The more personal you make your lessons, the more likely you are to reach out to your students. It's not about what you know, but how you can share it with them so that they will understand and appreciate it.
This blog will look at a popular teaching technique called macro teaching and how teachers can create an effective lesson plan with this.
What is Macro Teaching?
Macro teaching is a group learning activity where the teacher delivers the concepts to the entire class at once. The setting for the same can be a regular school or a university classroom.
The idea of macro teaching is to teach students how to learn, not just what to learn. It's about showing them how to think, not just telling them what to think.
Macro teaching allows teachers to assess how well students understand the concepts by breaking them into small chunks. This makes it easier for them to create a personalized curriculum that meets the needs of all students.
Moreover, it helps teachers reach out to more and more students and saves time, by incorporating it into other learning strategies.
Let's look at how to design an effective macro teaching lesson plan.
Macro Teaching Lesson Plan
A macro teaching plan is the roadmap of the course curriculum taught to students.
The plan is broken down into a timeline, covering the entire course in a series of lessons. It answers the questions associated with what, why, when, and how of the subject.
A successful macro teaching lesson plan provides a precise, viable, and organized path from the time the lesson starts until the class is over. This provides clarity, gives the teacher confidence, and ensures a good learning experience for the student.
A macro teaching plan addresses and integrates three key components:
- Learning goals
- Learning activities
- Assessment to check for student understanding
- Identify the Learning Objectives
Before you plan anything, you need to classify the learning goals for that lesson. It describes what students will be able to achieve after completion of a lesson.
It is crucial to have clear learning objectives to ensure better understanding of a subject. Some characteristics of clear learning objectives include:
- Well-stated Tasks: The idea is to keep them as simple as possible, free from any jargon.
- Learning Goals: This answers what the student must do to achieve their goals.
- Time for Every Concept: This pertains to the time dedicated to every idea discussed.
After identifying the objectives, letting your students know what they will be learning and doing in class will keep them engaged.
You can write a brief plan on the whiteboard or simply tell students what they will learn.
2.Plan Specific Learning Activities
It includes considering all the activities to boost the learning experience of the students and help them develop the right skills and knowledge.
These activities should be related to the various learning objectives mentioned earlier to ensure better conceptual understanding.
You need to plan the amount of time you'll dedicate to these activities for each course lesson.
The learning activities should be able to answer the following questions:
- How do you explain the topic?
- How do you illustrate the topic in different ways for better understanding?
- How can you engage students effectively for every lesson?
- How do you integrate technology and make learning fun and interactive?
There are numerous activities a teacher can plan. Some of these include:
- Content Interaction: Lecture, Drill, Quiz (MCQs, Essays, etc.), Student Presentation
- Digital Content Interaction: Online Games, Simulation
- Cross Interaction: Debates and Discussions, Guest Speaker
- Critical Thinking Inducing Content: Case Studies, Real-time Projects.
All these activities will help you design and deliver impactful learning experiences for your students.
3.Assessment of Student Understanding
Assessments help identify how much the students have learned. It also provides an opportunity for students to demonstrate their learnings and practice whatever they have learned.
The assessments made for learning objectives should offer targeted feedback to the students to continue promoting their learning.
These assessments are generally FOR regular tests, end examinations, class interactions and performance.
You need to ensure that the students are informed about the assessment criteria at the beginning of the course. It clarifies how they will get graded for various tasks for the final assessment.
4.Create Timeline
You cannot teach everything about the subject. You have to know how deep you can go.
If you start going into complex concepts, your students might not understand what you teach. Also, you won’t be able to finish the syllabus before the end of the session.
Here are some things you need to know for creating a practical and realistic timeline:
- Estimate the time you can spend or save on each activity with optimal results.
- Indicate the time you'll dedicate to each lesson as per the learning objective.
- Note the time you'd like to dedicate to summarizing each concept and post concept discussions.
Even though it's wise to have an action plan, being flexible while adjusting your lesson plan to students' needs is also a good practice.
5. Plan Lesson Closure
Planning a lesson closure provides an opportunity to crystallize student learning.
You can use closure to check for students' understanding of a concept and correct any misunderstandings.
Moreover, it helps students review and demonstrate their understanding of a concept. It allows them to link a concept to a real-life scenario with practical applications.
Lesson closure can be as simple as emphasizing the key concepts learned from the lesson.
Conclusion
Teaching is not an easy job. It's challenging to decide how to make your classroom engaging and inclusive of various learning styles while also meeting the needs of your students. By using macro teaching and designing an effective teaching lesson plan, teachers can make learning a fulfilling experience.
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