Prentice J. Sargeant
Social Studies: 6-12 Licensure
Instructional Planning
Instructional planning is the basis of a teacher’s job. Educators must be able to plan lessons that adequately convey necessary knowledge and skills to be mastered while simultaneously making those new skills accessible to students at every developmental level in the student population. Excellent educators must be able to utilize the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs), scaffolding, and student learning data in order to write meaningful lesson plans. Teaching is defined by ensuring that students are learning in order to better themselves and their critical thinking skills, so adhering to national, state, and local standards and taking the needs of every student into account are both critical aspects of instructional planning.
Standards of Learning:
For every lesson plan I design, I make sure to utilize the SOL Enhanced Scope and Sequence to make sure that I am covering all of the necessary content for each unit. The SOLs make it so that all of the required information is available to the teacher. It then falls to the teacher to apply that material in an engaging way. Below are examples of what I post on the blackboard everyday in class, showing the students the knowledge they should demonstrate and the skills they should develop in class and the SOL from which that material is drawn.
Scaffolding:
Scaffolding is a critical skill that educators must develop in order to ensure that students are learning material and developing skills relevant to the unit. Bloom’s Taxonomy is the best way to demonstrate scaffolding, as it shows how students can utilize higher order thinking when developing the mastery of knowledge or a skill. Below is a info-graphic that I used through my field experiences at Lucy Addison and Cave Spring to help me identify the types of higher order thinking students should be utilizing in my classes. I also have a few selections of higher order thinking that I used in individual lessons throughout my World War II Unit.
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Student Learning Data:
Using student learning data to enhance the learning is another critical aspect of instructional planning. When I created my two week unit on the Cold War, I gave my students a pretest as a way to see what they knew and what they did not know. I utilized the pretest to know exactly how I should plan my two week unit so that I focused on the material that my students struggled with on the pretest.
The Cold War Pretest I used determined that students needed to cover material related to the major events of the Cold War, so I designed a project that would allow students the opportunity to research a major event of the war and then teach the class about that topic. The Major Events of the Cold War Project raised the grades tremendously, as you can see in this graph comparing the pretest with the post-test.
Contact Information:
Prentice J. Sargeant
prentice.sargeant@gmail.com
540-797-8373