments (e.g., tests, papers, problem sets, performances)
provide opportunities for students to demonstrate and practice the
knowledge and skills articulated in the learning objectives, and for
instructors to offer targeted feedback that can guide further
learning.
Planning for assessment allows you to find out whether your
students are learning. It involves making decisions about:
 the number and type of assessment tasks that will best
enable students to demonstrate learning objectives for the
lesson
o Examples of different assessments
o Formative and/or summative
 the criteria and standards that will be used to make
assessment judgements
o Rubrics
 student roles in the assessment process
o Self-assessment
o Peer assessment
 the weighting of individual assessment tasks and the
method by which individual task judgements will be
combined into a final grade for the course
o information about how various tasks are to be
weighted and combined into an overall grade must
be provided to students
 the provision of feedback
o giving feedback to students on how to improve their
learning, as well as giving feedback to instructors
how to refine their teaching

To learn more about designing assessment, click here.

4. Plan to sequence the lesson in an engaging and

meaningful manner
Robert Gagne proposed a nine-step process called the events of
instruction, which is useful for planning the sequence of your
lesson. Using Gagne’s 9 events in conjunction with Bloom’s
Revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (link) aids in
designing engaging and meaningful instruction.
1. Gain attention: Obtain students’ attention so that they will watch
and listen while the instructor presents the learning content.
o Present a story or a problem to be solved
o Utilize ice breaker activities, current news and events, case
studies, YouTube videos, and so on. The objective is to
quickly grab student attention and interest in the topic
o Utilize technologies such as clickers, and surveys to ask
leading questions prior to lecture, survey opinion, or gain a
response to a controversial question
2. Inform learner of objectives: Allow students to organize their
thoughts regarding what they are about to see, hear, and/or do.
o Include learning objectives in lecture slides, the syllabus,
and in instructions for activities, projects and papers

o Describe required performance

o Describe criteria for standard performance
3. Stimulate recall of prior knowledge:
o Help students make sense of new information by relating it
to something they already know or something they have
already experienced.
o Recall events from previous lecture, integrate results of
activities into the current topic, and/or relate previous
information to the current topic
o Ask students about their understanding of previous
concepts
4. Present new content: Utilise a variety of methods including
lecture, readings, activities, projects, multimedia, and others.
 o Sequence and chunk the information to avoid cognitive
overload
o Blend the information to aid in information recall
o Bloom's Revised Taxonomy can be used to help sequence
the lesson by helping you chunk them into levels of
difficulty.
5. Provide guidance: Advise students of strategies to aid them in
learning content and of resources available. With learning
guidance, the rate of learning increases because students are less
likely to lose time or become frustrated by basing performance on
incorrect facts or poorly understood concepts.
o Provide instructional support as needed – as scaffolds
(cues, hints, prompts) which can be removed after the
student learns the task or content
o Model varied learning strategies – mnemonics, concept
mapping, role playing, visualizing
o Use examples and non-examples

To find out more about scaffolding student learning, click here

6. Practice: Allow students to apply knowledge and skills learned.
o Allow students to apply knowledge in group or individual
activities
o Ask deep-learning questions, make reference to what
students already know or have students collaborate with
their peers
o Ask students to recite, revisit, or reiterate information they
have learned
o Facilitate student elaborations – ask students to elaborate
or explain details and provide more complexity to their
responses
7. Provide feedback: Provide immediate feedback of students’
performance to assess and facilitate learning.
o Consider using group / class level feedback (highlighting
common errors, give examples or models of target
performance, show students what you do not want)
o Consider implementing peer feedback
o Require students to specify how they used feedback in
subsequent works
8. Assess performance: To evaluate the effectiveness of the
instructional events, test to see if the expected learning outcomes
have been achieved. Performance should be based on previously
stated objectives.
o Utilise a variety of assessment methods including
exams/quizzes, written assignments, projects, and so on.
9. Enhance retention and transfer: Allow students to apply
information to personal contexts. This increases retention by
personalising information.
o Provide opportunities for students to relate course work to
their personal experiences
o Provide additional practice

5. Create a realistic timeline

A list of ten learning objectives is not realistic, so narrow down your
list to the two or three key concepts, ideas, or skills you want
students to learn in the lesson. Your list of prioritized learning
objectives will help you make decisions on the spot and adjust your
lesson plan as needed. Here are some strategies for creating a
realistic timeline:

 Estimate how much time each of the activities will take, then
plan some extra time for each
 When you prepare your lesson plan, next to each activity
indicate how much time you expect it will take
 Plan a few minutes at the end of class to answer any
remaining questions and to sum up key points
 Plan an extra activity or discussion question in case you
have time left
 Be flexible – be ready to adjust your lesson plan to
students’ needs and focus on what seems to be more
productive rather than sticking to your original plan

