This book shows teachers how to plan units and lessons in a highly focused and effective way that is lean, timesaving, professional, and free of unnecessary trivialities.

This book shows teachers how to plan units and lessons in a highly focused and effective way. Readers are introduced to a professional planning strategy that is lean and timesaving, without wasting energy on side issues. This approach takes as its starting point the students and the outcomes they need to achieve and focuses the entire planning process on making sure students will be successful. With this backward approach, all planning steps are focused on the goal of learning success, keeping teachers from overplanning, underplanning, or misplanning. The book highlights the importance of tasks as planning tools for teachers. Well-set tasks reveal the teacher's intentions and the content to be learned, and they show students what will be assessed and how. How to develop and apply planning around meaningful tasks is a key focus.

Thanks to numerous suggestions for learning activities, this book is suitable for independent work through,but it can also be used with profit by teacher educators and cooperating teachers.

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1: The approach in brief

Chapter 2: The primacy of impact and the wisdom of practitioners

Chapter 3: Rethinking conventions of lesson planning

Chapter 4: The key principle of planning units “backward”

Chapter 5: Planning a unit

Chapter 6: Planning a lesson “backward”

Chapter 7: Planning lessons by and with student teachers

Chapter 8: What goals for units? What expected results? What tasks?

Chapter 9: From unit to lesson: Two goals per lesson, and assessment

Chapter 10: More on assessment

Epilogue: What is the plan?

References