Planning for Instruction

Introduction

The art being an effective teacher starts with effective planning for instruction. Effective planning dictates how the rest of the year will lay out and allows me to have confidence on student performance for the year and down to every individual daily lesson. I execute three types of planning: long-term planning, unit planning, and lesson planning.

The long-term plan is adapted from successes and feedback from previous years. During the weeks of summer professional development leading into the school year a scope and sequence is master planned with a calendar and lesson schedule that includes reteach days. The scope and sequence follows a deliberate temporal overview of the lessons that build on the history of the previous lesson.

Unit planning is broken down into three stages: desired results, evidence, and learning plan. Unit plans set forth key points and essential questions that should be consistently referenced. The Unit plan matches up the standards that are being addressed per lesson. Backwards planning is vital to steering students toward their learning priorities. Each unit is planned to include an end of the unit project that demonstrates accumulated knowledge and a summative assessment.

Daily lesson plans are the final part of my preparing for instruction. Each lesson begins with an activation of prior knowledge, then leads into a hook that will showcase our essential question and key ideas. The daily quiz is the first step in creating daily lessons. From there, activities, texts, and materials are scaffolded and differentiated for set students up for success.

Long Term Planning

The course work for 4th grade social studies is mapped out in appropriaate order and provide "multiple ways to demonstrate skill (InTASC Standard 7c) through the Scope and Sequence. Students in social studies should explore key questions through multiple sources to develop claims about social studies content. As such, it is my responsibility to create instructional opportunities that delve deeply into content and guide students in developing and supporting claims about social studies concepts.

Content: Students begin to understand the physical characteristics of the nation and learn a basic understanding of the history of America from early explorers to present day society. They begin to understand the democratic foundations that built the current political system of today through significant historical events that helped to shape the country into what it is today. Students explain how society, the environment, the political and economic landscape, and historical events influence perspectives, values, traditions, and ideas. To accomplish this, they:

Use key questions to build understanding of content through multiple sources
Corroborate sources and evaluate evidence by considering author, occasion, and purpose

Claims: Students develop and express claims through discussions and writing which examine the impact of relationships between ideas, people, and events across time and place. In a fourth grade class, students are beginning to use source based documents as a foundation for their claims. Since the readability level of many traditional historical documents are above that a typical fourth grader’s reading level, the teacher should make adjustments and support the students’ knowledge of each document during instruction. To accomplish this, they:

Recognize recurring themes and patterns in history, geography, economics, and civics
Evaluate the causes and consequences of events and developments over spans of time and across disciplines

The scope and sequence includes a calendar of teaching days and the standards that align to each lesson.

Selections that are that are appropriate for curriculum goals and content standards, and are relevant to learners.

Students must be critical consumers of information they read, hear, and observe and communicate effectively about their ideas. They need to gain knowledge from a wide array of sources and examine and evaluate that information to develop and express an informed opinion, using information gained from the sources and their background knowledge. Students must also make connections between what they learn about the past and the present to understand how and why events happen and people act in certain ways.
Thus, students must:
● Build an understanding of social studies content in the grade-level expectations (GLEs)
○ Examine authentic sources to build knowledge of social studies content
○ Explore meaningful questions about sources and content to build understanding
● Develop and express claims that demonstrate their understanding of content
○ Make connections among ideas, people, and events across time and place
○ Express understanding of content using evidence from authentic sources and outside knowledge

This document has two sections.

Key Themes: There are seven key themes across all grades. These describe the connections students must make to build and express their understanding of content. They progress from kindergarten to grade 12, as students build a more sophisticated understanding of content. The descriptions in this document are for grade 4

Unit Planning

Unit plans drive the big ideas that students will be working to uncover. Each unit plan varies in length and teaching days, but most link to one of the seven themes in the long-term plan. The unit plan begin with a standard breakdown. Each lesson is aligned to which standard and key objectives are targeted each day. The unit plan seeks to connect every lesson to the essential question that students should be able to answer in detail by the end of the unit.

Each unit is carefully aligned with benchmark an assessment at the end of each quarter. Backwards planning on the unit plan helps guide my instruction toward setting students up for success on the summative assessment.

Daily Lessons

The daily lesson plans are sculpted with precision. Student facing materials are time stamped to ensure pacing is efficient and each section has the required setup and execution time.

As with other planning, working back from the exit ticket to make sure rigor is high and content is scaffolded for students. Each lesson charts out the goal setting effort of students followed by a spiraling of previous material. The lesson intro begins with teach modeling of writing or thought process. I will present content with a hook or start with a reminder of the essential question for our unit.

Then it is time to check the pacing and move on to an introduction of the key ideas, explicitly listing the main takeaways that students should be prepared to demonstrate and explain.

The daily lesson plans include the vocabulary words that are necessary for students to understand and practice with.

Each lesson includes differentiation strategies and resources for tier 1, 2, and 3 exceptionalities.

Vocabulary is often given a opportunity for more practice and other options for VAKTS strategies to suppor students

Conclusion

Careful crafting of long and short term plans is important for efficiency and maximized delivery. Every lesson is guided by a larger investigatory question that echos of the seven themes in the scope and sequence. It is vital to consider potential misunderstanding and scaffold individual lessons to link up with the unit plans. Starting every plan where students should end up is an important element of every plan and then consecutively amending plans to "meet each student

s learning needs and enhance learning" (InTASC Standard 7f).