Category Archives: Lesson & Unit Planning

by | September 8, 2024 · 10:55 am

Performance Assessment: connecting teaching, learning, and assessment to support student

Performance Assessment is a way to integrate not only students’ knowledge and competencies but also the teaching and assessment process. By engaging in a more ‘real-world’ and authentic approach, students will learn in a more contextualized and deep way!

Performance Standards: The B.C. Performance Standards have been developed for voluntary use in B.C. schools. They describe the professional judgments of a significant number of B.C. educators about standards and expectations for the following key areas of learning: literacy, numeracy, social responsibility and healthy living. These came from work conducted by educators as part of the BC Network of Performance based schools.

What is a performance assessment?

This type of assessment evaluates students’ knowledge in a more complex way because students need to show what they know and are able to do through a practical and contextualized activity (Darling-Hammond & Adamson, 2010). In this sense, students produce something, such as an experiment, a performance, a report, research, etc that materialize what they have learned.

Moreover, performance assessment gives teachers the space to think about assessment beyond a way of measuring student learning. This type of assessment is also an opportunity for student learning since they may understand better a concept or develop a new skill during a performance assessment (Darling-Hammond & Adamson, 2014).

Performance standards helps students practice and understand their learning and how they can apply it.

Differences between performance task and performance assessment

The biggest difference between performance tasks and performance assessments is that the latter is designed for students to demonstrate a group of skills and knowledge acquired during a couple of performance tasks.

Teachers might design a series of three or four performance tasks (for example, one for each week of class). Each one of these performance tasks has the purpose of developing different skills and knowledge. Consequently, the final performance assessment of this course should give the opportunity to students to demonstrate all skills and knowledge developed during the four performance tasks.

One common way in which performance tasks  might be designed is through project-based learning where students are invited to develop a topic connecting classroom knowledge with some real world, community or contemporary topic (Lenz, Wells & Kingston, 2015).

Performance assessment has the purpose of helping teachers (and students) understand what students have (or have not) learned over a period by getting them to apply and practice in a contextualized situations.

How to design a performance assessment?

The National Science Teacher Association (NSTA) has an interesting article with steps to help you design a performance assessment. Below, we summarize these five steps:

Step 1: Unpack the performance expectation: Teachers should understand their expectations or in other words what they expect students to achieve at the end of the lesson/ classroom. Thus, teachers need to evaluate if the performance assessment is really accessing what they want. In this step, teachers can use curriculum standards to better align their expectations with the performance assessment.

Step 2: Identify a rich and authentic phenomenon: the richness of performance assessment is exactly its characteristic of being contextualized. Therefore, teachers should pay attention to choosing a phenomenon that allows students to apply their knowledge and skills in an authentic way.

Step 3: Develop prompts: teachers should develop prompts and questions that guide students throughout the process without taking them the opportunity to discover and test their hypotheses and assumption because these experiences are essential to produce deep learning.

Step 4: Create scoring guides: teachers should create rubrics or order types of scoring guides for students during the process. These guides help students to understand the different kinds of activities and levels of expectations teachers expect them to complete.

Step 5: Pilot, score, and revise: before putting performance assessments in practice, it would be important to test them to analyze if they attend what you want and identify possible problems.

Performance Assessment Tools and Resources

The Performance Assessment Bank, an open educational repository, includes resources for interdisciplinary studies and in several discrete subject areas including history/social studies, english language arts, science and math. In BC, a set of performance standards was developed to support teachers in designing assessments. Below are some additional resources:

References

Darling-Hammond, L., & Adamson, F. (2014). Beyond the bubble test: How performance assessments support 21st-century learning. John Wiley & Sons.

Darling-Hammond, L. & Adamson, F. (2010). Beyond basic skills: The role of performance assessment in achieving
21st century standards of learning. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.

Lenz, B., Wells, J., & Kingston, S. (2015). Transforming schools using project-based learning, performance assessment, and common core standards. John Wiley & Sons.

