Questions to Think Through While Planning

I've been thinking about lesson planning.  I've never written down the questions that passed through my mind as I planned. Now I'm trying to recreate those.

1. What do I want students to be able to do at the end of the lesson? vocabulary? skill? application? depth of understanding?


2. How will the vocabulary, skill or application in this lesson be tested?


3. What is the rationale for this lesson? 


4. What connections can I help students make to real world application? How can I help students visualize this math? 


5. What came before? What will come after? How can I link this lesson with the others?


6. What connections do I want students to make to previous work? What might those connections look like?
   


7. How will I know students "get" this lesson? What questions will I ask? In what format will I frame those questions?


8. At this point I often check the MTBoS search engine for blogs about this lesson. Is there a way to get at this lesson without direct explicit instruction? If so, how shall I set up students' learning? What notes will students need?  What do those notes look like? What practice will students need? What active learning strategy fits this lesson best? What differentiation is needed so that all students can participate?


9. What problems will I use? Do they need to be scaffolded ... basic to difficult? What student errors can I anticipate? How can I use those anticipated errors to support students?
   


10. What does the pacing look like in this lesson? Are there different activities? If so, what is the sequence of events? How will I handle transitions?


11. What materials do I need to prepare? What does the room arrangement look like? If students are in groups - how will I organize those?


12. What might plan B look like if any part of this lesson fails?

What questions do you think about as you plan lessons? Please share!