Twin Moons Officer

Basics Of Adult Teaching and Learning

May 2024 Meeting

Explore

Basics Of Adult Teaching and Learning

Intro

LOs:

Define Lesson Plan

Identify the importance of using lesson plans for teachers and learners.

Recognize clear and measurable learning objectives.

Identify aligned assessments

Curate learning materials

Apply to your course by identifying.

Clear, measurable CLO

1-2 MLOs

How you will know if learning goals have been met?

Why Lesson Plans?

You have an important set of knowledge and information you want to pass on in order to support the growth of our community and your craft

Benefits to Teachers:

Enhances teaching effectiveness: Planned lessons allow educators to deliver content in a clear, organized manner, increasing learner understanding.

Promotes student engagement: Well-structured lessons are more likely to capture learner attention and maintain their interest.

Supports differentiation: Through careful planning, educators can tailor instruction to meet the diverse needs of learners.

Facilitates assessment: Planned lessons align with assessment methods, enabling educators to accurately gauge student learning and provide timely feedback.

Benefits to Learners:

Clarity of expectations: Clear objectives and organized course structures help learners understand exactly what they will be able to do.

Increased retention: when learners understand exactly what they will get out of a course or lesson and how they will be able to use this information going forward, they are more likely to retain the information

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What is a Lesson Plan?

At it’s core, a lesson plan is the process of outlining the structure and content of a lesson to achieve specific goals.

When you set out to teach a class, in your mind, you likely have specific skills or information you want to pass on to the learners, right? Or at least, you should.

The purpose of creating a lesson plan is to ensure that:

What you’re teaching is clear

Engaging

Maximizing your instruction time

Providing direction and coherent activities

In Short, you can create a lesson plan by asking these questions:

What do you want learners to be able to do or know at the end of this course?

What are the steps a learner needs to take or know in order to do that thing?

What information do you need to share to get them there?

How do I know they have achieved the goal we set out?

Learning Objectives

An important part of any lesson plan is - learning objectives. What is a learning objective? Well, as we already discussed that is a measurable skill you want your learner to know when they leave you. Learning objectives are the foundation or the north star of every course or lesson plan.

In Higher Ed, we define this as “measurable objectives precisely describe what learners will be able to do if they successfully complete your course. These describe desired learner achievement in terms that are specific and observable enough to be measured by the instructor.”

Writing an Objective

As mentioned, there are some qualifications to what a good learning objective is. They should be clear, precise, and measurable.

A clear objective would be to “Identify types of stitches used in historical sewing.” An unclear objective would be “understand sewing techniques”.

This is unclear because it’s vague and lacks specificity, making it unclear what exactly I’m going to be expected to do by the end of the lesson.

So how do we write a clear, measurable objective?

Start with an action verb. Examples: identify, explain, solve, analyze, create

Describe the performance - what will they be able to do? Be specific!

Verb: identify Action: types of stitched used in historical sewing

Measurability

When we talk about “measurable verbs” or “measurable objectives,” what we mean by this is it’s a change or action I can observe or measure. We usually do this through assessments or knowledge checks. This is just a way for me, the faculty/instructor to ensure that you’re picking up what we’re putting down.

Your LO verb should in some way indicate what that assessment looks like. It informs the learner not only what they will be able to do but also how we’re going to check that learning later on.

In our example LO, Identify types of stitches used in historical sewing. I might check that you know this through a quiz or just show you a set of examples of stitches we’ve previously discussed and ask you what these are. I know we’re doing well if you can correctly identify these. That’s measurability or measurable LOs.

Bloom’s Hierarchy of Learning - Suitability and Scaffolding - MLOs

Now, I don’t want to get too deep into learning theory and pedagogy today - that might be a) boring b) maybe a bit too much for this audience. This actually takes me to two important points of lesson design: suitability and scaffolding!

When creating your lesson plan and defining your objectives, it’s important to know who your audience is. If this is someone who has no previous knowledge or experience with whatever we’re talking about we need to start at the super basics. We can’t start with advanced information or techniques for whatever we’re talking about. And the inverse, if our audience is folks that are experienced, they will get bored or check out of your lesson if you’re going over the basics and not giving them anything new or advanced. This is where Bloom’s Hierarchy of Learning comes in handy:

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This pyramid outlines the learning process from lower-ordered skills to higher-ordered skills. Remembering something is the first step to understanding. Understanding is the basis for applying and so on, and so on. You want to identify or state what level your class is so that learners find themselves in the right course for them.

This hierarchy of learning helps create smaller module objectives that break down larger objectives and help us acquire higher skills. Much like how you don’t become an expert owl drawer in two steps, we need to break down this larger goal into smaller, bite size pieces in order to accomplish our goal. This applies to anything you want to teach. Skills are built over time! So, we might start with learning the smaller things like what a stitch, what the the types of stitches, how to use the stitches, figuring out which stitch is the best for the project I’m working on, and so until you can actually make the thing.

These smaller, scaffolded steps are what we often call Module Objectives.

Module Objectives

Objectives also come in two levels or forms:

course level - The big ideas or skills

module level - the small steps that get you to the big thing

Let’s think about our owl meme again - we have step 1 and then.... step 10. We’re missing a hell of a lot of steps between to learn how to draw this damn owl.

Drawing the owl is the BIG goal and all the steps that get you to be able to draw the owl are module objectives or the little objectives that get you there.

Assessments- Checking Your Knowledge

Now that you’ve established your big and small goals, you can consider how we verify or check this goal has been accomplished. We can look back at our objectives to help us with this, or in some cases, we might create a perfect assessment and decide our objectives need some revision.

Assessment does not have to be a big test or quiz - it can be something small. Consider our owl example - I know you’ve met the goal of drawing an owl, well, when you’ve successfully drawn an owl. If we look at our sewing example, I know you’ve met our module goal of identifying stitches when I can

Conclusion

In Short, you can create a lesson plan by asking these questions:

What do you want learners to be able to do or know at the end of this course?

Who are my students? What do they know now?

What are the steps a learner needs to take or know in order to do that thing?

What information do you need to share to get them there?

How do I know they have achieved the goal we set out?

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