Lesson plans
Assessment and evaluation
Learning styles
Collaboration
Other teaching resources
Lesson plans
Why use a lesson plan?
Be a better teacher.
- A lesson plan helps you organize your teaching.
- A lesson plan helps you focus on what the students need to know and how best to teach them.
Save resources.
- A lesson plan can be reused or adapted for other classes or during another semester.
- Lesson plans can be easily shared with colleagues, saving time and providing continuity of teaching.
- A lesson plan can be adapted to teach a similar lesson to students in a different course.
Lesson plan form [DOC - Word format]
This is the lesson plan format used by the project participants. Parts of the lesson plan include objectives, lesson summary, activities, standards addressed, learning styles addressed, and assessment/evaluation methods.
Sample lesson plans
These lesson plans are provided as examples. They were developed by the five project teams, each consisting of a high school media specialist, a high school teacher, a community college librarian, and a community college faculty member for use in their own classrooms. Each lesson plan addresses one or more ACRL Information Literacy Performance Indicator(s), based on results of the project’s information literacy needs assessment.
Feel free to use as is or adapt to the needs of your students and curriculum. We do ask that you give credit to the NILRC/IMLS “Information for the 21st Century Learner” grant project.
Assessment and evaluation
Needs assessment instrument (link to assessment instrument info page)
- The project’s needs assessment instrument lets the instructor view the results immediately and adjust instruction accordingly.
Focus groups
- A focus group can be very useful tool for learning about your students’ attitudes and perceptions. It is also an effective means of additional assessment, particularly with at-risk students, who may not perform well on tests or other written assessments/evaluations.
- Conducting Focus Groups [PDF] offers guidelines as well as questions used in the project.
Post-instruction assessment and evaluation
- How you will determine the effectiveness of the lesson? Assessment can be as simple as evaluating the students’ verbal responses to review questions, or may be incorporated into a long-term assignment. If you are a teaching librarian, offer to work with the course instructor to develop appropriate methods of assessment.
- It’s important to re-evaluate and revise your lesson plan following the instruction and student assessment.
Learning styles
How important is it to address different learning styles in a lesson?
- People have different ways of learning. At-risk students may be less able to adapt and learn if their own learning style is not addressed in a lesson.
- To reach the most students, the lesson needs to incorporate instruction for as many styles as possible. It is especially important to include active learning components. There are numerous models of learning styles. For this project, the teams worked with the Kolb Cycle of Experiential Learning.
Collaboration
Collaboration doesn’t need to be part of a large, formal project. Just pick up the phone and contact one person whose talents would support what you want to accomplish.
Collaborative partnership ideas
- Form a partnership between community college librarians and school media specialists in the feeder high schools to create a sequential program of information literacy.
- Get to know your peer librarians in your area to share problems and solutions.
- Work with a course instructor/teacher to integrate information literacy into the curriculum.
More resources
