You can think of your daily lesson plans as tributaries that feed the larger goals of your course, all flowing in a direction you’ve determined through backwards design or other planning strategies.

As you craft your daily lesson plans, you might find it useful to establish a rhythm or repeated structure to the days, weeks, or sequences of your course. Having a pattern of activities can help students make sense of the course flow, reassure them that they can rely on some level of predictability, and make planning easier for you.

For example, one structure that works well with the hands-on, collaborative nature of English 100 includes three key elements:

1. Connect, Review, and/or Preview: Provide meaningful icebreakers or other ways of building community at the start of a class session. Make sure students understand the agenda and learning goals for the day, as well as how the current lesson connects to other lessons. Preview upcoming homework/major assignments and how the day’s lesson connects to it and consider leading into the lesson with a brainstorming or freewriting activity to stimulate focused, thoughtful discussion.
2. Introduce something new and Show what you want students to be able to do: Use demonstrations, discussions, activities, etc. to help students understand what you want them to learn. Don’t just tell students what you want them to do; engage and show. If feasible, consider doing a small version of it with them.
3. Give students practice, with feedback: Provide opportunities for immediate application of what you just introduced. Ideally, offer students at least some useful practice within the class period, or provide follow-up homework that gives helpful application of what students tried out in class. Make sure that every student has a chance to participate in a meaningful way, and that you build in some degree of feedback, whether that feedback comes from you or from peers.

As you can imagine, class sessions that use this structure can vary wildly in style, content, and appearance. Following this general sequence for at least some of your daily lessons can offer a balance between theory and practice while ensuring that the class remains focused on specific learning objectives.

Lesson Plan Toolbox: Some Options for What to Do in Class

The following tools and practices are woven throughout the model calendar. They can be used flexibly and often interchangeably at any point in the course and developed in a variety of ways to suit your teaching style.

Routines

Daily and/or weekly routines can guide student expectations, reinforce a sense of community, and help with time management. Some routines can be associated with a particular course component (e.g., routines that are always used during Writing Workshop or class discussion). Routines for beginning and ending class can be especially useful.

Possibilities include:

• Starting class with a freewrite
• Starting class with a Question of the Day or “Check-in”
• Reading aloud from a selected piece of student writing at a designated time
• Ending class with a homework reminder
• Ending class with a question to consider
• Allocating different roles to different days of the week (e.g., Monday Ice Breakers / Wednesday Freewriting / Friday Read-Alouds)

Preview and Synopsis

You can let students know what to expect in a class or from an assignment by offering a preview, either verbally or on a slide (“Here’s what we’re going to do today and here’s why…”). You can reinforce learning and remind students what they’ve accomplished by offering review or synopsis at the end of class, at the end of a sequence, or when completing an activity (“Here’s what we accomplished today and how it fits into the bigger picture…”).

Community-Building Activities

These include games, ice breakers, and warmers. You’ll find suggestions on LessonShare. Some of the standards include Question of the Day and Check-In. Taking time to build and reinforce a sense of community in your classroom will likely result in livelier discussions, help students develop good working relationships, show that you respect (and expect) their contributions, and create an atmosphere of shared responsibility for learning. Keep in mind, these kinds of activities are an investment. They tend to require both repetition and time to pay off. Don’t stop after the first weeks of class. You will need to use a number of community-building exercises over an extended period for your class dynamics to reach their full potential.

In-Class Writing

Writing during class emphasizes that writing is useful for making meaning and for processing ideas, demonstrates that you value writing as a process, and reinforces the social nature of writing. Among other things, in-class writing can be used to help students focus their thoughts before a discussion. Freewriting (timed, nonstop writing without editing) can be especially useful during class, either as part of your lesson plan or as a spontaneous activity when students need to “wake up” or figure out what they have to say.

Writing in class can be one of the best uses of class time. Here’s why:

• Good writing requires continual practice both in and out of class.
• Informal, in-class writing lets students “try out” ideas or strategies with low stakes—it’s a great time to encourage risk-taking.
• The classroom becomes a place for talking about writing and for practicing it together.
• In-class writing helps students immediately practice principles discussed in class.
• Students can immediately talk through their ideas with someone else or receive feedback from peers on the spot. They can also try out collaborative writing methods with a chance for instructor involvement in their shared process.
• Instructors can quickly gather the writing and review the whole class’s progress.
• Students can be walked through new, helpful writing strategies throughout their writing process: practicing ways to generate ideas, to explore options, to organize or reorganize ideas, to take on different voices, etc.

