Your Subject & Standard

Your first decision in establishing a focus for your instructional design project is to narrow your lesson's scope to a grade level, subject, and a specific College and Career Readiness Standard (or standards). To narrow your focus, you must first decide:

Grade Level: What grade level will be the focus of your lesson? (e.g., Grade Level A, B, C, D, or E)?
Subject: Will your lesson be on a Math or English Language Arts / Literacy subject?
Domain or Strand:

Domain: If you want to design a Math lesson, what will be the domain?
Strand: If you want to design an English Language Arts / Literacy lesson, what will be the:

Strand (e.g., Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, or Language), and
Sub-strand if you chose Reading and Writing (e.g., Reading of Informational Text, Literature, History/Social Studies Text, or Scientific and Technical text, or Writing of History/Social Studies, or Scientific and Technical subjects)?

Standard: Based on these decisions, what specific standard(s) and supporting standard(s) do you want to make the focus of your lesson.

The following figure illustrates this decision tree:

Decision Tree-2.png

Be Mindful of Scope

In making these decisions, keep in mind you are designing a lesson that will take the learner approximately 15-30 minutes to complete. This lesson duration is a very important design consideration that affects the focus and scope of your lesson. In practical terms, think long and hard about how much of the subject matter you can effectively and efficiently cover in 15 to 30 minutes. Therefore, it is very important to keep the focus of your lesson small when you are selecting from the roster of standards.

Your Topic

After you have decided upon your subject and standard(s), think about specific topic associated with the subject and standard that you have chosen. The topic area will help to frame your lesson, and should be relevant to your adult learners. For example, if you have selected an ELA/Literacy standard, your focus could be on a topic related to Social Studies or Science. Adult education topics may include current events in social studies, or plant and animal classifications in biology. In the topic area of Math, you may include interpreting and building functions, or symmetry and transformation in geometry. When selecting a topic, think about your learners, and what topics would be interesting and relevant to them.

Lesson Goals

As part of the process of narrowing your focus, you will define (and likely continuously refine) the purpose and goals of your lesson. In contrast to the learning outcomes and objectives that we will cover later, the lesson goals broadly define what the learner should be able to achieve when the lesson is complete. In other words, what skills and knowledge do you want your participants to learn as a result of the lesson? Again, keep in mind you are designing a lesson that will take the learner approximately 15-30 minutes to complete. Think of the purpose and lesson goals as a target to be reached or achieved.

For example ...

Let's now view an example of how the focus for instruction was established for a lesson. Please review the following lesson. This lesson is one of many examples of the free open educational resources (OER) available for instructors on OER Commons.

Within this lesson example, we see lesson's subject, topic, and purpose / goal. In an upcoming practice exercise, we will contemplate the applicable standard.

Lesson Example: Example of an adult basic education lesson on OER Commons

Subject: English Language Arts / Literacy

Topic: The Penny: Intermediate Reading Activity

Purpose / Goal of Instruction: The purpose of this lesson is for students to learn new vocabulary, practice reading, and hone their conversation skills while learning about the use of the penny in the United States.

Next, we'll explore how to develop measurable learning objectives, and discuss the tools needed to assess these outcomes.