Lesson Planning

[jamesb]

I've recently been given a project to develop some training materials and course plans. While I've done a couple of university lectures before I've not had to produce anything structured, and in this case I need to take a particular approach. I'm hoping someone here will have more experience with this sort of thing than me (not difficult) and might be able to point me towards guidance/resources.

 

The approach I need to take on this is modular, such that a bespoke course could be constructed for anything from two hours to a full week (obviously covering different topics in different depth depending on time available). For example, there might be a two hour phishing recognition and familiarisation course - or the option of adding in modules to extend it to a much more in-depth course for technical staff, covering how to protect users from phishing and train them in awareness.

 

Really what I want to do is build up a collection of lesson plans, which can be stuck together as needed. I've got all the stuff I want in my head, I'm just struggling with a way to actually put it on paper to demonstrate how this would work.

[steveking]

I'm speaking as a teacher. A lesson plan is a personal thing, only meant to be understood by you and used to guide the lesson (and sequence of lessons). It doesn't matter if it's total gibberish to anyone else, as that just isn't the point of them. Also, it's a plan not a cast in stone thing, and it's ok if you don't cover it all, or go onto the next lesson's stuff if you run out of activities for a lesson - or even if you go totally off on a tangent. I often get totally distracted by a random question I'm asked and can then easily spend 20 mins covering something I hadn't planned for. That screws up the plans but can make for a much better lesson for the class.

 

When I trained to be a teacher we were told to write looooong (at least one page, often 2 pages) lesson plans, but I never really needed them to deliver the lessons. Now, after 10 years of teaching (I so need a new job!), my planning consists of nothing for lessons I know I can deliver (well, nothing more than "we're doing topic x today"), and for new topics maybe a paragraph or two with key points in. For example tomorrow I'm teaching binary/linear searching to year 12 for the first time (a colleague has always taught it before) and my plan is:

 

"Understand linear and binary search.

Linear – for unsorted data, binary only for sorted data. Compare efficiency.

Create a linear search program, extend it to show how many comparisons it took.t

Create a binary search program, extend it to show how many comparisons it took."

 

That's enough (I hope) for me to get 75 minutes worth of lesson, with scope for the better students to push themselves and the weaker ones to at least have an idea of the topic. Perfect, nothing more is needed in my mind.

 

So, what I'm trying to say is don't get hung up on your lesson plans - instead come up with activities, work out roughly how long you think it may take to deliver it to your class/audience, and from there you can work out the timings. You should have a big overview of what you want to get done for a certain topic, and make sure all the activities add up to meeting that topic's work. If you want the option of a range of courses like you seem to maybe you can have intro activities which last say 20 mins, and have possible expansion tasks for each one which go into more detail. In your example of phishing sites a 20 min activity could be to just look at some phishing emails you've already found, and to see how to spot them. An extension to that could be to talk about URLs, and how to spot that HSBC Personal Banking and Online Banking | HSBC UK isn't the same as http://www.hsbc.some-free-site.co.uk and all that entails. You could also have an activity about passwords, and how only asking for certain digits is one anti-phishing technique, as is the use of the one time password generators.

 

To put that on paper I guess some sort of table with titles like:

topic, learning aims, prerequisites, timings

would probably suffice.

 

To repeat, it's the activities which make a lesson, not the planning.

 

All of that assumes it's going to be you teaching the stuff. If it's someone else who will be teaching it then it's totally different planning needed, more of a script - but that generally makes for dull lessons which don't react to what's happened so far in the lesson - think more of a lecture than a lesson.

 

I hope that's of some help.

[psydii]

IANAT.

 

I agree with Steve. What I would add is some generic advice: The less experience you have, the more you need to plan the individual lessons. And by "plan" in this case I mean for multiple eventualities, levels, questions, difficulties and distractions.

 

The production of a bank of "set pieces" for topics is a great resource, it sound to me like you have also been asked to develop what is commonly referred to as "schemes of work" from which lesson plans flow and in turn draw upon / follow from the set pieces depending upon the need of the teacher and their classes.

[jamesb]

Schemes of work sound about right actually. Not being in education for some years this is somewhat new to me (or old enough that I've forgotten it).

 

Thanks for the advice both, I've now got a place to start pulling things together.