What to Consider When Planning a Lesson and Writing to Learn Activities

The two chapters we read for this week’s post dealt with planning lessons and different Writing to Learn activities. At first I did not understand why these two chapters went together, but as I read further I realized how integral Writing to Learn activities are in lesson plans. But before I get to Writing to Learn activities, it is important to go over what to consider when planning a lesson.

So with lesson plans, teachers need to look at how students are going to learn during their lessons. Teachers can use something called instructional scaffolding which helps students learn how to learn from texts. It involves the teacher modeling how to read texts, what to look for in texts – basically everything necessary to know of how to use texts to their best degree and then letting the students go for it. This type of instruction is better for the students with the use of explicit instruction which not only teaches students what strategies to use to learn the content, but also the why, how, and when to use those strategies.

The key components of explicit instruction are:

• Awareness and Explanation – tell students about the strategy and why you are using it for this particular activity
• Modeling and Demonstration – walk through the strategies step by step and model it for the students
• Guided Practice – let the students practice the strategies and assess them afterwards for what problems they ran into/what went well/etc.
• Application – let them know when to use this strategy and make sure they keep it as a useful skill

Once teachers know how their students will learn during their lessons, then they can get to planning their lessons.

Questions to consider when planning lessons are:

• Standards – What local/state/national standards are being addressed?
• Instructional Goals – What do you want the students to know by the end of the lesson?
• Eessential Questions – What are the big questions that will prompt good discussion/thought?
• Instructional Strategies and Activities – What are you going to do during the lesson, instructional?
• Materials and Resources – What do you need to gather before the lesson that your students will be using?
• New Literacies – What technology can you bring in that will help aid the lesson?
• Assessment – How will you assess what your students learned?

A great summation of a few of these questions is called B-D-A instructional framework. This B-D-A system looks at what a teacher does during, before, and after reading. A closer explanation of B-D-A:

• B – establish the purpose of reading the text, motivate the readers to read the text, build any prior knowledge needed for the text, introduce key vocabulary and concepts needed in order to understand the text, and provide direction for reading for meaning
• D – guide an active search for meaning in the text and help the students learn how to read texts in order to get the most meaning out of them
• A – extend and elaborate upon ideas found in the text and encourage students to talk about meanings they found

Now that we know a little bit more on lesson planning we can look into more instructional activities and mostly – Writing To Learn activities. Writing to Learn (WTL) are short, informal writings that are centered on exploring ideas and clarifying thoughts about certain concepts found in reading.

But in order to use WTL effectively, the students (and you) need to know why writing is so closely linked to reading. There are two main umbrella connections: composing processes – both construct meaning, both involve purpose and working with ideas, both deal with audiences, etc. , exploration/motivation/clarification – reading provides meaning while writing helps students figure out what that meaning is.

The chapter we read provided five WTL activities:

• Microthemes – mini essays that work on synthesizing, analyzing, summarizing, and taking a stand on a text
• POVGs – point of view guides that are responses to questions posed like an interview, encourages speculation, inferential thinking, and elaboration using role-play, gets students’ own experiences involved in the writing process
• Unsent Letters – uses imagination, interpretation, and evaluation of texts, connects reader’s thoughts to specific audiences
• Biopoems – synthesizing a large text into a small poetic format, a structured reflection of a text
• Admit/Exit Slips – allows teacher to check where students are before or after a lesson

Besides these five WTL activities there are also academic journals. Academic journals help students to log their ideas and feelings on certain topics in readings as well as their own personal lives. It creates a personal connection between the student and what they are reading. There are three types of academic journals: response journals – feelings/thoughts recorded as students interact with texts, double-entry journals – dual entry records that are conceptually related, learning logs – records of learning as it happens in the lesson.

I personally love the academic journal route for WTL. I remember my freshman year of high school, my English teacher gave us journal prompts every day that were either directly related to whatever we were learning that day or were just fascinating questions he wanted us to think about. When I first decided to become a teacher I knew I wanted to use these in my classrooms so I was really excited to read about them and learn that they are actually effective for the whole class and not just the one random student (me).

I think that any opportunity teachers have to get their students writing informally is one they should jump at because there are so many benefits to writing that mostly go unnoticed. I know it is a change from how we learned in “the good old days,” but I think this is one change we really need to push for.