 

Guest post by Peer Tutor Ariane Faria dos Santos (Ph.D. EDCP), Dec. 2021

Leave a Comment

Filed under Active Learning, Assessment, Blog Posts, Curriculum, Language & Lit Learning, Lesson & Unit Planning, Math, Open Educational Resources, Planning, Resources, Science, Social Studies, STEAM

Tagged as , , , ,

by | August 30, 2024 · 11:51 am

Lesson/Unit Planning: a guide for quick review of the essential points

This is a quick guide with questions you might ask yourself about your lesson/ unit plan to check that are considering the most essential points while planning.

1. Why do we teach..?

Let’s start with this video to help us understand why thinking about the goal of your lesson/ plan is the first step to achieving students’ learning. Please click to view.

Now it’s your turn:

  • Look at your lesson/unit plan and ask yourself:
    • Why do I teach? Is this reflected in my planning?
      • Who do I teach? Are my learners at the center of my planning?

2. Goal vs. Activities

One way to start planning is to select some activities you think your students will enjoy and then try to organize them together as a lesson or unit. The problem with this is that we can lose the focus, and move too far from what the goal of all these activities actually is. Moreover, choosing activities first rather than learning goals tends to not allow for differentiation, as these activities generally require all students to show their learning in the same way. See the difference between both processes:

comparing more backwards planning with more traditional approaches where backwards planning begins with outcomes in mind and moves to designing activities while former approaches might begin with a resource or activity idea.

Source: https://teaching.cambriancollege.ca/studio/backwards-planning/#1532372758719-5b1d9546-624f

 

In this example, a “backward design” process is recommended for planning because it allows more flexibility and focus and takes a more student-centred approach. The video below explains the step-by-step process of planning using backward design.

Personally, I like to do a brainstorm of all my resource and activity ideas around a central theme (because that’s often where my excitement and creativity lie!). Then, however, I set it aside and look to the curriculum for the specific content and competencies that are important for my students to learn/practice at a specific point in the year. Once I’ve established the learning goals, I’ll break them down into a progression of lessons and outcomes. Now I’m ready to get inspired again and look back at the resources I set aside to see if or where they might fit (or not!)

Do you want more examples? This Cult of Pedagogy blog post will be of interest. Dr. Shelley Moore offers examples of Inclusive design templates and frameworks that align with a backwards design model.

Now it’s your turn:

  • Look at your lesson/unit plan:
    • Did you start by choosing the activity or the learning goal? (if you started with the activity, look at it again and ask yourself “does this activity help students achieve the learning targets?”)
    • Can you identify pieces of evidence that your lesson/unit is focusing on learning goals rather than being merely a set of activities?

3. Write good learning goals (Part 1)

Defining learning goals is essential to a effective plan. The image below describes the features and examples of what a well-defined learning goal looks like:

Source: https://citl.illinois.edu/docs/default-source/online-course-in-a-box/good-vs-bad-learning-objectives.pdf?sfvrsn=2

 

Now it’s your turn:

  • Look at your lesson/unit plan:
    • Is your learning goal…
      1. Clear and specific?
      2. Measurable?
      3. Concise?
      4. Tied into course/curricular objectives?

4. Write good learning goals (Part 2)

When we are choosing our learning goals it is essential to pay attention to the ones that are similar to each other so that we can plan in a more focused way. Look at these three learning goals from the BC Math Curriculum (grade 3):

  • “Fractions are numbers that represent an amount or quantity”.
  • “Fractions can represent parts of a region, set, or linear model”.
  • “Fraction parts are equal shares or equal-sized portions of a whole or unit”.

Even though they are similar and these learning goals are all likely part of a unit of teaching, they likely aren’t part of a single lesson and teachers will want to plan different activities and assessments to achieve each one of them.

Now it’s your turn:

  • Look at your lesson/unit plan:
    • Are your learning goals related?
    • In what ways do the lessons/activities help students achieve these goals?
    • How do you know students have achieved the goals?

