Lesson Planning with Lincoln

Any teacher knows that lesson planning can be time consuming. It is an important part of a teacher's responsibility, nonetheless. Rather than searching Pinterest, Google, and your home library, we have a time-saving lesson planning solution for you.

With Lincoln Empowered, you'll have all the tools you need for your lesson in one place. These tools include items such as videos, worksheets, and games based on lesson content. We'll get back to that. 

First, take a look at this lesson plan on American Romanticism. We'll break down the plan throughout this blog, but we encourage you to print it and follow along. Our sample lesson plan covers this lesson on American Romanticism from the Lincoln Empowered American Literature course.

NOTE: If you're having trouble viewing the lesson on your smartphone, click here for instructions. 

First, our teacher needs to start with the lesson objective. The Lincoln Empowered content is aligned to national standards, and it's easy to see which standards apply to the lesson content. Take a look at the lesson below. With a single click, our teacher can identify the academic standard to which the content aligns.

With a simple copy and paste, our teacher added this information into her lesson plan.

Now that our teacher has the specifics out of the way, let's see how she pulls all the pieces together to create a lesson plan that is engaging and interactive, not to mention incredibly easy for any substitute to use.

Anticipatory Set

As you can see in the sample below, this teacher decided to use a Watch It as an anticipatory set for her class. A Watch It is simply the video portion of the Lincoln Empowered content. Our teacher plans to display this video on her SMART Board to get the conversation rolling about American Literature's Romantic Movement.

Whole Group Instruction

Next, you can see that our teacher has broken down her lesson plan to include whole group and small group instruction. She'll use her SMART Board again to present the Read It, the text-based portion of her lesson, to the entire class.

This Read It includes a Did You Know activity (shown below), which is a question she'll ask the class to get them thinking. She'll click the Show Answer button and use the definition to focus the class and various portions of the Read It to support her discussion. 

Small Group Instruction

As you can see, our teacher has decided to break her class into small groups for the next portion of the lesson. Each group will analyze a passage found within the lesson content.

Groups will then review the next section of the Read It, Structure of a Poem, in order to further understand how a poem's structure can help to reveal its theme. Built-in self-check questions and activities allow each group to measure their understanding of poetic structure.

Individual Practice/Synthesis

Now it's time for individual practice. Students return to their desks to read a poem by Emily Dickinson and practice poetic annotation on their own. When students are finished with their work, our teacher's focus returns to whole group instruction.

The entire group will then review annotation for the Dickinson poem. Before they leave, our teacher will ask students to apply their understanding of annotation by submitting an exit slip defining their personal interpretation of Dickinson's poem.

Differentiation/Assessment

The lesson may be over, but our teacher took her lesson plan further and identified the ways she plans to use Lincoln Empowered to differentiate instruction based on each student's needs. 

As you can see, she'll point out the option for TextHelp to students, showing them how to use it for note-taking and highlighting important lesson content. She can work one-on-one with any student who would benefit from TextHelp's additional features, including text-to-speech, definitions, or language translations.

Our teacher also has access to the Lincoln Empowered digital library. From here, she can pull content from any course to fill knowledge gaps, extend learning, or address a student's unique learning needs.

In the lesson plan above, she quickly identified content from other ELA courses that align to the same standard:

She may use the Read It from British Literature to help expand her class's understanding of figurative language.

If she finds that several students are struggling with annotation, she can assign them the World Literature Watch It for extra practice.

When two students expressed an interest in Dickinson's work, our teacher suggested the Watch It from the Poetry course as an enrichment activity.  

When it's time to assess her students, she will assign them the Show It as a graded assignment. 

As you can see, lesson planning is quick and easy with Lincoln Empowered. Click here for more information and to learn how school districts and charters are using Lincoln Empowered.

Kathy Cerminara and Nicole Costlow are part of the Sales and Marketing Department at Lincoln Learning Solutions. Both Kathy and Nicole have been with Lincoln Learning more than 10 years. Prior to her current role as a Solutions Specialist, Kathy served as Senior Manager of Instructional Services, working closely with Lincoln's teacher facilitators. She has 15 years of educational experience, serving as a Spanish teacher in brick and mortar and virtual classrooms. Nicole is Lincoln Learning's Digital Marketing Manager. In this role, she works to grow and maintain the organization's social media presence. Previously, she served as Senior Managing Editor, working with the staff of curriculum editors and helping to develop and maintain user guides, job aids, and training documentation.