Video Lesson planning

0:03 so welcome back to communication computer communicating computer science um in the last unit of the lecture part I'll show you some templates for lesson plans and also what the purpose of that is which will feed into our continuous assessment

0:23 so a brief one what is this about it what's the purpose there was a survey asking teachers what they spent their time on um and uh they said they spend most of their time on planning and preparing if you take into account that they're also teaching some well a significant fraction of the day that's uh that means they don't usually stop working at three and they also say in their perception it takes up too much time to prepare and plan now uh the survey doesn't go in all details of the reasons um but one thing to point out is that the uh the ofsted inspections that all schools are very conscious about because it it gives them this this rating and and so on it's important for their head teachers uh first perspective of the school and all that uh offset doesn't insist on having lesson plans like this so it's they're they're not going to the teachers to say oh you you're teaching maths tomorrow with your year five students what what is your lesson plan can I see that printed out please they don't insist on this at the same time teachers seem to do it or the majority of teachers seem to do it so it seems that it's useful for them

1:43 even though they're not forced to write this down I think there's a there are several good reasons for that um a lesson plan is is supposed to cover one individual session of course it's usually if in the school context it's tied together to uh through a year or grouped into certain units or topics uh it's the way you write it down is um is a bit flexible up to you but what works uh but there's a few bits of content that are just natural and they're fairly standard so what do you do if you have something to do that eats it too much time but it sounds useful you try to reuse work that's already done ideally by other people but maybe also your own and so specifically for computing there's these resources I've pointed out in the early units that try to do that so there's the Grassroots Computing at school where just teachers share what they created and then there's this this teach career teach Computing curriculum that the Raspberry Pi Foundation pushed a lot where they designed an entire curriculum and tried to make things uh match match up and tie into each other and all of these work with lesson plans so they also recognize that this is a good good um

3:11 way to essentially preserve the knowledge that you get from teaching so the mindset for you should be you design a lesson you come up with great ideas now to make that survive over time you want to enable other people to run your lesson that should be the mindset even though you're potentially not doing that in the spring you're predominantly during your doing your own lesson you should write the plan as if that was another person and it has the nice side effect that you in five months will be the same person but you still have forgotten some of the things and so it's it's useful to to pin things down while they're fresh it's not enough if you just collect your slides and material that it creates you also want to document the whole um the scope in a big picture behind your lesson and maybe uh some uh administerial information just how to organize things this is a bit tough to do if you haven't delivered it yet so what people with lesson plans do that they share is they they add more information after they've run the lesson and if people run the lesson again they may chip in more experience if you look at the examples from the teacher teach Computing curriculum

4:37 there are many many such uh experience reports um what to pay attention to what what worked well or what is easy to go wrong things like that foreign I made a template for us that is inspired from what has been passed down from the legacy of this module um I I try to keep it as simple as possible look at it in a moment I chose some overview of of the lesson what is uh what are the main aims and how does it link to what uh key stage 3 students are are supposed to learn um an important part is to State what you think they already know so that you can tie into this and teachers or other people taking on your lesson can decide if it's appropriate for them to use it at this point uh learning outcomes is a little different from your aims so I think is uh in in our case it's not the primary goal potentially to uh teach new content and new material but you may still hope that the kids take something from it uh the aims here I think in our context is fair if you write that from the Outreach perspective as well so you're you're kind of pretending to be a teacher but you're also not

6:00 pretending to be a teacher because we're still in our context of a outreach program at University all right uh the rest is this is probably self-explanatory you try to structure uh how the lesson is supposed to run and try to give give times for that as well it's good if you practice that and see if the timings are realistic um anything you can anticipate already about how the the group should be organized and these things you should mention

6:36 um that's tougher to do up front the assessment part I want to point out that this is we're not you're not supposed to include an exam in your lesson assessment can be of very different kind it can be a small questionnaire that we that you do with the kids so uh a little thing you could do is you ask them about a topic at the beginning and then again at the end and you can test if something has changed in them either they've learned something or they've they've understood a concept that they didn't grasp before or they're they're emotional uh attitude towards the topic has changed these are things you can do um so I think this is this is more of list opportunities for that how could you assess that you had some impact you can you can start thinking about this that's why it's on the lesson plan

7:36 uh this is what the template looks like um I don't want to repeat what I just said the only thing that wasn't on this on this bullet list is I split it into an overview that should really not become much longer than it currently is half a page showing you the big picture what is what is the different blocks of each component of the lesson and then the detail lesson plan tells you how to do each part so maybe this is what are you doing just very briefly and this is how do you orchestrate it

8:16 you can structure your lesson in very different ways that will depend on your topic so maybe uh you will probably usually start with some hi I'm so and so and this is what I'll do and you'll probably want to wrap up because with some uh plenary talk as well because that's your your chance to Drive the main point home and make sure that people are focused again on what you want them to take from the lesson what's going on in between depends on on what best works I can be split between several activities with maybe some explain explainer in between or maybe it's just one long thing where they explore and you walk around and uh try to help the groups out individually that's a that's up to you

