Linking activities within a lesson. Timing activities within a lesson

LINKING ACTIVITIES WITHIN A LESSON. TIMING ACTIVITIES WITHIN A LESSON
In the primary classroom, even though teachers and students generally spend the day together, it cannot be assumed that students will experience their learning as coherent, connected or cumulative. Students need help to see and build connections within and beyond any immediate interaction or activity. It is essential that students understand how a specific teaching task and idea fits within and contributes to their learning in the longer term and across the whole sequence of unit/topic tasks. Scott, Mortimer and Ametller (2011) propose pedagogical link-making as a key aspect of teaching and learning scientific conceptual knowledge. They argue that both teachers and students need to be engaged with link-making – the teacher to make the link available and the students to actively make connections. If link-making is not addressed through teaching, it is unlikely to emerge naturally as part of students’ learning.

Rights: Tim Tripp
Māui harnessing the Sun
In Māori mythology, Māui, with the help of his brothers, harnessed the sun to slow it down so that the days would be longer and they would all have more time to find food.
Mary used resources from the Harnessing the Sun resources with her year 4 students. They explored solar power and made pizza box solar cookers.
The research
This case study research was undertaken with a primary teacher who used Science Learning Hub resources in her classroom with her 25 year 4 students. The teacher, Mary (a pseudonym), had 10 years of teaching experience, but this was the first year she had taught such young students (aged 7–8 years). This study investigated how Mary used the Harnessing the Sun resources. Classroom observations and interviews were conducted with Mary and the students. Analysis of the data was guided by the research question: How did Mary make visible the links between the ideas, activities and lessons so her students experienced their learning as a coherent whole?
Results
Mary used talk
Mary began each lesson with a plenary session to recap the previous tasks and ideas. She asked students questions that helped them remember and connect to what had happened previously. Opening plenaries were also used to signal and develop the goals for the current lesson. Mary concluded each lesson with a review of that day’s learning and sometimes foreshadowed what would happen in the following lesson. In her talk, she made explicit the links between the ideas that travelled across lessons. This linking talk helped her students keep track of the multi-layered nature of the science learning they experienced over time.
Mary used artefacts
Mary set aside wall space for a cumulative display of the students’ work. She posted student work on the wall display between lessons. The display provided an evolving record of the tasks the students had undertaken and their thinking. The wall display expanded the time students devoted to thinking about the science ideas as they spent time viewing and talking about what was displayed. Student comments indicate that they understood both the purpose and worth of a wall display of their learning.
A wall display is good because it helps you remember what you did in the past.
Mary used worksheets to focus and resource interaction as students moved between small-group and whole-class activities. In the photographic sequence that follows we see (from left) a group designing an investigation, sharing this with the whole class, undertaking an experiment using the method the class developed and recording the results on a class display.
The use of materials in this way helped students to connect ideas over contexts and time.

Rights: Judith Moreland
Students in the classroom
An example of students using Harnessing the Sun resources in the classroom.
Mary was alert to opportunities to build science connections in other curricula
Mary taught the students how to write play scripts so they could write a play about solar cooking. She provided time in art for students to design the costumes and props for characters in the play, which was part of the class presentation of their learning about solar energy to other classes. When students came to school and told her about how they had made pizza box solar cookers and had been doing solar cooking at home, she set aside class time so they could share these experiences with everyone.
Conclusions
Mary concluded that teaching science over time provides students with space to think over ideas, to deliberate on developing ideas and to generate new ideas. However, for students to form links and build coherence, she noted she needed to plan and provide opportunities for her students to make connections and see continuity – she could not leave this to chance.
An effective lesson plan refers to the roadmap the teacher adopts to make his lesson successful in producing the desired results. The process of designing a lesson plan starts with identifying the needs of the students, determining the objectives or standards the students need to attain, and selecting the approach and methods that best suit the learning situation. Most lesson plans consist of several components. These include the class profile, the targeted objectives, the procedure (which includes stages), the mode of work, the timing of each activity, and a reflective section.

Introduction To Effective Lesson Planning

This article is an introduction to how lesson planning should be designed. First, we will try to define what a lesson plan is. Then, the rationale behind the process of lesson planning is discussed. A case is made for developing a coherent approach to learning and teaching. Teachers at this stage are invited to think of their personal theory of how the teaching and learning processes take place. This should normally be applied to the way they design lesson plans. A list of the components of lesson plans is presented before we turn at the end of the article, to the merits of lesson planning for teachers as well as for learners
Concept Defining
Before listing the components of lesson plans, let us define some essential terms.
What Is An Effective Lesson Plan?
Let us start by defining some concepts.

Effective

Lesson
Plan
Lesson planning
What Does Effective Mean?
According to a dictionary definition, if something is effective it is:

“Successful in producing a desired or intended result.”

Dictionary definition

For example, an effective medicine is successful in healing from an illness. It has the desired effect or produces the wanted result. Similarly, an effective plan has the effect of reaching the objectives we desire.

What Is A Lesson?

Here is a situation to understand what is intended by the term “lesson“:

Suppose you go out of your home, close the door and to your surprise, you realize that you forgot the keys inside.

Obviously, this experience teaches you a lesson: you should never close the door before you make sure that the keys are in your pocket, or at least you have a plan B in case you forget the keys (i.e., having a double copy of the keys somewhere.)

This is a lesson learned from experience. But we can also learn by studying. Books, the internet, and myriads of other sources of information can teach you lessons.

Accordingly, a lesson can be defined as:

“Something learned by study or experience.” Merriam Webster Dictionary.

