Faculty of Education

EDU 502: Teaching and Learning

Word Count: 1486
Date: 10-25-2016
Assignment Title: Lesson Plan Analysis
Module Coordinator: Dr. John McKenny
Student Id: 2016101082

Lesson Plan Analysis

What is a lesson plan? The answer to this question is different for each educator. If you
ask school admin, it is a road-map that teachers in the school must create to show their
commitment to their profession. On the other hand, some teachers believe that if they can plan
their work in their head, why do they need to spend time to put pen to the paper. Some other
teachers might just want to write up some sketchy details in their plan-book; However, we also
have some teachers who believe in enlisting every step of their daily class routines. The lesson
plan that I have picked for my analysis is divided into five-day routines for an English class.
However, in this paper, I will argue the effectiveness of this lesson plan, given that the teacher
believes in planning each step of her routine. See the lesson plan attached under appendix 1.
In order to give my arguments a little more structure, depth, and validity, I chose to
analyze the lesson plan against Mike J. Schmokers Components of Effective Instruction.
Mike J. Schmoker in chapter 3 of his book Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve
Student Learning explains, Theres nothing new here. These terms were formalized almost half
a century ago, but their essence is as old is teaching itself. He goes on to outline 4 components
of effective instruction.
Components of Effective Instruction
1. Clear learning objectives
2. Teaching/modeling/demonstrating
3. Guided practice
4. Checks for understanding/formative assessment
(Page 53-54) Schmoker (2011)
According to Schmoker, first component of an effective lesson format is setting clearly
stated learning objectives. While the teacher who wrote this lesson plan attempted to have
multiple objectives for English Language Arts classes during the week and on each day, she has
stated different objectives for her warm-up and main activities; however, its not the quantity but
the quality of the objectives that matters. A clearly stated objective should include who is going

to achieve the objective, and it must be realistic and time-bound. So a clearly stated learning
objective might look something like this: Students will be able to recognize short vowels in
different words by the end of this lesson. However, the objectives stated in the lesson plan are
more teacher-centered. It sounds as if the teacher is setting up the goals for herself to achieve.
For example, the objective for her opening routine on day 2 notes, Connect to Science/inquiry
skills may be regarded as her attempt at cross-curricular learning, but the learning objective is
for the teacher to achieve and not so much for the students. The point is that the objective doesnt
state how will this opening routine add to the students learning.
Component number two on the above-mentioned criteria is Teaching,
Modeling/Demonstrating where the teacher relates the relevance of the learning objective and
models the skill that she has set up for learning. If the students dont know the relevance of what
they are learning in class to their real life, they may not feel the need to achieve the objective
because it is not important to learn. At this point, there is also a need to assess students prior
understanding of the objective as it may help the teacher in designing next steps for different
groups of students. The teacher who designed this lesson plan, however, goes on to discussing in
her day 2 opening routine differences and similarities between a crab and a turtle. My point
here is that the objective in this case should have been, students will be able to use Venn
Diagrams effectively by the end of this lesson. Teacher could have assessed students prior
knowledge about venn-diagrams and then modeled the skill with posing helpful questions aiding
students in critically thinking around the topic.
There is always a need for scaffolding the instruction in every lesson. Teachers must
model/demonstrate the thinking pattern or show the steps necessary for students to understand
exactly how to achieve the learning objective on their own. The lesson plan is missing this very
important step in the process. However, there is a very heavy and almost unnecessary focus on
getting activities done in the classroom. The lesson-plan format is divided into 3 parts: Warm
Up, Main Activity, and Plenary, and each part has some sort of activity that needs to get done. I
couldnt help but wonder how many students were actually able to understand and achieve the
objectives, albeit the objectives werent clearly stated.

According to the above criteria by Schmoker, component number 3: Guided Practice

should be a repetitive and reciprocal process, helping the teacher in modifying her instruction
during class while she is monitoring the practice of students on the already
demonstrated/modeled learning objective. Teacher should monitor/guide her students on how
they are progressing on achieving the learning objective by repeating the steps necessary to
ensure that all students are ready to work on their own in achieving the learning objective.
Lets look at the structure of activities on day 1 in our lesson plan under analysis. Our
teacher states her routines in the main activity as under:
After the activity, the teacher plays the story My Family student book p. 38 on the CD then
she will read it and pause to explain difficult vocabulary using the PowerPoint presentation.
After that, the students will do a group work activity (matching the vocab. To the word). Finally,
the students will do the worksheet.
Differentiation:
L.A will rainbow write the words in their spelling books.
According to this explanation, our teacher plays the story on a CD while she tries to
explain difficult vocabulary words to her students. Looking back at her learning objective, she is
trying to achieve, Introduce target Vocabulary and listen to fluent reading/ reading
comprehension, teacher probably wants the students to be able to model fluent reading skills,
yet there is no contribution from the teacher on how students should be able to achieve that
target. There is no understanding of why it may be an important skill for students to develop to
read fluently. There is also no modeling of how to achieve that learning objective. There is no
guided practice for the students to follow the fluent readers behavior while reading. Merely
playing the story on CD and introducing difficult vocabulary words will not help students in
achieving the target at hand, i.e. fluent reading skills. This will need practice on students part
after the teacher has modeled the skill and thinking process of a fluent reader.
Students must be able to understand their own progress or self-assess their learning
according to Schmokers component 4: Checks for Understanding/Formative Assessment where
students are able to assess their own learning and are ready for independent practice of the skill.
In our lesson plan, on day one routines under plenary, the teacher plans to assess student progress
by having them fill out a fill in the gaps activity on the board. If this is an activity done by

students on the board, it can not be independent, so the teacher will not be able to assess
individual student-progress with a collective activity. The purpose of having plenary routines is
to assess whether or not students were able to achieve the stated objective for the lesson.
Although students in this class may have understood the new vocabulary words, but long-term
retention of these words can not be assessed by having them fill-out a fill-in-the-blanks activity,
and a collective one at that. On the other hand, teacher didnt even plan to assess her second
objective i.e. fluent reading skills.
In conclusion, the lesson plan at hand is merely a detailed collection of notes from our
teacher on how she wants to organize her lesson. The lesson plan indicates that the teacher is
setting goals for herself to achieve in 5 days of the week without adding any real value to the
instruction process. There is no evidence of individual or group data that will be collected from
this lesson which will help the teacher in making informed decisions on how to proceed to the
next lesson. It also doesnt help the teacher in understanding how many of her students actually
were able to achieve the objective. There are some reflection check-point that the teacher used to
assess her own delivery of the content such as: were the students able to fill in the gaps with
correct words? However, in the absence of clearly stated or formulated learning objectives, it is
very difficult for teacher to assess the progress that students could have made in learning the
skills.

Citations, Quotes & Annotations

Schmoker, M.J. (2011) Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student
Learning. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.
(Schmoker, 2011)