Proposed Change to Lesson Plan Template

Welcome

The WordPress Training Team helps people learn to use, extend, and contribute to WordPress through learn.wordpress.org.

Are you new to the team?

Getting Started – Join the team through this self-guided onboarding program

Current Focus Areas – What we’re currently focusing on

Already onboarded and ready to get involved?

See How we use GitHub to get started on one of our 6 project boards

Meetings (Calendar)

You can join these meetings from the #training Slack channel:

Weekly meeting: Thursdays 00:00 UTC

Dev-squad GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ triage: Thursdays 07:00 UTC

See Meeting Details for more information.

The Training Team has been using the same lesson plan template for the past few years. It works well! I would like to suggest just a couple of improvements to make to more understandable, to provide some additional information about the lesson plan, and to help keep the emphasis on it being a lesson PLAN intended for instructor led training such as meetups, WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. workshops, or other such events. (Our focus is not on building online tutorials). Since we are rebuilding many lesson plans from the ground up at the moment, this seems like a good time to make this change.

Current Lesson Plan Outline

1. Description
2. Objectives
3. Prerequisite Skills
4. Assets
5. Screening Questions
6. Teacher Notes
7. Hands-on Walkthrough
8. Exercises
9. Quiz
10. Additional Resources

Proposed Lesson Plan Outline

1. Description
2. Objectives
3. Time Estimate
4. Prerequisite Skills
5. Teaching Materials
6. Readiness Questions
7. Teaching Strategies
8. Teacher Notes
9. Lesson Overview
10. Exercises
11. Differentiation Strategies
12. Assessment
13. Additional Resources
14. Hands-on Walkthrough

What Changed?

“Time Estimate” is added (and will be confirmed or changed base on testing experiences)
“Assets” is renamed “Teaching Materials” to be more understandable
“Screening Questions” is renamed “Readiness Questions” to be less intimidating
“Teaching Strategies” is added to help identify the best way to convey the material
“Lesson Overview” is added to provide a true plan for the lesson
“Differentiation Strategies” is added to provide ideas on how to accommodate different learning styles and speeds
“Quiz” is renamed “Assessment” to be more about whether the objectives were met and less about whether students “passed”
“Hands-on Walkthrough” is moved to the bottom so that the Exercises, Assessment, and Additional Resources don’t get overlooked, and to somewhat de-emphasize it.

I took the liberty of testing out the proposed template for the Content Editor Overview lesson plan if you want to see an example.

Thoughts?

donkiely 6:44 pm on May 24, 2018

Julie –

Thanks! Is this something that we’ll talk about at today’s 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/. meeting? I don’t see a spot for it on the agenda. Although we’ll probably want to spend more than a few minutes on it.

I get the sense that some of the additions are from a training methodology of some sort. Is that right? If so, is there a resource I could go to to understand how it works? Or is this an accumulation of best practice suggestions people have made?

Would Teaching Resources better convey what should be in that section? But either is indeed better than Assets.

It seems strange to me that the Exercises and Assessment sections are before Hands-on Walkthrough. Just seems illogically out of order to me. Putting everything else before Hands-on Walkthrough does make sense.

Don
- Julie Kuehl 1:02 pm on May 25, 2018
  
  It didn’t make the agenda for this week as I wanted to give it time to gather comments here as well as do some extra research. It will be on the agenda for next week though!
  
  Yes, some of the additions are from andragogy and education best practices. There’s a ton of resources out there and lots of opinions and conflicting information. It’s up to us to determine what’s going to be best for our “audience.” I’ve been thinking about what helps instructors best be prepared for the live event.
  
  “Teaching Resources” is a good suggestion. I think I’ve seen “Teaching Materials” more often, but yeah, either is better than “Assets.”
  
  OK, the idea behind putting the “Hands-on Walkthrough” at the bottom is that these are meant to be lesson PLANS. Everything above that is part of a plan, the walkthrough is actually more of an example of how the lesson plan could be applied and a resource to the person who is considering using the lesson plan if they’re not quite sure about the details. The walkthrough is where we skirt with being actual tutorials. I think changing the name of this section could be discussed too. “Hands-on Walkthrough” maybe becomes “Example” or “Further Details” or something similar.
  