9:08 now so far this was just in general about lesson plans specifically for our assessment um the dates Etc I think are are all on the website or canvas but let me just mention it again so early December is is the due date uh we'll meet soonish to finalize the topic selection so keep thinking uh you're not tied into whatever topic you've you've used so far as soon as the essay is is swapped out of main memory you can try to think about what what lesson topic you're most excited about um my suggestion would would be to start from an activity if you want to go back to this start from the red parts because it's usually easier to design some learning points around a fun activity that are so that some would make sense as opposed to the other way around if you think of some some specific kind of thing you want to teach and then coming up with a really exciting activity can be can be challenging I'm not saying it's not possible but it's easier because we have the luxury that we don't have to teach a specific curriculum right we're free to do whatever we feel is um engaging and fun for the kids and fulfills our goals motivating them for computer science

10:39 so uh you can you can be free to choose the topics so that you can make a nice activity out of it and so in a way the topic can come as an afterthought

10:53 I'll haunt you on teams I think to uh to discuss in between just to see that the the lesson is is roughly pitching the right level and so on I have a bit more experience now what what might work so I hope that can be useful and then shortly after you submit your thing we'll meet again to uh have a little round of appreciation so where everyone can can tell the others what they did because the other part will be as I said between you and me maybe but you're mostly working on your own and I think it's nice to bring the group together to see what what is in the portfolio what have people come up with you will discuss together what topics uh everyone's taking a little bit um so that next week or a week after well soonish a week after but it often there's quite a difference between what you started planning with and what ends up in your lesson plan after after pinning things down so this is the second reason for the lesson plan in our context it forces you to make everything explicit what do you want to do and that's a reality check often in terms of the time

12:11 should be somewhere on the website I don't know if I put it on the slides anywhere so that's not a lot of time uh get everyone back to their seats saying hi you're basically left with half an hour for actually doing something is quite short so you have to be to the point with your preparation

12:35 all right uh yeah try to manage your time I I hope that works um what do you have to submit is the lesson plan but it's a few things around it as well so uh any any material you need for the lesson should also be part of that again um I'm forcing you to think of this well ahead of the actual taste today's so that it's it's clear early on if your lesson is is realistic

13:07 um and the last part is something I think we should advertise our lessons on our website and so I thought it's a good idea to Outsource that to you um write a little paragraph like uh five to ten lines I don't know how many words that works out to a hundred maybe not not too long just a very short sales pitch so it's it doesn't need to explain in detail what you're doing it's it's supposed to sound engaging for the teachers and parents that's the that's the goal and so I hope that we can put that on on the website so it just looks a bit more uh maybe yeah looks more engaging or look looks more concrete and you can showcase your work

13:59 uh that reminds me I have I have permission from some of the students from last year to put their lesson online and uh but I haven't done that out of lack of time is there's no other reason uh so I'll try to do that as soon as possible so you can have a look at those um they basically did the same same structure except that this last part was uh it's up to me um so you can take some inspiration I also didn't want to bring this out too early or at least not point you too much to it because I don't want to

14:34 um anchor you too much onto what other people have already done uh the more creative or more fun lessons come out if you're a freely Explorer so don't don't feel like you have to stay close or very far in either way from the last sessions

14:54 uh I'll leave this to you to read for you the marking scheme it's the same on the website um I'll leave that for for you for later it's it's a mixture of things I don't know um you see that the majority is on on the teaching materials and

15:12 how you plan the activity if that is if that is suitable in in terms of the content that you're covering with the activity that's the main thing and then the rest is

15:28 still 40 but not as heavy if you want more inspiration for lesson plans there's this uh teach Computing curriculum um I think you have to register and pretend to be a teacher at least um I did that because I think um you can also say you're teaching teachers so that that counts and you want to see some of those you can look at the list of lessons online I can send you individual ones if you want to have a look at this I don't think it's uh Secret in any way um they might just not want students to have access to it if there's questions with answers in theirs for example so the point my point is here this can be a good guide for how much you can cover in one school lesson that's what they're supposed to do it's broken down into fairly small pieces now so it can be a good guide for for how to write these lesson plans and how much to put in there are some differences of course because uh they set out to cover exactly what's in the National curriculum and we don't care as much so you have more freedom foreign

16:56 yeah yeah that's that's a caveat to point out uh the unit guides so they structure the content into years and then each year consists of units and the units consist of lessons and so some things are documented at the unit level so um the equivalent for us will be you're doing one lesson but some of the comments that we would want in the Lesser plan are documented for the unit keep that in mind all right for the rest of today uh I thought it's it's best to do this on an example where it doesn't count uh so I asked you to have a look at this um this course involving these alien pictures that I also printed out uh it's just an example for an activity so we can pretend we're doing this for for year nines uh maybe the aliens are a bit childish for them for that age group but why not um and so

17:59 let's let's do this on the actual template and try to figure out a lesson plan for this now by the time you write your own lesson plan hopefully you have a deeper understanding of what you want to do than what you might have gone from have a look having a brief look at this at this um online stuff but let's give it a go so um I saw teams of two if that roughly works out or maybe three um just so that that you can you can take some material where there's interesting stuff in there but now the question is how do you squeeze that into 45 minutes