Messiah College

Instructional Planning for

Elementary, Early Childhood, and Secondary Education

Overview: A lesson plan is an instructional system that describes the strategy that you intend to
use to help your learners achieve specific instructional goals. To be most useful, an instructional
system must represent your thinking and professional judgment in three critical areas:

a. instructional goals and content to be learned (Where are we going?)

b. assessment (What will we do when we get there?)
c. instructional strategy (How will we get there?)

The focus of an instructional system is on specific learning outcomesnot the amount of time to
be spent teaching. Therefore, a well designed instructional plan may (and often does) require
more than one class period, or daily lesson, to implement completely. To ensure that you plan for
each critical component of your instructional system, you need to address all of the topics
indicated in the following structure:

Summary of Instructional Plan Structure

(use all of these headings in your plan)

A. Instructional Goal and Learning Outcome

B. Academic Standards Addressed
C. Essential Content
D. Instructional Objective (Summative Assessment Strategy)
E. Instructional Sequence
1. Pre-instructional Events (anticipatory set)
2. Instructional Events (modeling, guided practice)
3. Post-instructional Events (independent practice, closure)
F. Daily Lessons
G. Summative Assessment (Consistent with Instructional Objective)
H. Modifications and Accommodations
I. Resources

Each of these critical components is explained briefly below. Use each of the bold-faced
headings as headings in your own written plan. Begin your plan by providing the following
basic identifying information:

Name: Subject:
Date: Topic:
Grade: School:
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A. Instructional Goal and Learning Outcome

State the instructional goal(s) that learners are to achieve. Write your goal with a clear
capability verb (e.g., state, identify, apply, demonstrate, etc.) and clear content.
Clearly indicate the learned capability that each of your instructional goals represents
(declarative or procedural knowledge).

EXAMPLE: Learners will be able to identify examples of adult insects. (procedural)

EXAMPLE: Learners will be able to apply the rule for punctuating compound sentences
with commas. (procedural)

EXAMPLE: Learners will be able to list the first 10 elements and their symbols on the
Periodic Table. (declarative)

B. Academic Standards Addressed

Clearly state the Academic Standard(s) Addressed that your instructional goal supports.
Provide the standard wording as well as its numeric reference.

C. Essential Content

Clearly indicate the essential content that your learners will need to acquire so that they
can perform the learned capability described by your instructional goal. If a verbal
information goal, what are the specific facts to be learned? If a concept goal, what is the
definition of the concept? If rule or principle goal, what is the rule or principle?

EXAMPLE: Definition of adult insect: An adult insect is an animal without a backbone

that has three body parts, six legs, and two pairs of wings.

EXAMPLE: Rule: To punctuate a compound sentence, connect the two independent

clauses with a coordinating conjunction (and, or, but) and place a comma
before the conjunction.

EXAMPLE: The first ten elements are: Hydrogen (H), Helium (He), Lithium (Li),
Beryllium (Be), Boron (B), Carbon (C), Nitrogen (N), Oxygen (O), Fluorine
(F), and Neon (Ne).

D. Instructional Objective (Summative Assessment Strategy)

Write a precise instructional objective that describes the assessment strategy you will
eventually use to determine if your learners are able to perform the learned capability
described by your instructional goal (see Part F). Remember that your assessment strategy
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needs to describe how you plan to collect reliable data to help you make a valid decision
about your students achievement of the instructional goal (Part A). Remember also that
your instructional objective describes how you plan to assess your learners (see Part F)
not how you are planning to teach them. Your instructional objective should be a
description of how you will collect SUMMATIVE data. This is NOT a description of
practice opportunities or formative assessment. Each instructional objective must include
the following components:

1. Performance (Observable Behavior): What will learners do to demonstrate their

achievement of the instructional goal? The performance described must be consistent with
your instructional goal. Include both the capability (instructional goal) and the specific
action verb.
2. Context (Conditions): In what kind of environment will learners perform? Describe
directions, materials, resources, and so on that will be provided to learners.
3. Quality (Degree or Criterion): How well do learners have to perform? Describe the
criteria that you will use to determine if your students have achieved the instructional goal.

E. Instructional Sequence

Describe the teaching procedures you will use to help your learners achieve the learned
capability described by the instructional goal. Organize your procedures according to the
following three general phases of instruction (use a heading for each one):

1. Pre-instructional Phase. Describe how you plan to prepare your learners for instruction.
Specifically, how will you:
(a) gain learner attention,
(b) establish learning goals and motivation, and
(c) stimulate learner recall of relevant prior knowledge?
This phase also may be referred to as establishing an anticipatory set or as set induction.
What will you do? What will your learners do? How will you prevent classroom
management problems from occurring? Be specific!

