A Lesson Plan For Any Humanities And Social Sciences

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When creating a lesson plan for any Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) subject the starting point should always focus around the 5 E-Inquiry model. The set of unit and lesson objectives and expectations are ideally derived from this model and help direct the students to access all the areas of the curriculum being taught. Much like the objectives the final aspect of a unit, the assessment, should be clear and connect to the expectations and accessible for every student to reach. For the foundation year level the Australian Curriculum centres heavily around the self and the family. This component features in many of the content descriptors across History and the other HASS subjects. To make the unit of work accessible for all students there needs to be clear connections back to the objectives and to other subject areas to include interest levels and readiness levels.
The first component of the 5e’s is, engage. While many of the other components are important this one is often found to be the most important and effective but the hardest to measure in Education. The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (aitsl) describe engagement as, “an ambiguous term; poorly defined and difficult to measure” (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, n.d.). It is important to remember when planning, that engagement doesn’t solely refer to good behaviour; it needs to relate to a student’s ability and want to learn. Klem and Connell state in their article that, “ongoing engagement refers to student behaviour, emotions, and thought processes. Behavioural engagement includes time students spent on working, intensity of concentration and effort” (Klem and Connell, 2004). The History unit plan attached utilises the...

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...ds by design model. The skills that were required to be learnt by the students were the first things to be designed in the plan. From there the assessment pieces were planned, the assessment is planned second so that the goals are directly aligned and the understanding can be clearly correlated through the assessment. The final process is determining the lesson sequencing and teaching strategies to ensure students get the most out of each lesson and the unit is flowing through each topic in succession. (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005)
Combining the two models, the 5E’s Instructional and Backwards by Design, makes for smooth planning and easily designed lessons and units. It helps an Educator to return to their KUD’s when planning the body and assessment of a unit to ensure their students are obtaining the highest level of engagement and understanding possible.

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