The document discusses the importance of carefully planning lessons to support student learning. It outlines the author's lesson planning process which includes reviewing objectives, content, learning outcomes, and assessments. The author experiments with different assessment methods like web quests, blogs, and online learning to improve student performance. Incorporating new ideas and techniques can help boost student participation and validate that learning goals are achieved. Careful planning and prioritizing student learning are essential for education.

1. The Importance of Planning your Lessons
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post 153
There is no doubt of the tremendous importance of planning one’s lessons carefully, which is decisive and vital to support students’ deep learning of the content and to ensure that learning lasts beyond the end-of-class farewell. For this reason, there are indeed several factors that can doubtlessly and directly affect the steps followed for planning and assessing learners and the tryout of new ideas that can be incorporated to one’s way of planning and assessment as well.
“What steps do you work through to plan your lessons and student assessments? How effective do you believe they are?” (Laureate Education, 2014). When inquired about this, one must reflectively consider how one goes about planning lessons. In my case, planning bas become a series of steps that consists of the following: 1) reviewing course (outline) objectives to have my teaching aligned with them, 2) course content attached to the objectives and that needs to be learned by students, 3) the learning outcomes that I visualize for my students in term of skill development, and 4) the way I want to test student learning (assessment of skill or behavior). In regards to effectiveness, like in any other process, planning becomes –at times- a trial-and-error mechanism. That is, there

2. is always room for improvement, but that improvement depends on the ethnographic characteristics found amongst one’s students and their learning backgrounds: Deep Learners vs. Surface Learners. Every single class, then, is a radically different teaching and learning scenario that positively challenges both the instructor and the learner.
“What new ideas about lesson planning and assessment … might you incorporate into your teaching?” (Laureate Education, 2014). In terms of the search for optimal planning and assessment techniques, faculty members, as well as any other teacher at any level (in primary or high school), must rely on their vivid creativity to always find alternative ways of assessing student learning outcomes. The incorporation of new trends in educational assessment, or even old ones one has never tried before, can shift one’s perception of the learning process that leads students to build and consolidate knowledge, skills, and, why not, even competencies. As a faculty member of the English Department at Universidad Latina, I have consistently tried different ways to help learners achieve course learning goals and to expand their horizons in terms of skills that can turn into competences for their future or current working performance; among these tryouts with college students I have to mention Web Questing (part of Project-Based Learning) combined with blogging, IBL (Internet-Based Learning) research assignments aiming at developing students’ hierarchical thinking, Blended Learning where students work on a Moodle LMS, etc. And I must admit that learners’ performance has been improving the more I polish assignments for student assessment.
A lot can be reflected upon activities that can boost student participation in and out of the classroom, as well as planning and assessment. Participation boosters, whether they are incorporated while working with pupils F2F or while students are using social media networks, are necessary to consolidate learner’s learning process and to validate the accomplishment of learning goals, one’s lesson planning, and the assessment tool one has chosen to provide formative and summative feedback to students. Education is indeed a complex process we are immersed along with our pupils. Words such as success

3. and failure in one’s teaching are no doubt labels we can attach to a process that lacks prioritization of student learning.
Laureate Education. (2014). Certificate in Higher Education.
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