5. Connecting the why and what

In the BC Curriculum, we can interpret the Big Ideas as the “why” we teach and the content and competency as the “what” we teach, or in other words, the learning goals.

Now it’s your turn:

Look at your lesson/unit plan:

    • Do the curricular competencies and content work together to support learning around the big ideas?

6. Who are my students?

We do not plan for imaginary students but for the ones we have in our classes. Thus, it is essential to think about the student profiles and how to adapt your lessons to their needs and, potentially, their interests.

Tomlinson (2001) proposes a model to think about different student features we can consider while planning our lessons:

Source: Tomlinson, Carol A (2001). How to differentiate instruction in mixed-ability classrooms

Now it’s your turn:

7. Classroom setting

Our lessons happen in a space (physical or online). Thus it is important to think about how we will organize this space for each moment of the lesson. Tomlinson (2001) gives some ideas of how a teacher can organize that space:

Source: Tomlinson, Carol A (2001). How to differentiate instruction in mixed-ability classrooms

Now it’s your turn:

  • Look at your lesson/unit plan:
    • Have you planned the space for each moment of your class?
    • Behavioral expectations. How can different class instructional arrangements be used to deal with students’ behavior?
    • How can different classroom arrangements support your learning goals and students’ behavior?

8. Time

Our lessons also happen between some time frame. In this sense, it is not reasonable to plan the best lesson/ unit if they can not be implemented within the time limit you have.

Now it’s your turn:

  • Look at your lesson/unit plan:
    • Are your learning goals achievable within the time limit you have?
    • Do you have suggested times for each moment?
    • How many minutes are teacher-focused
    • How many minutes are student-focused?

9. What is next?

The last step in planning a lesson/ unit is to think about what is my next learning goal and how I can connect it to the current one. In other words, it is essential to think about the learning trajectory of my students and how I will support their progression.

It is important to understand how each learning goal is connected with the others. The BC Ministry of Education provides Learning Progressions to allow us to visualize and plan for curricular and cross-curricular learning.

Now it’s your turn:

  • Look at your lesson/unit plan:
    • Have you planned the progression of your learning goals?
    • Do you know your next goals and how they are connected to the current one?

10. Warm-up and end-up moments

Now that you have a good notion of your goals and the progression of you lesson/ unit, you can ensure the warm-up and end-up moments (opener/activating strategy and closure help to create coherence throughout your whole lesson/unit.

Now it’s your turn:

  • Look at your lesson/unit plan. Consider:
    • How you will start this class?
    • How will you provide closure?
      • Why did you make these choices?
      • How do they connect to the rest of the lesson?
      • Does your opening and closing help to start and complete a discreet cycle of learning? Are there opportunities to extend learning or signals of where you are headed?

More resources to support your lesson/unit plan

Guest post by Peer Mentor Ariane Faria dos Santos (Ph.D. EDCP), Aug. 2024.

 

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Assessment, Blog Posts, Inclusive Practices, Lesson & Unit Planning, Planning

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

by | August 2, 2024 · 2:47 pm

Unit Planning: one teacher’s approach

Guest post by Ariane faria-dos santos, Peer Mentor, PHD student EDCP 2022

The BC curriculum presents some challenges for teachers to plan because it requires that teachers combine Big Ideas, Contents, and Competencies. The purpose is to create clear goals which will guide teachers to design assessments and activities to develop concepts and skills in their students.

However, given the multiple possibilities of combining Big Ideas, Contents, and Competencies, teachers or teacher candidates may feel overwhelmed while planning without understanding how to balance these three elements.

With this challenge in mind, I’ve tried to unpack the steps of planning and propose a possible teacher’s journey through an iterative process of design using the new BC curriculum.

This video titled: Know Do Understand Model provides a very brief overview of the initial stages of the approach noted below (thank you Lexie, peer mentor 2021-22, for included it)

Step 1: integrating Big Ideas, Contents, and Competencies

 

 

As a first step, one might be select a Big Idea that a teacher wants to develop with their students through this Unit Plan.