2. Instructional Phase. Describe how you plan to engage your learners with the essential
content to be acquired. Specifically, how will you (a) engage learners with the information to
be processed so that it is meaningful to them and (b) provide guidance and support for your
learners encoding processes? How will you collect formative assessment data? Clearly
describe how you will use examples and nonexamples to support skill learning. The
cognitive and associative stages of skill learning (input, modeling, demonstration, guided
practice) occur during this phase. What will you do? What will your learners do? How will
you prevent classroom management problems from occurring? Be specific!
You might think of this as the phase where you:
a) Tell them. Include explicit strategies for the promotion of encoding,
organization, elaboration, etc.
b) Show them. Include sufficient number of divergent examples and non-
examples to make your point clear.
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c) Guide their practice. Include opportunities for students to practice the new
skill with adequate scaffolding from you and/or others in the class.

3. Post-instructional Phase. Describe how you plan to strengthen student learning.

Specifically, how will you (a) provide performance/practice opportunities, (b) informative
feedback, and (c) support long-term retention and transfer? How will you collect formative
assessment data? The autonomous stage of skill learning (independent practice) occurs
during this phase. What will you do? What will your learners do? How will you prevent
classroom management problems from occurring? Be specific!
You might think of this as the phase where you:
a) Provide increasingly difficult and authentic independent practice opportunities.
b) Provide multiple mechanisms for feedback on practice.
c) Work toward effective transfer and automaticity.

The post-instructional phase is NOT where you would do SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT.

Summative assessment comes after the independent practice opportunities.

F. Daily Lessons

A daily lesson is the set of specific learning activities that you plan to implement during a
specified period of class time. The activities described in your instructional sequence may
require more than one day or class period to complete. Therefore, in this section you need to
think about how you will allocate the activities described in your instructional sequence to daily
lessons. For example, if you estimate the need for three class sessions to move your learners
through the entire instructional sequence you have planned (Part E) and each class session is 45
minutes, you will need to outline the specific activities that you are planning for each of the three
45-minute sessions.

To develop each daily lesson, you can simply summarize the specific events that will occur and
their order. There is no need to provide detailsyou already have done that as you planned your
instructional sequence (Part E). So each daily lesson simply outlines the events from your
instructional sequence that you intend to implement on that particular day. In addition to
outlining these events, each daily lesson also needs to specify how you will get your learners
interested and motivated for the days activities (anticipatory set) and how you will provide a
meaningful ending to the days activities (closure). For each daily lesson, use the following
structure:

1. Time Estimate
2. Expectancy, Motivation, Interest, Attention (Anticipatory Set)
You may want to spell out exactly what you will say/do to open the lesson.
3. Specific Learning Activities (list from Part E)
4. Review, Wrap-up (Closure)
You may want to spell out exactly what you will say/do to close the lesson.
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G. Summative Assessment (Consistent with Instructional Objective)

Describe specific procedures and materials that you will use to implement the assessment
strategy described by your instructional objective (see Part D). Include any analytical
scoring scales (i.e., rubrics) necessary for judging the quality of subjectively scored data or
performance assessments. Attach any worksheets that you plan to use to collect assessment
data. The assessment strategy described here must be consistent with the assessment strategy
you described by your Instructional Objective (Part D). The assessment strategy described
here and in your instructional objective should not appear as part of your instructional
sequence.

H. Modifications and Accommodations

Describe any specific adaptations you may need to make to support your learners who have
special needs or disabling conditionsregardless of whether the students are identified or
not. Anticipate any particular classroom management issues or problems that may occur
throughout your lesson and describe specific strategies you will use to prevent them from
occurring. Also include provisions for class safety.

I. Resources

1. Materials: Review your instructional sequence and assessment strategy. List specific
materials you will need to have readily available when you implement instruction and
assessment.

2. Advance Preparations: What must you make, mix, purchase, order, reserve, etc., ahead
of time?

3. References: Provide complete bibliographic information (title, author, publisher, date,

page numbers, etc.) for all resources referenced in your instructional system: textbooks,
childrens literature, CDs, computer software, curriculum kits, music, video tapes,
internet cites, etc. Use APA style or the format that is most appropriate for your
particular academic discipline.