Can you think of a time when a teacher used a lesson plan? Right, so maybe you feel like you know what a lesson plan is. Maybe you don't. Here's a couple of images that if you search on Google images that come up around lesson plans. And, well, let's just take a minute and look at them. Here's a different one. And one more, that looks different yet again. Did you see any of the things in these lesson plans that you thought might be part of a common lesson plan? Don't know. But the key thing I want you to note that there is no one definition of what a lesson plan is. First off, in education generally. Secondly, in K-12 education. Thirdly, in any particular grade band in education. Fourthly, in any particular discipline. And certainly not in computer science, since we really haven't been teaching computer science in K-12 at all, or certainly not very long. So at least in the United States there's absolutely no one definition of a lesson plan. That said, here's a definition of a lesson plan from Wikipedia. Take a minute and read this description for yourself All right, here's the last part of the Wikipedia definition. All right, now I added the bullet points. Those are not part of the original Wikipedia description. But I think it helps us to visualize some of the key components that I want you to take away from a lesson plan. First off is that a lesson plan isn't maybe what you think of, at least in your university courses, of what the professor is going to cover that day. But pretty much lesson plans always start with a particular learning goal or outcome. Now the Wikipedia description used the word learning trajectory, etc. I would say the learning goal or learning outcome for what you want the students to have learned coming out of it. Those are more commonly used in the United States. Secondly, is that a lesson plan in some way describes a process. It may have some information about what you, the teacher, does. But I think really importantly, and something that you might not think of, is it really should be focused on what students are doing. Because as we've talked about, it's students that have to construct their own knowledge. And so if you're really thinking about how you're going to be engaging students in learning something, you need to be thinking about what it is they're doing that's causing the construction of that knowledge. Finally, and this isn't necessarily common in all lesson plans, but this idea of, you would think and plan out in advance what would be an assessment or what would be some assessments that I could do. So that I could find out that after engaging the students in this lesson and doing things, and whatever, how would you know that they learned what you wanted them to learn from it? Okay, we want it just be like, well, I did it. I covered this, I had the students do that so they must have learned something. But what is something we could specifically have them do so that we would know. And sometimes that can be that you observe them in doing something. Sometimes it could be something like answering a multiple-choice question or something like that. So there’s also a couple of other ways lesson plans could differ. So as a newbie teacher you may really find value in lesson plans to help you stay on track in terms of what is going on in the classroom, and manage the time that you have with students. And also just because you haven't taught these things hundreds of times already. To have a plan for what you're going to be doing, and knowing that you don't skip something, and that you have students engaging in activities that will help them learn. However, specifically for people who will be considering teaching computing in their courses. We know that at least right now, you probably not likely going to actually have a degree in computer science. And computer science, maybe even what you teach primarily at a school, but it may also be that you teach something else. And it's certainly, at least in the state of California right now, required that you actually get your credential in another area. So you might be credentialed to teach math, okay, or maybe you're teaching Spanish, or Biology, or English. Okay, but it may not, that credential isn't going to be primarily in computer science. So how much computer science you've taken might not be that much, okay. And so I really think that for the near term, where the near term is probably at least the next ten years, that it's really important for K-12 lesson plans for computer science content to include what I call content knowledge. That is knowledge about the actual computer science that is going to be taught. Why is that different? Why am I making a big deal out of including content knowledge in computer science lesson plans? Well let's look at an example from a different area, something you probably know. This is just a small excerpt of a lesson plan for teaching long division. Just take a minute and glance over what it's saying here. All right, now this is a very teacher-oriented lesson plan, but I'll just point out this is the portion of it that's called Instructor and Teacher Modeling. They had a student-focused activity that came before it, etc. But the one key thing that I want to point out here is there's an assumption in this lesson plan that you, the teacher, really know long division. Okay, it might even say, assume that you can do long division, not feel bad about that, and maybe that you even know the kinds of things that students might commonly have a problem with. Now I do think it is nice. They did make sure that you point out the answer and the remainder just so you can sanity check. But that isn't, I found, very common in many lesson plans. So this is a big thing for me. In the computer science, I think to make lessons and computer science, education in general, more accessible to more teachers and to help them feel comfortable teaching it. We need to recognize the fact that they may not have a really strong background in computer science. Maybe they didn't study it for four years in college, and they probably didn't study it at all in high school. And so, for me, lesson plans in computer science do need to incorporate that content knowledge to help at least remind the teacher maybe about some learning that they had about this particular topic of computer science. Whether that's muddy cities, as we're going to look at next, or graphs, or you know, how the Internet works. Trying to incorporate more content knowledge into the lesson plan to make it easier for a teacher to adopt I think is really important.
