Many of you are familiar with the ITIP lesson plan or comparable format. These can be helpful ways of organizing instructional activities, provided an instructor keeps in mind a set of questions that should inform each step of the lesson design process. These questions can be summarized under the acrostic W-H-E-R-E:

Where are we headed? Why are we headed there? What must the student know and be able to do by the end of the period of instruction? What criteria will be used to judge the students' performance? Students want and need to know the answers to these questions at the outset of the course, each unit, and each lesson.

Hook the student through engaging and provocative entry points: thought-provoking and focusing experiences, issues, oddities, problems, and challenges that point toward essential questions, core ideas, final performance tasks.

Explore and enable/equip. Engage students in learning experiences that allow them to explore big ideas and essential questions and cause them to pursue hunches, research and test ideas, and try things out. Equip them for final performances through guided instruction on needed skill and knowledge. Have them experience ideas to make them real.

Reflect. Dig deeper into ideas at issue (through facets of understanding). Revise, rehearse, and refine as needed. Guide students in self-assessment and self-adjustment, based on feedback from initial inquiry, results, and discussion.

Evaluate. Reveal what has been understood through final performances and products. Involve students in a final self-assessment to identify remaining questions, set future goals, and point toward new lessons.

(Source: Wiggins and McTighe, Understanding by Design [Alexandria, VA, 1998], 115-116)

Many lesson plans available on the web and from other sources neglect the issues raised above in a focus on specific activities which may be interesting in themselves, but lack adequate direction, connection to larger themes, or sufficient focus on significant knowledge and skills. The content, competencies, and larger purpose too often become swallowed up in the activity. In an attempt to avoid these pitfalls in HST 400, we will be outlining lessons by answering a series of questions keyed to WHERE.

Where are we headed? Answer this question for yourself and your students with two categories of response: Curriculum Fit: Where does/would this lesson fit within a unit of instruction; and Learning Objectives: What will students know and be able to do by the end of this lesson?

Hook: Hook the students' interest with two devices: a Focus Question for the lesson and an arresting introduction. No lesson should be without this, even if, in a multi-lesson unit or multi-period lesson, the hook consists of reminding students in some interesting way of the big question or problem they have been working on.

The Focus Question accomplishes two things: first, it raises, hopefully in an engaging way, the one big idea or essential question that the students will explore through the period's instructional activities; second, it provides a core that keeps the lesson on track.

The Introduction piques intellectual interest through one of several strategies proven by extensive educational research: 1) Instant immersion in questions, problems, challenges, situations, or stories that require the students' wits, not just school knowledge; 2) Thought provocations such as anomalies, weird facts, or mysteries; 3) Experiential shocks where students have to confront feelings, obstacles, and problems personally and as a group; 4) Differing points of view or multiple perspectives on an issue.

Explore and Equip: This is the structure of procedures for exploring the issues, content, and skills of the day's lesson. They may vary widely according to the specific objectives and requirements of the topic under consideration.

Reflect and rethink. This aspect of the lesson may vary as well depending on the particular content and procedure, but could include checking for understanding and student self-assessment and self-adjustment. Here the hook and focus question can become very helpful, if you have raised it properly at the outset of the lesson. Students can simply compare their initial responses to their conclusions at the end of the lesson. NOTE: this is not simple review, which is generally teacher centered and passive. Rather, it engages students in actively rethinking and refining their understanding of the issues raised during the lesson.

Evaluate. What evidence will demonstrate to you and your students that they have met the lesson objectives? They may do this in a wide variety of ways, many of which you will not need to collect and score because they will become evident in the simple performance. complete a quiz, A very effective strategy is to having students answer two simple questions at the end of the lesson: 1) What is the big point you learned in class today? and 2) What is the main unanswered question you leave class with today?

Thus, every HST 400 lesson plan must include the following components:

Focus Question

Objectives (each one keyed to a relevant benchmark in the Michigan Framework for the Social Studies)

Curriculum Fit

Procedures for Exploring and Equipping

Reflect/Rethink

Evaluation