Plan your series of lessons

Teaching in Higher Education

Now that you know what it is that students must learn, you need to make an outline of your sessions. At this stage, you are looking at the series of sessions as a whole and sorting it into a progression of lessons.

Find out more about your topic. You will need to develop it and make written notes. You might be very confident that you have mastered it, but you will still need notes and materials. In fact, your institution may have particular design rules on notes e.g. layout templates, page or budget limits, etc.

If you haven't done so yet, develop any new learning activities. They should be relevant and engaging, and should work for adult students.

Group content according to topics

Group skills or knowledge together according to topics; that is, break the content into manageable chunks. This will also mean that you'll only have to teach everything once.

It sounds easy, but getting a clear idea of exactly what you want to teach will simplify your teaching life.

You might want to simply have a lesson on each aspect of your purpose statement, but this is not always a good idea. You might need to:

💡 Tip. The unit outcomes are not a curriculum of what you should teach. You might have to add material to get students from where they are now to achieving those outcomes.

Integrate assessment into classroom schedules

Classroom schedules normally give you limited time to get students to the outcome. Look at all the advantages of integrating assessment into lessons:

  1. You can normally get everything done within your time limits.
  2. Assessment is easier to manage if you can use the same activity for practice, formative assessment and final assessment.
  3. If you let each stage of a lesson flow naturally into the next, practice progresses easily into the final assessment. Students are better prepared for assessment and less nervous.
  4. It is very unlikely that students will be assessed as not yet competent because you have observed their practice and given formative assessments.
  5. Besides, students have a better chance of being ready for final assessment on time if you notice soon enough what they still need help or extra practice with.

Here's how a session could follow these stages:

Introduction You let people know the purpose and why this is important
Demonstration You show students what to do and tell them how to do it
Guided practice The students try it and you provide guidance
Independent practice They try it with less guidance from you.
Formative assessment You monitor how they are going and informally do a formative assessment while they are practicing. You might also ask students to assess themselves or assess each other.
Summative assessment: When students are ready, do the final assessment by walking around the class with an assessment form.

 

You can also use the same progression over several lessons or over a whole unit. It is normally a mistake to do a summative assessment in each lesson, and you would have summative assessment towards the end of the unit.

⚠ Avoid holding many small assessments over a longer period, becuase you might not put all the parts together. Make sure that it really is summative assessment and that you put all the parts together.

Decide on a sequence

A sequence is the order in which you you will progress through the material. You need to sequence it in a way that students will see a simple, natural progression in the lessons. All sequences:

It is important at two levels: the whole course and each lesson.

You will know if the sequence is probably working if students think That seems easy, That makes sense, or I can do it now. (It's easy to teach people something they already know; the challenge is to teach them something that they don't know yet.)

Some sequences

Progress chronologically (recommended) Use steps or stages as if you were telling a story (like these materials). Easy to use for lots of things.
Make the basic principles clear very early, and then build on them. Good for working with concepts, and appeals to conceptual learners. You can add sophistication or detail afterwards. You can explore different case studies to see how the principles work in practice.
Simple to complex skills 1 Introduce the topic of study, provide basic skills and practice in each lesson, then put skills together in a more complex project.
Simple to complex skills 2 Start with orientation, then monitor adjustment, then provide basic skills and practice in each lesson, and then provide more sophisticated skills.
Quest Go on a quest to find answers. Start with giving some information, then give a question or task, then let students explore and reflect.
This sequence is quite difficult to use because you need some idea where your students might end up, but you can't predetermine their answers.
Concrete to abstract Stage 1: Concrete experience. Students need to do the job with real people in real situations learning real skills. On-job learning is by nature holistic, not artificially divided into many separate units. By being workplace-driven, students' learning experience can be highly efficient and very practical.
If you are leading a group through this stage you might be most interested in asking questions like: "What did you do?" "What happened?" You might also want to get your students to explain their experiences as a story.
Stage 2: Observation and reflection. Students need time to reflect on what they do, ask the bigger Why? questions figure out the big picture of what they are trying to achieve. Sometimes the challenge is to find the best questions, not just the best answers.
It is best if students can meet with peers who are going through similar experiences, and get input that is not available at the workplace. It may be in a classroom situation, or it may be at a much wider gathering.
Stage 3: Concept formation. At this, stage, students need to start developing their own idea of what is going on or understanding how to achieve a particular purpose. At this stage they are still working with hypotheses, things that they have not fully tested for themselves. Some students will be very creative and others might simply be "internalizing" an already existent body of skills and knowledge.
If you're working at a higher academic level, you'll probably find that information (e.g. textbooks, library, Internet) might be very helpful at his stage. But don't let your students just believe whatever authors say; they need to formulate their own ideas through evaluating written materials.
Stage 4: Testing new learning. At this stage, students put their new knowledge into practice to see how it works. This will give them new experiences from which to learn and start the cycle again.
The classic outline The classic outline was was developed by the ancient Greeks. It is excellent if you have a point that you need to make and prove. It can work best in some kinds of lecture situations, especially if you are dealing with ideas. It depends on your ability to be very fair with evidence and not over-opinionated.
Introduction: Define the importance of your topic, and express your point (the thesis) as a declarative statement.
Defense: Describe honestly each argument against your point, starting with the strongest argument. Give a response to each one, either by defending your thesis or by qualifying it.
Give arguments for: Give each argument in support of your thesis, starting form the weakest argument and going through to the strongest. Give evidence for each argument. Give more space or time to the stronger arguments.
Conclusion: Restate your thesis, recap the arguments, and close with a general application that doesn't bring up any new points.
Sequence 1
  1. Identify the purpose and why it is important
  2. Look at what it is that students need to know (the content)
  3. Identify the implications of putting it into practice
  4. Make the decision to implement it
  5. Attempt implementation
Sequence 2
  1. Identify the purpose and why it's important
  2. Research a procedure
  3. Formulate an approach
  4. Implement the approach
  5. Evaluate.
Sequence 3
  1. Introduce the topic of study
  2. Provide basic skills and practice in each lesson
  3. Put skills together in a more complex project for assessment.
Sequence 4
  1. Give orientation
  2. Monitor adjustment
  3. Provide basic skills and practice
  4. Provide more sophisticated skills.
Sequence 5
  1. I do, you watch
  2. I do, you help
  3. You do, I help
  4. You do, I watch
Sequence 6
  1. Give students an idea with a short explanation that they can easily understand.
  2. Get them to make a simple response to it. (The purpose at this stage is to engage students rather than explore the idea.)
  3. Do a learning activity that helps them understand it. You will need to give students considerable guidance at this stage, because the idea is still quite new to them.
  4. Students do more learning activities with decreasing amounts of teacher help. This is called the fade because the role of the teacher fades out. It correlates to practice and formative assessment.
  5. Students do it on their own without help. This is called the release because the student is released to do the task by him/herself. It is also the summative assessment phase.
Sequence 7
  1. In your preparation, break the skill into simple steps. This will make it easy to understand and communicate.
  2. Start by telling students the purpose or goal of the skill.
  3. Show the students how to do each step.
  4. Let students do each step with help and supervision. (They start performing the skill themselves.)
  5. Let them practice repeatedly with little or no help and supervision. (They become proficient)
  6. Assess whether they can do it. (Now you know that they have the skill.)
  7. You can add any difficult cases after students have the basic skill. There might be variations of the basic skill, complications, or exceptions.

Review your preparation so far

Review the program draft with key stakeholders. You can use written quality criteria and evaluation tools if you have them. Important things are

💡 Tip. Flip the class-room. If you give lectures, put them on YouTube and assign them for homework. Then spend the whole class time for activities.