Lesson planning is one of the most fundamental aspects of teaching. Guiding the course of classroom instruction, lesson plans are like an educator's road map – detailing what students need to learn and how lessons will be taught to influence learning.
What Comes First: Lesson Planning or Student Assessments?
The challenge many educators face is how to make more informed instructional decisions when planning.
In designing your instructional road map, what information, tools, and data do you use to inform your plans? Are your planning and assessing efforts integrated?
How Assessments Help Differentiate & Track Targeted Instruction
Every student learns differently and requires varying levels of academic support. When lessons are planned without any assessment process in place, instruction lacks differentiation and becomes very one-size-fits-all.
To effectively provide every student with instruction that targets his or her unique needs, the following data-driven student assessments can effectively inform lesson plans:
- Benchmark Assessments (Interim or Formative Assessments)
Beginning-, middle-, and end-of-year benchmark assessments identify students who are performing at, above, or below grade level.
- Progress Monitoring Assessments
Progress monitoring evaluations frequently assess students’ understanding of fundamental skills during the learning process and provide up-to-date information on student achievement.
- Curriculum-Based Assessments
Designed around classroom curriculum and utilized within progress monitoring assessments, curriculum-based measures (CBM) communicate “vital signs” or “indicators” of a student’s basic skill competencies in reading and math.
Support Your MTSS & RTI Frameworks with Powerful Assessments
Each student assessment discussed above plays a pivotal role in an educator’s instructional plans. These assessments help educators pinpoint:
- Which students need extra support/intervention early in the learning process
- Whether instruction is impacting student achievement
- Which students may need additional intervention
As discussed in a previous blog post titled How Benchmark Assessments Support an RTI Framework, once a student has been identified for intervention based on benchmark and progress monitoring assessment data, your MTSS and RTI framework will begin to produce powerful, data-backed student improvement.
When you and your team of educators are empowered with robust, up-to-date student performance data, you your team of educators can help every student make significant gains.
Direct the course of your students’ academic path with brief, valid, and reliable assessments from aimswebTMPlus. Learn how you can start measuring what matters to get the feedback you need to create more informed classroom and intervention lesson plans.