For example, if teachers want to develop the Big Idea that “Numbers to 20 represent quantities that can be decomposed into 10s and 1s” (first-graders Big Idea), teachers will need to choose the Content and Competencies aligned with that Big Idea. (Keep in mind, that Core Competencies wrap around this process and are selected for inclusion based on what is the most needed or appropriate for the context/activity)

The math example beside shows some first-grade Content and Competencies that teachers can choose to develop this Big Idea. In this sense, teachers can choose the contents of “numbers concepts to 20” and “ways to make 10”. Teachers can also choose several competencies that students will do to demonstrate that they have learned the Contents and Big Ideas of this unit planning.

In addition, it is essential to pay attention that any Content or Competence that does not help to develop this Big Idea should not be included to not generate a loss of focus on this lesson planning. For example, the Content “addition and subtraction to 20 (understanding of operation and process)” should not be included because it does not help to develop the big idea chosen as the main focus of the lesson planning.

Step 2: integrating other relevant principles, subjects, and purposes

As a next step, I like to consider other principles, subjects, and purposes that I might include to make this lesson planning richer and more interested to their students.

  • Are there any first peoples principles of learning that are aligned with step 1?
  • Are there any ADST skills that I can include in this lesson planning?
  • Are there other subjects that may be integrated into this lesson planning?
  • Are there any other important principles to me as a teacher that can be integrated and aligned into this plan?

The only caution is that teachers should pay attention if the other points chosen are coherent with step 1 or if they are changing the main focus of the lesson planning.

Step 3: understanding my students’ prior knowledge, needs, and curiousities

My third step is to understand what students already know about these Big Ideas, Content, and Competencies with the purpose to discover the entry point in planning a sequence of lesson briefs (or, one might call this a pathway).

For example, in the example above a teacher should understand (or learn) their students’ background knowledge related to number sequence, how they count, if they are able to skip and compare numbers, etc. This prior knowledge will be essential to teachers design the more appropriate sequence for students to learn the Big Ideas, Content, and Competencies of this lesson planning. For a teacher just meeting their learners, they will want to incorporate some prior learning assessment during the first few lessons in a given Unit.

As you plan assessment and lessons, it is invaluable  to consider the needs of students regarding learning. Teachers should think about the diverse learners in their classroom and plan to attend to their needs which can be related to ELL, modified programs, career, etc.  Universal Design (UDL) suggests incorporating multiple ways of communicating and allowing students to represent learning in varied, multi-modal forms.

Finally, I like to consider the particular interests and curiosities of my students, planning lessons that engage students in the teaching and learning process.

Step 4: designing the units of my lesson planning

Now that teachers know the point they should start (step 3) and what they want to achieve (step 1), teachers should divide their lesson planning into several units (step 4) to design a pedagogical path to students achieve the lessons’ goals.

There are many ways of answering these questions and teachers should consider what will more support their students’ learning process.

If you want some suggestions and ideas, you can visit the Learning Design Blog

Step 5: designing the assessments

The fifth step is related to designing all formative and summative assessments for this lesson planning. Teachers should plan when they need to understand if their students have learned and design assessments to collect pieces of evidence of learning. Teachers should also consider when to choose formative or summative assessments and the format of each of them (written, oral, in a group, etc).

  • How should I give feedback to my students regarding their learning process?
  • When do I need formative assessments throughout the lesson planning?
  • When do I need summative assessments throughout the lesson planning?
  • What format should they have?
  • Should I propose performance assessments?
  • Should I use technology to support my assessment practices?

If you want some suggestions and ideas, you can visit the Learning Design Blog

Step 6: designing the learning activities

My next step in pre-planning is to design an outline of the learning activities that will give opportunities for students to develop skills and knowledge. These activities will ‘lead’ students to proficiency on the final Big Idea, Contents, Competencies in the Unit.