6. Plan for a lesson closure

Lesson closure provides an opportunity to solidify student learning.
Lesson closure is useful for both instructors and students.
You can use closure to:

 Check for student understanding and inform subsequent

instruction (adjust your teaching accordingly)
 Emphasise key information
 Tie up loose ends
 Correct students’ misunderstandings
 Preview upcoming topics

Your students will find your closure helpful for:

  Summarizing, reviewing, and demonstrating their
understanding of major points
 Consolidating and internalising key information
 Linking lesson ideas to a conceptual framework and/or
previously-learned knowledge
 Transferring ideas to new situations

There are several ways in which you can put a closure to the
lesson:

 state the main points yourself (“Today we talked about…”)

 ask a student to help you summarize them
 ask all students to write down on a piece of paper what they
think were the main points of the lesson

DURING THE CLASS: PRESENTING YOUR LESSON

PLAN
Letting your students know what they will be learning and doing in
class will help keep them more engaged and on track. Providing a
meaningful organisation of the class time can help students not only
remember better, but also follow your presentation and understand
the rationale behind the planned learning activities. You can share
your lesson plan by writing a brief agenda on the whiteboard or
telling students explicitly what they will be learning and doing in
class. Click on link here for tips and techniques to facilitate an
interactive lesson.

AFTER THE CLASS: REFLECTING ON YOUR LESSON

PLAN
Take a few minutes after each class to reflect on what worked well
and why, and what you could have done differently. Identifying
successful and less successful organization of class time and
activities would make it easier to adjust to the contingencies of the
classroom. If needed, revise the lesson plan.
STAGE 2- DECIDE WAYS TO COLLECT EVIDENCE OF
STUDENT LEARNING
At this stage, you determine:

 The different assessment methods that demonstrate

students’ achievement on the course learning objectives
and their respective weightages/weightings towards the
course grade
  Whether you would assess students formatively (i.e.
student is expected to learn from provided feedback) and/or
summatively (i.e. grade awarded contributes to the overall
grade at the end of the course)
 The criteria (i.e. rubrics) you will use to ensure consistency
in your evaluation of your students’ work (Click here for
samples of grading templates contributed by SMU
instructors)

CTE recommendations:

I. Plan assessments at the time the course outline is

initially developed

Often, learning objectives are framed in advance of the assessment

plan. Then, when the assessment plan is being developed and it
becomes clear that the learning outcomes were framed poorly,
instructors may end up with a situation of misalignment between the
two. We recommend that you plan your assessments at the time
the course outline is initially developed such that the learning
objectives can be seen to be assessed and achievable within the
timeframe of the course.

II. Select appropriate assessment methods to measure

your course learning objectives

Some assessment methods are more suitable for assessing

student learning at each thinking level of the Bloom’s revised
Taxonomy. Table 2 provides a reference help you select the most
appropriate assessment methods to measure your course learning
objectives. In the instance where an assessment method can be
used for assessing more than one thinking level, it will be
mapped to the highest possible thinking level.
In judging whether students have met the learning outcomes,
consider creating a rubric to make this transparent to students and
to ensure consistency in your evaluation of students’ work. Our
faculty members have given CTE permission to share their rubric
templates with the SMU community. The grading templates can
be accessed here. Please feel free to adapt the rubric templates
according to your course. Click here for a resource guide on how to
create quizzes in eLearn.
Put into practice: Completing your course outline document
Assessment Methods
List the assessment methods that you will be using to collect
evidence student learning. For each assessment method, include
details on its weightage contributions^ towards the course grade
here. Give a short description on the purpose/format/how students
will be graded for each assessment method. You may group the
assessment methods according to:

 Class participation
 Group Assignments
 Individual Assignments
 Final Exam (up to 50% for all schools/centre, with the
exception of School of Law, which is up to 60%)

An example is as follows:

Assessment Weightage Description (Purpose/Format/How students

method will be assessed)

Online quizzes 10%  There will be 2 short quizzes for this

course- one on Process
Fundamentals and one on Inventory
Management, to assess your
understanding of factual information
and concepts.
 Quizzes will be conducted via eLearn
and conducted during Weeks 5 and
10.
 Each quiz consists of 20 MCQs, and
each is 5% of the course grade.

^Note: For university core, business core and major-related

required modules, a final exam is usually required. Please also note
that the final exam should have no more than 50% of the total
marks from MCQs. Check with your respective course
coordinator/Dean’s Office on the guidelines for all other assessment
method weightages applicable for your course (Source: SMU
Teaching Handbook.)