In my first year, if you had asked me what I was teaching next week, I would have said things like:
- Fraction Addition
- Transitive Verbs
- Wind Power
- Ancient Egypt
Now I realize that those are not lessons. They’re merely topics. And topics by themselves aren’t enough.
A Topic Is The Raw Ingredient
A topic is the content students will be thinking about. Think of it as the raw materials of a lesson. If you’re a chef, it’s your main ingredient. It’s your chicken, salmon, or eggplant. But the main ingredient isn’t the meal. It really, really matters what the chef does with the main ingredient. Bake it, fry it, boil it? These are all very different.
Likewise, it’s really, really important to plan how students will think about the topic. And Rookie Ian had no plan for how students would think. I just had topics.
But my mentor whipped me into shape. The key piece I was missing was the thinking skill. This is how I want my students to think about the topic. And you can use good ol’ Bloom’s Taxonomy to plan your thinking skills.
See The Difference A Thinking Skill Makes
Compare “I’m teaching wind power!” to these three, increasingly high-level statements:
- Students will compare and contrast the pros and cons of wind power with solar power.
- Students will find patterns in cities that have successfully implemented wind power.
- Students will decide which form of power would be best for Madagascar, Japan, and Norway.
See the massive change in expectations? It becomes really clear what students’ brains should be doing. And, because I’ve made a scaffolded sequence here, there’s room for “early finishers” to continue learning.
Now, those objectives are not complete! I still need to plan for resources and students’ products. I wrote more about creating a complete lesson objective here.