  • How long do I have for each lesson (may vary depending on your schedule and how much this unit integrates across the curriculum)
  • What are my objectives for each lesson? How do these link back to the overall unit objectives?
  • How many activities will my students develop in each class? Should they work individually, peers, in a group? What resources or strategies might I include? What digital tools or other manipulatives/hands-on learning will I integrate?
  • What kind of assessment will I incorporate? Initially, Assessment as and for learning including formative assessment to help guide the teaching and learning.

Video Overview

Below you can see a wonderful example of Language and Art Unit Planning from the BC Curriculum designed by Janis Sawatzky, Langley School district:

Planning Templates:

There is no ‘one way’ – that said, here are a couple that some teacher candidates have found helpful

For more on Planning for BCs Curriculum include examples, templates and tips, please visit:

Designing Learning Blog, UBC, Teacher Ed

Guest post by Peer Tutor Ariane Faria dos Santos (Ph.D. EDCP), Dec. 2021; Edited by Yvonne Dawydiak, Learning Design Manager, Teacher Education

KDU image reference: BC Ministry of Education https://youtu.be/lXyyZql2PZQ

Modified image (shown above with curriculum filled in) courtesy A.F.S Template – BC Curriculum

2 Comments

Filed under Blog Posts, Lesson & Unit Planning, Planning

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

by | July 4, 2024 · 10:57 am

BC Curriculum: Core Competencies

Understanding the Core Competencies

Core competencies of Thinking, Personal and Social, Communication

from: https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/competencies

According to the Ministry of Education, there are some essential understandings related to the Core Competencies and how they are connected with the other parts of the BC Curriculum:

  1. “The Core Competencies are sets of intellectual, personal, and social and emotional proficiencies that all students need in order to engage in deep, lifelong learning”
  2. “Along with literacy and numeracy foundations, they are central to British Columbia’s K-12 curriculum and assessment system and directly support students in their growth as educated citizens”
  3. “Students develop Core Competencies when they are engaged in the ‘doing’ – the Curricular Competencies – within a learning area” and, therefore, are an integral part of the curriculum.
  4. Even though the Core Competencies manifest in different ways, they are interconnected and are foundational to all learning.
  5. Core competencies are developed throughout the whole students’ life (before, during, and after school graduation, both inside and outside school settings). For these reasons, schools should not only value and integrate students’ knowledge acquired outside school but also give opportunities to students to learn and/or improve these competencies.

The BC Curriculum has three Core Competencies:

Communication

These are the competencies that students should develop to establish healthier relationships with others. In this sense, students should develop two groups of communication competencies:

    1. Communicating: BC curriculum identifies three facets (skills) that students should develop to active a good communication:
      • Connecting and engaging with others
      • Focusing on intent and purpose
      • Acquiring and presenting information.
    2.  Collaborating: BC curriculum identifies three facets (skills) that students should develop to be able to collaborate with others:
      • Working collectively
      • Supporting group interactions
      • Determining common purposes

Thinking

These are the competencies that students should develop to improve their intellectual development and produce new understandings:

    1. Creative Thinking: BC curriculum identifies three facets (skills) that students should develop:
      1. Creating and innovating
      2. Generating and incubating
      3. Evaluating and developing
    2. Critical Thinking and Reflective Thinking: BC curriculum identifies four facets (skills) that students should develop:
      • Analyzing and critiquing
      • Questioning and investigating
      • Designing and developing
      • Reflecting and assessing

Personal and Social

These are the competencies that students should develop to help them understand their own identity in the world. There are three facets within personal and social:

    1. Personal Awareness and Responsibility
    2. Positive Personal and Cultural Identity
    3. Social Awareness and Responsibility

The BC Curriculum recognizes that Core Competencies are developed inside and outside of school. Consequently, students, teachers, and parents/ guardians have different responsibilities and roles in the process of developing Core Competencies.

To guide students, teachers, and parents/ guardians in understanding how students develop proficiency in the Core Competency, the Ministry of Education has articulated profiles, or levels in the progression of development of each one of the Core Competencies. See an example on the BC government website

How to assess Core Competencies?

