When planning a lesson, the objective needs four parts:
- Content
- Thinking Skill
- Resources
- Product
Content is simply the topic you’re teaching. SO many folks stop here. But a topic is not a lesson. Not by a long shot.
We also need the thinking skill, which comes from Bloom’s Taxonomy, and determines how students will think about the topic.
Then we need to plan what resources we’ll provide our students with so that they can do that thinking. And that’s what this article is about.
If I want my students to compare and contrast the pros and cons of wind power and solar power, they’ll need access to those pros and cons so that they can do the thinking skill of “compare and contrast.”
Perhaps there’s a particular table in our textbook that lists those pros and cons. Maybe there’s a video I can show that explains the pros and cons. We could read an article. We could interview an expert. Mr. Byrd could give a pros and cons lecture.
All of these are possible resources. Any of them could work. But we have to make the choice and provide something.
Be Specific
The biggest mistake I’d make was writing down a super-vague resource like “Google” or “the textbook.”
We want students to spend their energy on the comparing and contrasting. That’s the lesson’s objective. But if they have to spend 20 minutes looking for a good webpage using Google, they’re working on a totally different objective. “Students will find the pros and cons of wind power and solar power.”
Now, that could be an objective in an earlier lesson. That would be fine. But we can’t have two objectives going at once.
So, since this lesson’s goal is to compare and contrast, students just need the darn pros and cons.
A Place To Differentiate
If you provide simple, low-level resources, students will be stuck with simple thinking. The more sophisticated the information, the more sophisticated the thinking can be.
A grade-level textbook might be fine for students who are on-levelish. But your students who are way ahead of the pack will need appropriately interesting resources. Perhaps there’s a professional website you could use. Maybe there’s a better resource from the local library for these students.
Likewise, a student who is struggling to read the textbook would benefit from an easier-to-understand resource for their pros and cons.
The resources are another lever you can use to adjust a lesson’s complexity.