Amazing Lesson Design Outline (ALDO) (left),
a tool for guiding lesson design for diverse learners.
Use the choice board (right) to get you started on designing. It features four choices for each of the lesson design stages in ALDO.
The key concept is students engaging in metacognition. As I create a concept map, an outline, or take notes, I am full of questions that may include:
Should I build my understanding around this main idea?
Is this the main idea? What are the supporting or related concepts?
How do main idea and the supporting ideas connect to what I already know?
How can I best represent or arrange ideas to reflect what I know and what I am learning?
This self-interrogation is ever-present in all the strategies that involve diagramming and concept mapping. It is also important to distinguish between main ideas and supporting details (essential for summarizing, outlining, and a bunch of other strategies).
Marine, Tales from a Very Busy Teacher, shares her insights on creating learning target cards. Her goal is to make learning targets as visible as possible. As you might suppose, this combines with Teacher Clarity strategy, which seeks to ensure students understand what the learning objective(s) is/are.
"...self-assessment tickets help students self reflect and self regulate while they’re learning. I call them “Learning Target Tickets” with my students. They’re pretty simple to use and be used for any lesson, in any content area." (source)
Marine offers these tips for using these "learning target tickets:
After the engagement activity or attention grabber, state the learning objective
Ask students to write it down on their tickets then self-assess their level of learning in the "before lesson" column. This is a capacity matrix with the added innovation of before lesson/after lesson/teacher analysis rows on the side.
When the lesson ends, ask students to rate their grasp of content in the after lesson column
Ask students to write a short reflection on the lesson
Afterwards, you could ask students to share their biggest growth area or reflection via audio (e.g. Vocaroo, Mote), or video (e.g. Flipgrid).