Assessment is another big challenge related to the Core Competencies but essential to guarantee that each student is developing them. BC Curriculum suggests that students should self-assess their own Core Competencies, but teachers have an essential role in developing strategies and tools to support students in this task.

Several school districts have published resources to help teachers engage in articulating and helping students self-assess the core competencies:

The Provincial Outreach Program for the Early Years (Popey) has some resources including PPTs with assessment examples  to support teachers implementation in  primary and pre-primary contexts.

Teacher Kerri Hutchinson from Surrey Schools explains and gives many examples of how she has developed and supported her students to self-assess Core Competencies:

Additional resources:

If you are looking for suggestions of how to develop the Core Competencies in your classroom, the UBC Education Library has a Core Competency booklist to support teachers in this work.

References:

Ministry of Education (2022, February 25). BC Curriculum Core Competencies. https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/competencies

Guest post by Peer Tutor Ariane Faria dos Santos (Ph.D. EDCP), Feb. 2022.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Assessment, Core Competencies, Curriculum, Lesson & Unit Planning, Not Subject Specific, Planning

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

by | June 30, 2024 · 7:02 pm

Know Do Understand (KDU): a starting point in planning

section header - what is it?

The BC curriculum’s more concept and competency based curriculum, expects that teachers combine Big Ideas, Contents, and Competencies as they plan learning experiences for their students. The purpose is to create clear goals which will guide teachers to design assessments and activities to develop concepts and skills in their students.

section header - why is it relevant

The KDU Planning Model can provide a simple initial planning structure and can support planning with the end in mind (backwards planning). It allows you to consider the connection with and between areas of the curriculum. and how the core competencies ‘wrap’ around or are foundational to this learning. Think of it as a cycle – The big idea is what you want the students to ultimately understand as a result of their learning; The Know section is the curricular content… they need to know this in order to develop their understanding of the Big Idea; The DO section is what you want the students to be able to Do by the end of the unit (the skills they will practice throughout the Unit that help them learn the content and develop their understanding of the Big Idea(s)!) Wrapped around all of this are the Core Competencies (more about those in the video below and later posts)

 

The BC Ministry provides background on the KDU model in this “Starting Points in Planning” PDF. The video below, titled: KDU Model, was created by Lexie, UBC Teacher Ed Peer Mentor 2020-21, and provides a very brief overview of how to consider Know-Do-Understand as you plan for teaching and learning in your context.

Here is a blog post from Ariane, peer mentor Winter 2021-22, sharing her approach to planning as she learns more about our BC curriculum.

Planning Templates as starting points:

Below we offer a few templates that align with the KDU approach. Please remember, there is no ONE approach or specific template that is required when planning for your learners. Please feel free to use, modify, adapt & share. Additional samples can be found on the Teacher Education ‘Designing Learning’ blog.

The BC Ministry of Education provides some instructional samples including this overview or lesson brief of a primary Math Unit “Patterns and Circles” and this more elaborated lesson plan example “Collapse of a Society” for Middle Years learners.

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Lesson & Unit Planning, Planning

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

by | October 15, 2022 · 8:26 am

Student-centered classrooms

What are student-centered classrooms?

The following video discussed that student-centered classrooms are focused on students’ interests and curiosities. In this sense, students choose not only what but also how they will learn. Consequently, student-centered classrooms have many specific characteristics different from traditional ones. However, these features can bring many advantages to students learning.

Source: Edutopia (2022, May 3).

Characteristics and advantages of student-centered classrooms

  • Focus on both content and competency skills: student-centered classrooms aspire to develop both academic and non-academic students’ skills. Hence, teachers design lessons focused on content and competencies which is aligned with BC Curriculum.
  • Student voice & choice: listening to student voices and designing lessons based on students’ choices and interests can improve engagement (links to external resource) in the classroom, and consequently learning. In this sense, teachers align curriculum goals with student voice and choice to produce a more engaged and even personalized teaching and learning environment. One example of this approach would be a choice board of activities or a choice in how students represent their learning.
  • Differentiation: teachers should design lessons that support students with different backgrounds and needs. To achieve all types of diversity, teachers should vary what knowledge is taught, how they present curriculum content and competencies through activities, and how they assess students learning.  Offering several teaching and learning process help to engage and reduce inequalities among students.

