Professional Practice Standard 2: Instructional Planning
The purpose of Virginia’s Instructional Planning Standard is for the teacher to create thorough lesson plans ahead of time that can be used to analyze data, structure a baseline, and set an achievable goal. Consequently, the goal of this standard is for the teacher to chart a course that allows each individual student to reach such a goal, implementing appropriate scaffolds, activities, and other practices along the way. Finally, the objective of this standard is for the students to reach the goal set by the teacher and, thereby, effectively learn and progress.
The prepared teacher can implement instructional planning by completing the following tasks:
Using Data to Guide Planning:
This requires that the didactic experiences teachers create are informed by ongoing analysis of what concepts students do not yet know but will need to, what concepts of which students can improve their understanding, and what concepts students have mastered. In short, content is just challenging enough to keep students interested but not too challenging so that they feel defeated or too easy so that it is redundant. Using data to guide planning also involves employing numerous checkpoints to assess whether the students have mastered the current task(s). It allows teachers to flesh out essential concepts that students need in order to function in life beyond the classroom and to then create authentic ways for them to hone said concepts or skills.
Here is a link to access a lesson plan I prepared in which students are placed in reciprocal teaching groups and given a specific role in annotating a short story based on their score on a reading benchmark. Students with lower scores were designated as questioners and those with higher scores as clarifiers. Here is a link to the assignment each group was responsible for completing.
Aligning Objectives:
Before teachers can effectively align lesson objectives with the specific school’s curriculum as well as to student learning needs based on data, they must truly understand each standard. This understanding must be on a micro view and on a macro view to see how all of the standards fit together in order to build a holistic learner. By implementing this comprehensive analysis, teachers can better focus on the verbs within the curriculum, i.e. the skills that must be mastered, and, in so doing, on students’ needs.
Personalized Instruction:
Planning for personalized or differentiated instruction involves precisely tailoring instruction to meet each student’s individual needs and unique learning style. By presenting students with a choice of product based on their unique learning styles and interests, they will be more engaged and, therefore, more likely to complete the task well, resulting in a successful learning outcome.
Here is a differentiated lesson plan I used to help students review before taking a summative test on the parts of speech unit. Here are the review activities students participated in based on their quiz scores. Additionally, here is a list of project options students could choose from to demonstrate mastery of the eight parts of speech. For these projects, students had the option of utilizing interpersonal, musical, kinesthetic, visual, linguistic, and/or logical intelligences. Finally, here is a list of final project choices for Shakespeare’s Macbeth that cover musical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, visual, linguistic, logical, kinesthetic, and/or existential intelligences, depending on the chosen project.
Thesis:
Please click here to access my paper on this professional practice standard as part of my thesis for my MAT degree from Hollins University.