Hello, and thank you for joining me today to discuss evaluating lesson plans with essential learning questions. The essential questions that we'll be able to answer by the end of today's tutorial are what is the criteria for evaluating essential learning questions? And what does this kind of evaluation look like?
For a quick recap, remember that all the essential learning questions have the following things in common. They promote inquiry into the big ideas of the lesson. They promote higher level thought, discourse, and a new understanding. They force students to consider the evidence presented and make assumptions and decisions based on that evidence, as
Well as having students justify their answers by using evidence to support their stance. They also help students make meaningful connections to the content in class. And they can provide for transfer of learning, so the students can take the information that they've learned from your class and transfer that to different situations or different classes.
So there is a process for evaluating lesson plans created with essential learning questions in mind, and we're going to look at the following guiding questions to evaluate. So the guiding questions are are they centered on big ideas and content standards? Are the questions open-ended, meaning there's no right or wrong, yes or no answer. Are the questions thought provoking, and do they promote discourse among the students? Do they avoid having a single right or wrong answer? So we're going to look at a lesson plan using this evaluation.
And the lesson overview is geometry students are studying theorems and connecting them to real-world examples, as well as studying the history of geometry. Are the questions open-ended? My question example for this is what is the role of geometry in architecture? This is an open-ended question because there's not a right or wrong answer. It's going to require the scientific method of inquiry and also discourse among students because they might disagree or have different opinions about geometry's role in architecture.
Another open-ended question is how have ancient societies influenced geometry, and why would these innovations have been made? Not only is this question open-ended, requiring inquiry and discourse, but it's also forcing students to make assumptions about what they've learned so that's going to relate directly to Bloom's taxonomy and the higher order thinking categories. It's also going to require students to make a hypothesis and to support their statements with evidence.
Are the questions thought-provoking? Yes, they are because, again, these same questions that we just looked at require students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate. And these are all higher order thinking skills according to Bloom's. And do they promote discourse? They definitely do.
In this classroom setting, students are discussing these in a Socratic seminar, so they're definitely talking with one another and having conversations. And there's no right or wrong answer. So that's definitely going to provide some wiggle room and gray area for students to discuss.
They also are going to be presented with various opinions, and this is going to allow for students to become more empathetic learners because they have to learn to value and listen to the opinions of others. Let's take a quick reflection break. I would like you to create one essential learning question for your current lesson or unit.
I also would like you to think about why are essential learning questions appropriate for any age group of students? So how could they work in a kindergarten classroom versus a high school classroom, or could they even work in a kindergarten classroom? In closing, let's review what we talked about today.
We talked about what the criteria is for evaluating essential learning questions in a lesson plan, and we talked about what this kind of evaluation looks like. Now it's your turn to apply what you've learned in this video. The additional resources section will be super helpful. This section is designed to help you discover useful ways to apply what you've learned here. Each link includes a brief description so you can easily target the resources you want. Thank you for joining me, and happy teaching.
Overview
(00:00-00:14) Introduction
(00:15-00:55) Essential Learning Questions Recap
(00:56-01:24) Process for Evaluation
(01:25-03:03) Evaluating a Lesson
(03:04-03:31) Reflection
(03:32-04:05) Conclusion
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