How do teachers design student-centered classrooms?

Stanford University explains that the process of designing student-centered classrooms may be different from more teacher-centric course design. While teacher-centered lessons prioritize content, student-centered classrooms start by selecting the learning goals that students will achieve at the end of a lesson. Student-centered design, also known as Backward Design, inverts the order of more traditional classrooms.

5 aspects of student-centered learning design: content, learning activity, assessment, learning objective, learning goal.

Stanford University (2022, May 3). Teacher-centered vs. Student-centered course design.

Source: Stanford University (2022, May 3).

References:

Edutopia (2022, May 3). Student-Centered Learning: Building Agency and Engagement. George Lucas Education Foundation. https://www.edutopia.org/video/student-centered-learning-building-agency-and-engagement.

 https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/explore-teaching-guides/online-teaching-guide/theory-practice/teacher-centered-vs-student-centered

Guest post by Peer Tutor Ariane Faria dos Santos (Ph.D. EDCP), May. 2022.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Active Learning, Inclusive Practices, Lesson & Unit Planning, Planning

Tagged as ,

by | November 15, 2021 · 1:43 pm

Puzzle of planning: types of hooks

The big picture of planning:

There are many ways of thinking about planning. Wiggins, Wiggins & McTighe (2005) suggest teachers are designers of activities and experiences to support students’ learning. As designers, teachers may think about planning as a puzzle they are building: a lesson is a group of pieces that together form a bigger picture. In this sense, the authors divide the planning into three moments: 1) desired results 2) assessment evidence, and 3) learning plan. However, each one of these moments has many other small slices. Hooks are one moment of stage 3: the learning plan.

What are hooks?

Hooks (links to post in this blog) are strategies used to

  • activate students’ previous knowledge,
  • engage students in the teaching and learning process
  • create a bridge between teacher and students (Auseubel,1978).

What are the types of hooks? When do I use each type?

Even though most hooks are used at the beginning of a lesson or activity, hooks can be a resource for many moments in the classroom. That is why we can classify hooks into different types and each one of them has a specific pedagogical function. We will look at A) Starting Hooks, B)A Hook as an Activity C) Background Hooks

A. Starting with a hook

These are in general short and used at the beginning of a lesson or activity. They are a great strategy to grab students’ attention and spark their curiosity to engage in the next learning moments. Starting hooks are also a contextualized way to understand students’ previous knowledge about the topic. However, in general, starting hooks do not develop new knowledge. They only engage students in the next main activity which intends to teach another content or competence. There are many starting hooks such as stories, analogy, pictures, maps, jokes, discrepant events, controversial statements, etc.

You can find some resources about starting hooks in these links:

B. A mix of hook/activity

They are a mix of hooks and activities because they are designed to engage students but also to develop some new learning. They can be used in many moments of a lesson and take more time. The general idea is to make students engage in some fun activity while they are learning something new. Some examples of this type of hook are games, field trips, hands-on activities, stations, data collection, etc.

You can find some resources about the mix of hook/ activities in these links:

 

C. Background Hooks

This type of hook is called background because it itself does not have any curriculum goal, but it can be the perfect scenery for learning activities. For example, a teacher wearing a bear costume may be funny but not pedagogical. However, if the teacher uses this costume to grab students’ attention to a lesson about Canadian geography and fauna, their students probably will learn more. Some background hooks can be props, costumes, scenery, role play, etc.

 

Guest post by Peer Tutor Ariane Faria dos Santos (Ph.D. EDCP), peer mentor, 2021

1 Comment

Filed under Activating Strategies, Blog Posts, Lesson & Unit Planning, Planning

Tagged as , ,