Lesson Plan Format

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Recently the team has been talking about how to restructure and smooth out our processes moving forward. One thread of these conversations has centered around the fact that people are not actually using our lesson plans as a script when delivering the lessons. People are not reading them word for word (which we agreed is a good thing!). This leads to the question: does the format of the lesson plans need to change in order to facilitate easier and more effective teaching?

A bit of history on this: the lesson plan format dates to very early on the team where the general dictate was that lesson plans needed to be written as scripts to encourage everyone to be able to teach. Over time the lesson plans have gone through significant testing that shows that hardly anyone actually uses the plans as a “script” and that teachers of the lesson plans have/need some exposure to WordPress in order to effectively teach the lesson plans. The lesson plans as they exist now are being used, it is just a question of whether refactoring them into a different fact would be useful or not.

We will not be getting rid of the current lesson plans, but would like to brainstorm, over the long run, what format we want our lessons to have.

Once we determine a format, we will reformulate one or two plans and test those, in order to test our assumptions about the new format. THEN we may work on refactoring existing plans to fit the new, tested format.

Please record your thoughts on the lesson plan format here rather than in the SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel so that all of our ideas are recorded in one place. We are at a discussion stage with this particular question and no one has decided what exactly would be helpful to change. The sole goal of this conversation is to make sure that the format of the future lesson plans is as helpful to teachers as possible. All ideas/thoughts/constructive feedback are welcome 🙂

Mike Mueller 4:34 pm on August 29, 2017

Thanks for update.
I miss you all and hope to be able to get back in there soon and get back to being active!
🙂
Joe Casabona 6:52 pm on August 29, 2017
It’s been a while since I’ve been a part of the group, but going on the current description of the Training Team:

The WordPress training team creates downloadable lesson plans and related materials for instructors to use in live workshop environments.

I think it’s important that we consider 2 truths:
- There are more than a few professional teachers in this group – that is people who get paid to teach, or people have a formal education/training in teaching things.
- The majority of this group likely doesn’t fall into this categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging., and the majority of people we’re building these “plans” for doesn’t fall into that category (though perhaps by the very nature of teaching, using one of these plans makes you a teacher).
It seems in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. the focus was put on the word ‘plans’ when citing what this group creates, and what is it and is not. Our charge is to create plans and related materials. To me, we want the instructor of a workshop to be completely prepared using the materials the training team creates. I’m sure it’s true of many professional teachers that we build lesson plans around textbooks or other related material.

Perhaps the new format should separate the outlines (or plans) from the related material, if we’re not doing that already. Then the seasoned instructors can take the outline and build their lectures around that, and those starting out have everything they need in order to have a successful workshop.

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