What Is A Lesson In The Language Teaching Context?

According to Brown (2001, p.149), a lesson is:

“a unified set of activities that cover a period of classroom time… These classroom time units are administratively significant for teachers because they represent “steps” along a curriculum before which and after which you have a hiatus (of a day or more) in which to evaluate.”

Lessons And The Curriculum

As the above quote states, a lesson is a coherent whole of well-selected activities that cover a period of classroom time, generally 50-55 minutes. These lessons have administrative implications because they are part of the curriculum design. They should abide by a well-defined syllabus.

Note:

Some approaches like the Critical Theory and the Dogme Approach minimize the importance of a syllabus designed by higher authorities and advocate, by contrast, a syllabus that is co-built by both the teacher and the needs of the learners.

What Is A Plan?

According to some dictionary definitions, the term plan means:

a method for achieving an end.

a detailed formulation of a program of action.
an orderly arrangement of parts of an overall design or objective.
All the above definitions emphasize the idea that a plan refers to a strategy, a method, a program, or an arrangement, the aim of which is to reach an outcome.

Having a plan necessitates determining both the point of departure and the point of destination and the decision taken to reach the objectives.

What is effective lesson planning?

According to Jeremy Harmer (2001, p.308):

“Lesson planning is the art of combining a number of different elements into a coherent whole so that a lesson has an identity.”

In other words, effective lesson planning is the process of selecting and organizing a coherent set of activities that cover a period of classroom time. Each lesson has an identity. If one has a look at different lesson plans, one can be sure that these lesson plans cover specific points of the syllabus or that they are designed for specific types of learners.

Effective lesson plans require the teacher not only to set learning and teaching routines but also to visualize the lesson before it is actually delivered.

Effective Lesson Plans As A Sequence Of Routines

Lesson plans can be also viewed as a set of classroom routines. According to Yinger (1980), lesson planning can be described as:

“decision-making about the selection, the organization, and the sequencing of routines”.

Research suggests that expert teachers use routines to make parts of their teaching more automatic. This automaticity helps these teachers free their working memory for other more difficult parts of their teaching process.

Visualizing The Lesson For Effective Teaching

According to Scott Thornbury, there is a long legacy of visualization in athletics as a means of performance preparation. In this regard, the story of Marilyn King, a pentathlon athlete who, after a crippling accident, ‘visualized’ herself back into Olympic-standard performance, is frequently mentioned.

Successful athletes run the race in their minds several times before they actually run it in real life. They use a technique called mental rehearsal to run through their performance, over and over again.

Like these successful athletes, teachers may benefit from delivering the lesson over and over in their heads before coming to the classroom. This will have the positive double effects of:

Anticipating the potential problems that they may encounter while delivering the lesson;

And deciding on the best options to address these problems before they actually occur.
Accordingly, effective lesson planning can be viewed as the ability of the teacher to visualize and forecast how the lesson delivery will take place. It is the cognitive process of thinking about what will happen in the classroom when delivering the lesson and making decisions about what, why, and how the teaching-learning process will occur.

Pre-Planning

Effective lesson planning involves taking the most appropriate decisions about what, why, and how the teaching process will take place.

What Why How

Syllabus, content, activities, materials, exam requirements… Rationale, approach, objectives… Methods, philosophy, theory, Procedures, techniques…
Effective Lesson Planning (What, Why, How)
Before starting to design a plan, teachers must make sure that they have the right knowledge about the students, the subject matter, and how the knowledge will best be imparted to these students.

What Knowledge Should We Have Before Starting Designing A Lesson Plan?

Knowledge of the students Knowledge of the syllabus
Level of proficiency, learning styles, age, gender… The content and organization of the syllabus. (What type of syllabus it is? Structural, notional/functional, situational…)
Exam requirements
This knowledge will help us make decisions about the content and the activities that we should prepare to teach the language system and skills (see below).

What Do Language Teachers Teach?

Language teachers are required to teach both

The language system: the grammar and lexis

And the language skills: the receptive skills (i.e., listening and reading), the productive skills (i.e., speaking and writing).
What do language teachers teach?
What do language teachers teach?
Here are some important remarks about the above categorization:

There are differences in the way we teach the above different aspects of the language. Teaching grammar differs from teaching writing for example.

Some native speakers may have internalized all the aspects of the language system, yet they may be unskilled in writing or reading, or they may even be illiterate altogether.
As teachers, we are required to teach both the system and the skills.

Philosophy Of Teaching And Learning

Before you start designing plans, as a teacher you must have your own philosophy of teaching and learning.

Note: If you want to read more about the philosophy of education, read this article: Philosophy Of Education For Teachers

So, what’s your personal philosophy of learning?

Learning takes place in a certain sequence:

First, the learners do not know or they know little of what you want to teach. This is the phase where they are ignorant or partially ignorant.

Then the teacher exposes the new knowledge (generally through listening or reading.) At this stage, the learners notice that there is a feature they do not understand. This is a stage when their awareness is raised and their attention is drawn to the new information.
Once they notice the gap between what they know and what they do not know, they start working on reducing this gap by making hypotheses and experimenting with them. At this stage of the learning process, the learners are trying to understand – to make sense of the new feature of the target language, most probably with the guidance of the teacher.
Once the learners understand the new feature, they try to use it (probably with some errors popping out). This is the stage when learners practice the target language to make its use more automatic.
When they have practiced the target language enough, learners integrate the item into their interlanguage system and use it, hopefully with relatively minor errors. This is the stage of active use.
The steps in the above sequence are adopted by teachers with some fundamental changes according to their philosophy of learning and teaching.