I’m a math coach, and one major point of contact I have with teachers is around their lesson planning process. Sometimes, we get to talk about implemented lessons and revise them, but way more often the revision process is focused on drafting lessons and improving how they are planned.

So… if I want to help teachers engage in Teaching (as opposed to pseudoteaching), how can I help them structure the planning process to plan against pseudoteaching and for Teaching.

Some first-pass gleanings:

  • Plan for assessment. How will you gather data during the lesson to identify if learning is happening?
  • Plan assessment around those sticky places that indicate pseudoteaching — asking “what should I do next?” or “do you understand?” is not assessment. Instead, ask students to apply concepts to a new problem, say things in their own words, present situations designed to elicit common misconceptions, etc. (Pseudoteaching: Hunting Monkeys by John Burk (Quantum Progress))
  • Plan for time for students to question and interact with the content.
  • Plan for students to interact with the content before listening to explanation. (Pseudoteaching by Rhett Allain (Dot Physics))
  • Plan lessons where students’ experiences and sense-making determine right-ness and wrong-ness. (Hook It to Something They Already Know by Kate Nowak (f(t))) [pause for brief geek-out on nested parentheses]
    • Give students opportunities to argue.
    • Give problems where students have the resources to argue sensibly — where they have the problem-solving skills to check their work, or can refer to physical realities of manipulatives, or can refer to real-world knowledge, etc.
    • Help students learn estimation and checking for reasonableness so they can have non-silly arguments.
  • Plan lessons focused on, “What are my students going to do tomorrow? How will it help them progress towards our learning goals?” (Pseudoteaching: MIT Physics by Frank Noschese (Action-Reaction))
  • Anticipate student misconceptions, not to inoculate students but to figure out the best ways to get the misconceptions out there publicly. (https://www.ncetm.org.uk/resources/1442)

What else? Are there nitty-gritty tips for planning to avoid pseudoteaching?