Course development, lesson plans, and classroom training techniques

What this lesson is for: you write a lesson plan and teach from it. Not a plan you found, a plan you wrote, on a subject you are given at the start of the lesson.

This is the longest lesson in phase 1, and the one everything else leans on. Every plan you write for the rest of the program is written to what you learn here.

Read:

• FAA-H-8083-9B, chapter 5, The Teaching Process.
• FAA-H-8083-9B, chapter 7, Planning Instructional Activity.
• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation I, Task C.
• standards/LESSON-PLAN-TEMPLATE.md, all of it, including the worked examples of completion standards and the minimum plan set.

Deliverable: Two completion standards you have been held to in your own training, written out as your instructor stated them, plus your rewrite of each as a performance-based objective. If the original was already performance-based, say so and explain what makes it so.

Bring something to write with. You will write a full lesson plan during this lesson.

1. The teaching process and the essential teaching skills.
2. What a course of training is.
3. Preparing a lesson: training objectives, completion standards, performance-based objectives, what the ACS is doing in a curriculum, and decision-based objectives.
4. Organizing material.
5. The six delivery methods: lecture, discussion, guided discussion, cooperative or group learning, demonstration-performance, and drill and practice.
6. Electronic learning.
7. Instructional aids: what makes one effective, why to use them, and how.
8. Integrated flight instruction.
9. Problem-based instruction.
10. Planning instructional activity: blocks of learning, the training syllabus, and lesson plans.
11. The risk in choosing the wrong teaching method.
12. You write a lesson plan.
13. You teach from it.

• Write a complete lesson plan to the North Aero template, in this lesson, on a subject your instructor assigns you at the start. You will not get to pick, and you will not know in advance.
• Teach a block from the plan you just wrote.
• Handle a question your plan does not cover.
• Critique yourself before being critiqued.

Keep this plan. In lesson 4 it gets critiqued, you revise it, and you teach it again. That is built into the program on purpose. Do not treat it as finished.

1. You write a lesson plan to standards/LESSON-PLAN-TEMPLATE.md on an assigned subject, with every required field completed, within the lesson.
2. Your plan's completion standards are stated as observable behavior, and you can say, for each one, what an observer would see. A recall-only standard fails this.
3. You teach a block from your own plan and follow it, rather than teaching a remembered version of the subject with the plan sitting on the table.
4. You name the delivery method you chose for that block and why that method rather than another.
5. You answer a question your plan does not cover without either guessing or abandoning the lesson structure, and say afterwards where it belongs in the plan.
6. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

• Writing "the student will understand the airspace requirements." This is the most common error in this lesson by a wide margin. Understanding is not observable. What would you see?
• Knowing all six delivery methods and using lecture anyway. Nearly everyone does this. Notice which method the subject actually wanted.
• Using someone else's plan. A plan out of a commercial binder is not one you can teach from under pressure, and an examiner works that out in about ninety seconds.
• Writing a plan that does not fit its own schedule. Add up your blocks. They usually do not sum to the time you have.
• Objectives that describe what you will do rather than what the learner will be able to do afterwards.
• Abandoning the plan at the first unexpected question. A plan is a structure, not a script. Answer, then get back on it.
• Treating the ACS as a test document. It is also a curriculum document. That is what program/COVERAGE-MATRIX.md is built on.

Not applicable. Ground lesson.

This lesson has no Video Slots.

Parameter P3 in standards/LESSON-PLAN-TEMPLATE.md sets the minimum number of lesson plans you must have written in your own hand before the mock oral at lesson 40. It is seventeen. The plan you write today is the first one.