Standard Four: Planning Instruction and Designing Learning Experience for All Students

4.4 Designing short-term and long-term plans to foster student learning.

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Description of Practice

Strong Practice that Exemplifies the Standard

Long-term plans are highly coherent. Learning sequences are responsive to the needs of individual students and promote understanding of complex concepts.

Maturing Practice

Long-term plans have a coherent structure, with learning activities in individual lessons well sequenced to promote understanding of concepts

Developing Practice

Long-term plans have a recognizable structure, although the sequence of individual lessons is uneven and only partially helps students develop conceptual understanding.

Practice Not Consistent with Standard Expectations

Individual lesson plans have little or no relation to long-term goals, or a unit plan has little recognizable structure.

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What the classroom looks like

• Translates content into a set of short-term and long-term learning goals for students sequencing learning activities and materials
• Understands the structure or hierarchy of a discipline
• Knows how mastery of one element is prerequisite to or related to learning another
• Planning includes breaking down knowledge, skills, and abilities into logically sequenced learning goals that reflect sets of more specific knowledge, skills, and abilities
• Examines and learns the table of contents of textbooks
• Studies the district and/or school curriculum, grade level expectations, or standards
• Draws upon student interests, experiences, and prior knowledge
• Chooses or creates specific learning activities, instructional materials, assessments, that are appropriate for their students' prior knowledge, interests, and backgrounds
• Creates or uses a syllabus for the course to distribute content and learning goals across the year
• Prescribes materials and procedures
• Progressively allows students to assume more responsibility for designing and conducting experiments
• Looks for activities with regards to the learning objective
• Provides learning opportunities in activities &Teachable moments (mini-lessons)
• Understands the district's curriculum and the particular concepts, knowledge, and skills that students are expected to master by the end of the school year
• Sequences lessons and learning activities
• Draws upon knowledge of the subject matter to identify where the current lesson or learning activity fits within the broader scope of the discipline as a whole as well as the curriculum
• Thinks of specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that they expect students to learn
• Planning includes identifying the major categories of knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to accomplish over the year
• Estimates the time necessary to complete the learning activities to ensure that they can be finished within the time available
• Consults with colleagues
• Examines different instructional materials
• Reflects upon their observations of students in and out of school
• Activities are comprehensible to the students through connections with their prior knowledge and experiences
• Familiar with the curriculum and grade-level or course
• Familiar with the length of time that different types of activities take
• Able to select a manageable series of learning activities to develop student knowledge and skills to promote student understanding of complex concepts.

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As teachers develop, they may ask, "How do I . . ." or "Why do I . . ."

• develop short-term and long-term plans that build on and extend students' understanding of subject matter?
• make decisions about organizing curriculum to allow enough time for student learning, review, and assessment?
• think ahead toward long-term goals for student learning?
• use my knowledge of subject matter and my students to plan and pace instructional activities over time? ¥ plan to ensure access to challenging, diverse, academic content for all students?
• provide opportunities for all students to learn at their own pace in my daily, weekly, and unit plans?
• incorporate diverse subject matter perspectives in my planning?