It’s hardly a secret: If you, or if anyone on your teacher team lacks confidence in the classroom this year, student outcomes will suffer as a result.

In the face of historic teacher turnover, this reality has taken on even greater significance.

As the founder and lead editor of the popular blog, Cult of Pedagogy, former educator Jennifer Gonzalez says learning to teach with equal parts skill and confidence is essential to hitting the ground running, while helping all students meet and exceed academic goals.

Why?

Because evidence has shown that confident teachers:

• Build stronger relationship with students
• Break down systemic barriers to learning
• Meet students where they are academically
• Limit classroom disruptions & distractions

The problem is that most teachers, especially newer ones, often start the year as if drinking from a firehose. They neither have the time, nor the headspace, to step back and objectively evaluate their approach, or to even think about complicated psychological terms like self-efficacy. They’re simply trying —sometimes it seems, against all odds — to just teach.

“In America anyway, we’ve got these schedules in schools that are so demanding and have so little time for thoughtful planning that, unfortunately, I think a lot of teachers end up just going with what is going to get the greatest level of compliance from our students,” says Gonzalez on an episode of The RocketPD Podcast. “There is a science to this. And it’s not difficult to learn. But those fundamentals aren’t taught widely or often enough.”

For her part, Gonzalez suggests that the key to building teacher confidence starts not with ease or calm at the front of the classroom in facing students, but well before that: With careful planning in the form of up-front lesson design.

As she prepares to deliver a new course on the topic of powerful lesson design, Gonzalez highlights a five-part framework that any teacher, no matter how long they’ve taught, can leverage to build confidence and design, deliver and assess power classroom lessons on essentially any subject.

How to Architect a Powerful Lesson
Gonzalez credits the Principles of Backward Lesson Design for reshaping her perspective as a former teacher who often struggled to plan highly effective classroom lessons.

In fact, she wrote a phenomenal blog post on this topic.

Rather than start your lesson planning process at the beginning by thinking about what topic you want to teach and the resources needed to teach it, consider starting with the end in mind. What do you want students to be able to do as a result of what they’ve learned?

So, how do you do it? Gonzalez offers the following suggestions (in this order):

1. Write clear, measurable learning objectives
2. Choose the right assessments to measure mastery during & after the lesson
3. Select learning experiences to match your objectives
4. Design the lesson flow from start to finish

#1 Write a Clear, Measurable Learning Objective
To write a clear objective, it’s important to know what your learning goals are up front.

For example, does the lesson aim to help students acquire a new skill, or new knowledge? Or, is this lesson about providing perspective or attitudes, such as how students act toward others?

Once you’ve decided on a broader learning goal, you can start to focus on an objective. Think in terms of action and use a verb. Develop a statement that includes your audience, what you want them to accomplish (e.g. what action), the context in which they’ll do it and and the change that you want to achieve.

These achievements should be observable and measurable, as described in this worksheet, courtesy of Iowa State University.

#2 Create Intentional Assessments
The key isn’t to assess students based on what information they can recite back to you, explains Gonzalez, but rather how they’re understanding of key concepts can be applied to demonstrate mastery of the learning objectives.

Your assessments should be:

• Diagnostic, formative, & summative
• Specific & aligned w/instructional goals
• Applied in the context of a broader rubric
• Embedded seamlessly into your lesson, not tacked on at the end

#3 Plan the Learning Experience
Now that you know what you want to accomplish and how you plan to measure it, you can start to design the learning experience for your students and begin thinking about how this will all play out in the classroom.

Gonzalez offers the following suggestions as part of her framework for Powerful Lesson Design:

• Create an engaging opening to start the lesson
• Use effective content-delivery strategies
• Use effective application strategies
• Put it all together w/intentional sequencing & timing

#4 Differentiate Instruction from Multiple Angles
It’s important to remember that, when it comes to lesson design, one size does not fit all, says Gonzalez. To be successful, you need to build lesson plans that take different student learning needs into account. That way, every student has an opportunity to thrive.

• Here’s what you need to think about as part of that work:
• Explore the principles of Universal Design for Learning
• Include instructional differentiation into your lesson plan
• Highlight specific differentiation strategies
• Diversify learning materials for different learning styles
• Think about how technology can help you reach different students in different ways

#5 Practice Your Lesson Delivery

Now, for the fun part: Find a mirror and somewhere quiet so that you can practice your delivery. The goal isn’t to simply sound good, or to ensure students (and you) are having fun (though fun helps!), but to master proven instructional techniques, so you deliver the best learning results.

Gonzalez offers these tactics as a starting point:

• Create “academic safety” to help students relax & engage
• Time yourself. Balance limited instructional time with efficiency & flexibility
• Encourage meaningful student participation
• Model concepts using effective teaching practices
• Learn to use silence to your advantage as a teacher