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Chapter 13 |
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Theory into Practice |
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Ch. 13, p. 463
Planning Courses, Units, and Lessons
In planning a course, it is important for a teacher to set long-term, middle-term, and short-term objectives before starting to teach (Brown, 1988; Shavelson, 1987). Before the students arrive for the first day of class, the teacher needs to have a general plan of what will be covered all year, a more specific plan for what will be in the first unit, and a very specific plan for the content of the first lessons (as shown in Table 13.2).
Table 13.2 implies a backward planning process. First the course objectives are established. Then unit objectives are designated. Finally, specific lessons are planned. The course objectives list all the topics to be covered during the year. The teacher might divide the number of weeks in the school year by the number of major topics to figure what each will require. More or less time could be reserved for any particular topic, as long as adequate time is allowed for the others. A whole semester could be spent on any one of the topics in Table 13.2, but this would be inappropriate in a survey course on life science. The teacher must make hard choices before the first day of class about how much time to spend on each topic to avoid spending too much time on early topics and not having enough time left to do a good job with later ones. Some history teachers always seem to find themselves still on World War I in mid-May and have to compress most of the twentieth century into a couple of weeks!
Table 13.2 shows approximate allocations of weeks to each of the topics to be covered. These are just rough estimates to be modified as time goes on.
Unit objectives and unit tests. After course objectives have been laid out, the next task is to establish objectives for the first unit and to estimate the number of class periods to spend on each objective. It is a good idea to write a unit test as part of the planning process. Writing a test in advance helps you to focus on the important issues to be covered. For example, in a 4-week unit on the Civil War you might decide that the most important things students should learn are the causes of the war, a few major points about the military campaigns, the importance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s assassination, and the history of the Reconstruction period. These topics would be central to the unit test on the Civil War. Writing this test would put into proper perspective the importance of the various issues that should be covered.
The test that you prepare as part of your course planning might not be exactly the test that you give at the end of the unit. You may decide to change, add, or delete items to reflect the content you actually covered. But this does not diminish the importance of having decided in advance exactly what objectives you wanted to achieve and how you were going to assess them.
Many textbooks provide unit tests and objectives, making your task easier. However, even if you have ready-made objectives and tests, it is still important to review their content and change them as necessary to match what you expect to teach.
If you prepare unit tests from scratch, use the guide to test construction presented later in this chapter. Be sure that the test items cover the various objectives in proportion to their importance to the course as a whole (that is, that the more important objectives are covered by more items), and include items that assess higher-level thinking as well as factual knowledge.
Lesson plans and lesson assessments. The final step in backward planning is to plan daily lessons. Table 13.2 shows how a given unit objective might be broken down into daily lessons. The next step is to plan the content of each lesson. A lesson plan consists of an objective; a plan for presenting information; a plan for giving students practice (if appropriate); a plan for assessing student understanding; and, if necessary, a plan for reteaching students (or whole classes) if their understanding is inadequate
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