Here are some ideas for when and how to use in-class writing:

At the beginning of class:

• Connect the upcoming lesson with what students have done earlier in the sequence
• Reflect on recent class discussions, readings for that day, or students’ writing processes for their current projects
• Prepare for a class discussion or a Writing Workshop
• Practice an invention activity that will lead into the next activity

At the end of class:

• Immediately practice what was discussed in class
• Reflect on what the class just practiced and its relation to students’ individual learning goals—or to their work in the rest of the sequence
• Create a plan of action for the next step in students’ writing projects, or for how students will respond to peer comments they just received

Discussions

There are a variety of ways to structure discussion to help students practice oral communication skills and contribute to the intellectual work of the course. To learn more about discussion possibilities and strategies, consider participating in the Discussion Project (https://discussion.education.wisc.edu/) on campus.

Small Groups

When you break the class into small groups for discussions, activities, and Writing Workshops, you give students the chance to speak more directly to each other, collaborate in solving problems, pool intellectual and creative resources, and practice speaking and listening in a variety of situations. You also actively engage them in social dimensions of learning as well as writing. Some instructors choose to create stable groups of 3-4 students who work together throughout the semester in Writing Workshops and occasionally for other activities. Small groups discussions work best when you provide clear tasks and clear roles for group members.

Student-Led Discussion

Student-led discussions work best when assigned ahead of time, early in the semester or early in a sequence. Specific students can be responsible for writing and sharing a reading response to open a discussion, preparing discussion questions for a reading, or in some other way given a leadership role that leads to practice in oral communication.

Whole Class Discussion

Class discussions are a staple in English 100. The goal, of course, when involving the whole class is to encourage every student to participate. You can facilitate this kind of participation in a number of ways.

• Go Around the Room. One of the most structured methods is to begin a discussion by going around the room and asking each person to, for example, answer a question or offer one response to a reading. This way, every student speaks at least once.
• Prime the Pump. Whole class discussion can also be preceded by a freewrite or small group discussion, either of which can help students figure out what they have to say before facing the entire class.
• Write on the Board. Another method for encouraging discussion is to demonstrate your own active listening by inviting students to say what is most important to them about the topic of discussion and then writing their words on the board. Some instructors appoint “discussion leaders” for particular classes.

Strategies that can help to foster productive classroom talk include:

• Providing a clear focus for the discussion
• Asking questions that invite clarification, elaboration, or disagreement
• Inviting students to use their prior knowledge and experiences alongside texts or activities the class has read/done together to work toward a position regarding a problem
• Encouraging everyone to embed previous responses and discussions into the ongoing conversation (making it more coherent, rather than the choppy movement from one right, or wrong, answer to the next)
• Giving genuine responses to students (That interests me because . . .)
• Avoiding class questions that follow an IRE pattern (Initiation, Response, Evaluation)–
  • Teacher: “Who’s the audience for this piece?” (Initiation)
  • Student: “College students?” (Response)
  • Teacher: “Yes, that‘s right.” (Evaluation)

Short, Occasional Lectures (ca. 10-15 minutes)

English 100 is not a lecture course, but occasionally you might want to introduce a concept, provide a sequence overview, contextualize a reading, or provide instructions in a short, focused lecture format. In general, short lectures should be followed by opportunities for discussion, writing practice, or other activities that involve students in active learning. If it is occasionally necessary to give longer lectures, be sure to break them up by providing focused questions students can respond to during class, other opportunities for active learning, interactive PowerPoint or multimedia components, and/or other engaging methods.

Other Options for Lesson Plans and Assignments

Beyond the required curriculum elements and the basic practices lies a wide range of other possibilities for teaching English 100. You’ll find support related to these choices in staff meetings and 790, in informal conversations with experienced instructors, and through conferencing with any of the course directors. Among your choices:

• Field Trips
• Journals
• Multimodal/Multimedia Assignments (e.g., websites, short documentaries, podcasts, etc.)
• More than one and/or different styles of Presentation – using or designing alternative formats (e.g., poster sessions, mini-conferences, collaborative group presentations, digital storytelling)
• Primary Research – designing assignments that require students to do primary research (e.g., using primary documents or archival collections, lab experiments, surveys, ethnography)
• Publications – e.g., student produced print or digital magazines
• Using media (wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, discussion boards, etc.) inside or outside of class