Modern education offers more tools than ever, but also a higher level of distraction. Phones in every pocket. Computers on every desk. Smartwatches on many wrists.

These, combined with all of the old attention stealers, create a uniquely challenging environment for teachers who want to produce grabbing, effective lesson plans. To win your class's attention and move the needle towards higher testing benchmarks, you need clear structure, flexibility, variety, and evidence-based practice.

In this article, we take a look at how you can create engaging lesson plans.

All Lesson Plans Should Begin with Clear Learning Objectives

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe developed a backward design approach. While the actual theory is complex, it boils down to something like this: instead of saying "what shall I teach," start with "what do the students need to be able to do by the end of this lesson?"

It sounds obvious, but it's a very useful framework in that it allows you to build your assessments from the ground up with mastery in mind. To write a strong objective, focus on these concepts:

• Analyze, compare, create, evaluate, and demonstrate. These are the action verbs from Bloom's Taxonomy that describe a successful lesson plan.

• Make sure your objectives are measurable. How can you quantify student success using this metric? Understand with clarity what you want. A weak objective would be something like "students will understand fractions." A strong objective would be more specific: "students will be able to solve word problems requiring addition of fractions with unlike denominators."

Having a very clear, objective-driven framework for lesson plans makes it easier for students to understand what they're trying to achieve. It also makes things much simpler for you as an instructor.

With clear objectives, you can measure progress more effectively and adjust along the way to make sure your goals are being met.

Incorporate Active Learning Strategies

Interestingly enough, there are fairly concrete metrics on how efficiently students actually learn. Studies have shown that children will retain about 10% of what they read and 20% of what they hear.

 However, they can retain up to 75% of what they do or teach to others.

Some researchers describe this as the learning pyramid. The actual percentages vary pretty dramatically based on the study, indicating that student ability as well as the nature of the learning environment itself can play a very significant role in overall outcomes. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that active learning environments have a definite advantage over passive ones.

There are lots of ways to tap into the efficiency of active learning. For example:

• Think-Pair-Share: Think-Pair-Share involves posing a question, giving students time to think about it independently, and then partnering them with one or two other kids to discuss and share.

• The Jigsaw Method: In this framework, you divide the classroom into jigsaw pieces in which each kid learns a different part of the lesson. They then present it to the class. Naturally, this will create anxiety in students with a fear of public speaking, but it is a very efficient and effective way to promote learning.

• Exit Tickets: Admittedly simple, exit tickets are a way to encourage one final repetition of concepts before the student has permission to exit the lesson. This generally involves a writing prompt or a short presentation that allows them to immediately reflect on what they've learned.

Variety will keep the students engaged. It might also help you land on the specific strategy that works best for the kids in your room.

Teachers certainly know that what works one year might not work the next. Mixing things up gives you the chance to find the sweet spot as early into the year as possible. It’s also just true that individual students will sometimes be harder to accommodate. Introducing a variety of teaching methods might better help you reach students who struggle with paying attention in school. 

Differentiate as Much as Possible

Differentiation not only allows you to try out as many things as possible, but it is also more accommodating to the fact that there are simply lots and lots of different kinds of learners out there. 

Some people will do their best work with visual content, while others will thrive through hands-on learning experiences. Still others genuinely are best at pen and paper learning.

The key is to provide multiple pathways towards every learning goal. This is an idea that has been developed extensively by a variety of researchers, perhaps most famously Carol Ann Tomlinson working out of the University of Virginia.

Digital technology makes it easier than ever to personalize learning. Many programs will, for example, automatically adjust content based on reading level or concept mastery.

You can also manually offer different options for how students explore materials. This is admittedly harder to do, particularly in larger classrooms, but it is something you could potentially coordinate with paraprofessionals or other support staff.

Incorporating visuals, spoken displays of mastery, and, of course, pen and paper demonstrations of comprehension is a great way to ensure that students are being assessed not based on their ideal style of learning, but on their ability to grasp concepts in a way that makes sense to them.

Strive for Continuity and Consistency

If that sounds like a contradiction to what we've said before about experimentation and variety, note that there are ways to keep lesson plans predictable without making them boilerplate and boring. 

Providing your students with a familiar but flexible structure could mean, for example, basic bullet points of what a lesson looks like: a short lecture, break into pair-share, exit ticket.

But every lecture, every pair-share, every exit ticket could still be different. Why does this matter?

It allows you to keep things engaging while reducing cognitive load. Our brains do have defined energy limits, the same way the rest of our bodies do. 

When students constantly have to adjust to what's going on, it consumes cognitive energy that could be better applied towards learning.

Adjust as You Go

The most important step to creating strong lesson plans is to stay flexible. Don't fall rigidly into habit.

Track the effectiveness of your routines and adjust them consistently, even if sparingly, as you go. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every day. But making minor adjustments to optimize towards what has been working in the past will pay off over time.

It's a data-driven educational environment that we live in. You'll have numbers for all of this. Use them.

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