Every teacher knows what a pedagogical lecture plan is meant to achieve in the classroom. But if you want to know how to organize your approaches towards engaging lectures that make the most of in-class time and promote deeper interaction among students and their peers, yet still focus on your instructional learning outcomes, try our brand new (and totally free) lecture planning tool.
This is the first of a set of four teaching resources we’re making available to all instructors to incorporate into their instructional lesson plans. Our tools can be used whether you’re using Top Hat in class for quizzes (or other methods of assessment), to display and share digital content, or simply as an audience response tool.
As well as a curriculum lecture plan, our Top Hat tool kit will include an innovative course storyboard that can be integrated into your teaching strategies, a one-pager on how to create measurable goals and a chart that will let you determine the best types of assessment activities to implement for your particular class and student learning styles. Taken together, these powerful teaching tools will encourage you to place student learning and activity at the center of your course planning during the preparation period and beyond.
After you’ve downloaded the plan, there are three fields that we think merit particular attention:
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Learning outcome
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Input from you
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Assessment
This is the driving force behind your pedagogical lesson—which is why it’s one of the larger fields. The objective should be personalized and customized to your course to promote active learning for students, in addition to being relevant to your ongoing assessment. Making it a ‘SMART’ goal (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound) is a sensible idea. Doing so will effectively facilitate the active learning experience, and encourage student engagement and participation in the course material. Because this is such an important responsibility, we’ll be giving more focus and detail to this in our forthcoming resource for educators, the source storyboard.
This is where you clarify what strategies you, as an educator, can demonstrate via pedagogical lessons for learners through your instruction of an assignment. Again, with a focus on the students and deeper collaboration, this is where you would document class activities that are part of the curriculum based around the learning objectives, and what engaging case studies or examples your students can practice as assignments to aid in the learning process.
How will you assess student work, and student learning through their knowledge and mastery of the subject? While considering formative and summative assessment for students in an ever-evolving student population, it’s also worth thinking about other methods of instruction to use in your teaching. These could include self-assessment, or one of several techniques listed for consideration here. Again, we’ll be focusing on assessment in a future instructional tool for the classroom and student learning, to further foster student learning.
Of course, any educational tool can only go so far in the teaching and learning experience—as a teacher who provides instruction in the classroom, and employs different teaching methods, you bring the creativity, through presentations, interactive instruction, and other teaching and learning strategies, along with focus and discipline to your class environment. But by putting the action of your students at the core of your pedagogical plan, then, as John Dewey said, “the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.”
Practice how to organize an active learning lecture, and shift your thinking of pedagogy, now — click here to check out the entire toolset and download the lecture plan as a PDF.
