The Purpose Of A Lesson Plan printable pdf download

The purpose of a lesson plan:

To pinpoint what information and skills the student needs to learn

and how to get her to learn it.

Tutoring is an organized exercise in trial and error. There are no sure-fire methods of successful teaching

– though some work more often than others; see the “Tutoring Techniques” resource sheet – beyond

continually adjusting to the student’s style of learning and interests. To start out you will need to make

an educated guess of what will be most effective for your student. That guess, put into practice in your

first session, will give you valuable feedback on what works and what doesn’t. A lesson plan will allow

you to evaluate these mistakes and successes and use them to concretely benefit your student.

Remember, the key here is experimentation! The more you play around with different techniques, the

more you’ll figure out what works.

three parts

There are

to a lesson plan:

•

Where is your student now?

Where does she need to be?

How will you get her there?

Breaking these questions down into specifics gives you a definitive lesson plan. A sample is provided

below from sessions with a second grade student named Arielle, who is working on her math skills.

Where is my student now? What was she doing well in our last session, and what was difficult?

Last session my goal was for Arielle to gain a deeper understanding of the borrowing technique used

with subtraction. To accomplish this I experimented with representing a number physically, to give

Arielle a physical sense of place value and what it means to take something from the ten’s column and

move it to the one’s column. I was not able to ascertain the effectiveness of this technique because we

ran into a major difficulty: Arielle couldn’t concentrate.

Where does she need to be? What skills does she need to gain? What information?

In order for Arielle to learn anything effectively she needs to be able to concentrate. This means both

my learning to motivate her concentration and teaching her discipline so she can choose to concentrate

on her own.

How will I get her there? What techniques will help her gain the skills she needs?

This is the final and most important part of your lesson plan.

See the next sheet for an example outline.

The Purpose Of A Lesson Plan