educational info

Educational Information

Lesson Structure: Research to Practice, ERIC Digest #448.

RESEARCH FINDINGS:

Teacher effectiveness studies have identified a number of critical components of a lesson for initial instruction.

For mildly handicapped students, seven elements of a teacher-directed lesson are included: attention, review, goal, mode, prompt, check, and close.

GAIN THE LEARNER'S ATTENTION:

Gaining the attention of mildly handicapped students is critical for influencing student achievement. The teacher's task is to direct selective attention to the relevant activity. Indeed, a satisfactory criterion for maintaining student involvement in teacher-directed activities is 90% task engagement.

Attention can be gained by using verbal prompting such as "Look here,"

"Listen," "Let's begin," followed by a pause. Teachers need to monitor to ensure that students are attending.

REVIEW RELEVANT PAST LEARNING:

Learning is optimal when students can establish a link between new information and what they already know. Review can take the form of guiding students in correcting independent work or homework. Teachers can systematically review prerequisite skills for the lesson. For example, when two-digit division is being taught, one-digit division should be reviewed.

COMMUNICATE THE GOAL OF THE LESSON:

Low-achieving students learn best when teachers make reference to what is being learned, why it is important, and if appropriate, how it relates to other learning.

The goal should be stated briefly. If appropriate, the students should also be told the relevance of the specific skill or activity. 

For example: "Today we are going to learn to proofread our work. We want to learn to proofread in order to catch careless errors."

MODEL THE SKILL TO BE LEARNED:

Effective teachers demonstrate the skill prior to eliciting student responses. High student success rates are seen in classrooms where instruction proceeds in small steps that are not too difficult.

When modeling, the demonstration should be very clear. Steps should be exaggerated so the students will attend to the critical features. When a complex skill is being taught, it is important to ask questions of students to verify their understanding and increase their attention. Steps need to proceed in small increments, with explicit directions. The model may need to be repeated several times.

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