Overview:
Lesson plans are at the center of the creative teaching process that enables an effective teacher to synthesize knowledge of the learners, the curriculum, and the context of teaching. Lesson plans produce more unified classes and helps teachers think about their objectives, the sequence of activities, the materials to be used, and relationships between the current lesson and past or future lessons. Lesson plans help teachers make connections more explicit and meaningful to students.
Objectives:
Students will be able to:
- Identify, describe, and design a lesson plan for music,
- Write observable behavioral objectives,
- Identify age-appropriate psychomotor, cognitive, and affective skills for younger students,
- Identify high-quality teaching materials,
- Design music learning procedures through inductive and deductive methods,
- Organize instructional procedures in sequential order,
- Describe age-appropriate assessments, and
- Identify ways in which technology can be used to evaluate student learning.
What is a Lesson Plan?
The formal curriculum establishes major goals, competencies, and outcomes. Using these documents—usually in the form of curriculum guides—teachers develop the curriculum for their own classroom and the personal method or methods to achieve the goals through daily lesson plans. Lesson plans are the teacher’s realization of the objectives and methods employed to reach the long-term goals of the formal curriculum. Because of this, the lesson plan maps out immediate learning experiences that align with both the short-term objectives and long-term goals.
Learning activities should move from simple to complex, from sound-to-symbol, from the known to the unknown. Every lesson should begin with an activity that “grabs” the students’ attention and motivates them to participate in the class activities. Then throughout the lesson, a variety of activities should maintain students’ interest and hold their attention.
There are many formats or outlines for lesson plan construction. The common elements, in order, for lesson plans are as follows:
- Observable behavioral objectives
- Materials
- Procedures
- Closure
- Assessment
Here are some examples of lesson plan formats.