  I think the Content Editor Overview is a good example (although perhaps badly written at the moment) of where a person could look at the Lesson Overview (maybe we could change that to “Lesson Outline”?) and run an event based on that alone. With all the lesson plan information above the walkthrough, it could be used as notes while teaching at the event. The walkthrough is something that should be read as preparation before the training event. No one should be reading the walkthrough in front of a group. And I think with the Exercises and Assessment below the walkthrough they can be overlooked.
  
  Additional thoughts?
  - donkiely 5:42 pm on May 25, 2018
    
    Okay, all makes sense.
    
    One minor thing is that we agreed last year that the last item in the Teacher Notes section would be what version of WordPress the LP was built or updated with. That will make it way easier for people to see what plans need updating over time, as well as for users to get an inkling in where the LP might be a little behind things.
    
    Putting the walkthrough at the end still feels weird to me, but if it’s a good idea I’m trainable.
    
    Maybe call it Example Walkthrough? Sample Walkthrough? I like “example” better. Example Demonstration? Sample Example Hands-on Walkthrough Demonstration? Okay, I’ll stop.
    - Julie Kuehl 5:57 pm on May 25, 2018
      
      “Hands-on Walkthrough” => “Background Information”? “Instructor Preparation”? “Further Details”?
      
      If we are writing lesson plans for in-person, instructor-led events, then the “Hands-on Walkthrough” is something the instructor should review before the event, not read from or display during the event.
      - donkiely 7:09 pm on May 25, 2018
        
        Yep, that I understand.
        
        Julie Kuehl 6:13 pm on May 26, 2018
        
        “Rehearsal”?
        
        “Lesson Illustration”?
        
        “Exemplar”?
        
        I like that last one best I think.
Michelle Moore 5:05 pm on May 25, 2018

From May 22,2 018 TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. card.

Feedback:
Could Teaching Strategies and Lesson Overview be merged? They are basically saying the same thing in different ways.

Differentiation Strategies – I had training on this when I was teaching and never totally got it, to write it down that is… But I would personally handle those situations. Based on the potential adult audiences, is this really needed? And also based on the volunteers that will have to figure out what a differentiation strategy is, is it really needed? 🙂 I think many would search for different words to say or a different way to display something or slow down a bit, if the situation called for it. But then, I do know that some presenters don’t have those instincts.

Hands on Walkthrough – I see the Lesson overview, but don’t see where the lesson plan actually tells me the order of the lesson and when to say what when. Is that the place/purpose of the slides? Could there be a step by step lesson that tells the presenter, now lecture on this, now demo on that, and run the students through this exercise. All blown out like the hands of walkthrough.
- Julie Kuehl 6:39 pm on May 26, 2018
  
  The “Differentiation Strategies” is meant to help instructors think ahead about the challenges they might face. Traditionally it has been used to plan for “advanced” and “needs support” students. But perhaps in our context it might be better to name it “Be Prepared For…” or “How Will You Handle…” or some variation. Helps people think through things like: What if there’s no internet available? What if there’s no projector available? What if a student doesn’t has a WordPress site to work with? What if there aren’t enough computers for everyone? What if no one has the prerequisite skills? What if there are different opinions about the topic?
Julie Kuehl 6:26 pm on May 26, 2018
Egads, I think I may have missed a few pieces of metadata that we’re going to need for each lesson plan.
- Audience
- Users
- Designers
- Developers
- Speakers
Level
- Beginner
- Intermediate
- Advanced
Duration (this has already been suggested for the new template)
- in minutes
Lesson Type (this is possibly another name for Teaching Strategies)
- Show and tell
- Exercises
- Discussion
- Feedback
- Presentation (aka Lecture)
- Demonstration
- Tutorial
Those should be included in the template too.
Julie Kuehl 9:06 pm on May 26, 2018

Sample of the proposed changes https://github.com/JulieKuehl/repo-template
- Julie Kuehl 11:57 pm on May 27, 2018
  
  Actually they’re on the dev branch here now: https://github.com/wptrainingteam/repo-template/tree/dev

Welcome

Meetings (Calendar)

Current Lesson Plan Outline

Proposed Lesson Plan Outline

What Changed?

Share this: