Belated Posting of Lesson Plan on Drucker Chapters 1 - 3

From Team Change, Effective, Designing for

I. At certain points throughout this discussion, we will ask that you ignore what you read for today’s class. Instead, please answer solely based upon your thoughts and what you would find yourself thinking/doing in that situation.

II. Introduction to Hypothetical Situation
Congratulations! You have just decided to open a Mexican restaurant. This has been a lifelong goal for you, and you are thrilled you have graduated college and can now dedicate yourself to a fine Mexican cuisine restaurant serving organic, extraordinary takes on traditional Mexican recipes.
You cannot afford to open this venture in Chicago, so you’ve decided to do it in your home town in the outskirts of large Chicagoland suburbs. You have secured financing for this venture in a few ways. First, you begged your parents to make you an interest-free loan of $15,000. They scrambled for the money, but in the end came through for you. Next, you obtained a $60,000 loan from your local bank (obviously, your parents co-signed). Finally, you are putting forth your life savings of $5,000. Your student loan provider has agreed to defer your $21,000 student loans for 3 years.

A. What are you basic instincts on this situation which you have willingly entered?

B. What is the purpose of your restaurant? Add your personal touch when responding to this question.

C. You are the owner and manager. What will make you a good manager for your restaurant?

III. Characteristics of good management (general discussion)

A. What makes a good leader

B. Attitudes, communications, etc.

C. Begin the personal examples
· Employer
· Extracurricular Activities
· Sports Coach
· Band, Choir, Orchestra Leader

IV. Chapter 1: Management as Social Function and Liberal Art (points to hit from the book)

A. What is management?
· It is about human beings, making them work efficiently together by multiplying their strengths and compensating for their weaknesses
· Management is deeply embedded in culture
· Although the functions of management are the same, the way in which management is executed varies based on tradition, history, and culture

B. Management must have objectives
· This is the difference between an enterprise and a mob
· Management needs to allow individuals to grow and develop to face new challenges
· An enterprise is both a learning and a teaching institution
· Communication and personal responsibility are required to structure people with many different skills and jobs
· A diversity of performance measurements are needed continually assess and improve the health and performance of an enterprise
· Results only exist on the outside; inside, there are only costs

C. Management as a liberal art
· “Liberal”- management deals with knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership
· “Art”- management is concerned with practice and application
· Which type will you engage in for your restaurant? What type of manager do you see yourself as?

V. Hypo.
Think of your day-to-day operations—and not just the good or the bad, but the stressful things that will push you to your limits. As you work with irresponsible teen waiters, Mexican cooks who know more about Mexican food than you do, suppliers late with shipments, rude customers who leave without paying, employees whose kids come and loiter at the restaurant all day, local vandalism, etc.
What type of management do you see yourself engaging in? What type of manager do you want to be? What will make you effective?

VI. Chapter 2: The Dimensions of Management (points to hit from the book)

A. What are the tenants of an effective manager?
· Purpose
· Productivity
· Social responsibility

B. Three tasks of management in the enterprise:
· Establish the purpose and mission of the institution
o In the business enterprise economic performance is the primary purpose
· Make work productive and the worker effective
o Organizing work
o Making work suitable for human beings
o Doing things that benefit your employees even though you don’t have to do those things. Making your restaurant a great place for people to work because you care about them
· Manage social impacts and responsibilities
o An enterprise has have an impact on the community
o An enterprise should show concern for the quality of life
o The two previous points go along with making work suitable for human beings but take the concept a step further. . Influencing or contributing to your community because you care about them—they are your customers—and they care about you—they come to your restaurant for the unique experience. Make life easier for those who work for you and who support you. Show that you are not a money-making machine but rather a person who cares about the people who work for him
o Doing so will build employee loyalty and help foster a relationship of mutual caring and respect. This cannot be faked, as it is obvious to employees when a boss does not truly care about their wellbeing.

C. Ask a question where it is less obvious for social responsibility.
· If no one answers, hypothetical: one of your waitress’ has two sons who play catch outside. They break your window. You decide to sponsor t-shirts to get a Little League started in your community.

D. What is something a manager needs to do that does not fall under those three?
· There is nothing that does not fall under these three.
· Anything you think of either falls under those tasks or is not as important as you think.

E. Validity of his quotes
· Our ability to contrib. to society is the manager and the individual skill (p. 11)
· No one does it alone. Even Einstein didn’t do it alone.
· Management is solely responsible for consequences. (p.10)
· Hypothetical: One of your kitchen workers slips and dislodges his hip. He wasn’t wearing slip-resistant shoes and the kitchen does not have slip-resistant mats. Get class to say who the blame is on.
· Hypothetical: A customer calls complaining about food poisoning. Who is responsible?
· Results of an organization only exist outside the group itself. You can only rate group’s effectiveness based on external factors. (p. 12)
· Soccer team? In a game, you don’t know how good you are until you face another team. When you play a team sport, how do you know your team is good/competitive?
· SWOT
· Exam, you feel like you know everything, but you didn’t when you get exam. Huge huge lecture, no chance to prove yourself until exam ina small one, there is more disc, opp, direct discussion with prof. What were your chances to prove yourself to the professor? Exam, online quiz
· How is an individual rated? Only O and T (Opportunities, Threats) is what matters…
· What about personal growth or the group itself?

VII. What are the results of a good business?

VIII. Chapter 3: The Purpose and Objectives of a Business (points from book to integrate with examples for this section only)

A. Purpose of a business
1) To create a customer
(a) Don’t ask “what do we want to sell?”; ask “what does the customer want to buy?”
2) What is our business? What should our business be? What will it be? (necessitates objectives)
B. Objectives of a business- definition, purpose, and mission of a business must be translated into objectives to make achievement possible
1) Objectives of objectives
(a) Objectives represent the fundamental strategy of a business (what our business is, will be, and should be)
(b) Objective must be operational
(c) Objectives must concentrate resources and effort
(d) There must be multiple objectives to balance a variety of needs and goals
(e) Objectives are needed in each of the business’s “survival areas”
2) Marketing objectives- creating a customer
3) Innovation objective- this is not only technical invention, but also economic and social innovation to prevent being rendered obsolete by competitors
4) Resources objectives- to plan the supply, employment, and development of human resources, physical resources, and capital resources
5) Productivity objectives- to obtain and grow productivity of resources
6) Social responsibilities objectives- business exists in society and so has to take responsibility
7) Profit as a need and limitation- Plan for a needed minimum profitability rather than meaningless “profit maximization”

IX. The new company will die without management. The existing company will die without innovation.
· With restaurant: Marketing? Resources? Productivity? Social responsibility?
· Mother, four kids under age 5. Stickers can be a simple tool to make kids behave, and this is innovation.
· Used car salesman: going-concern? He is making money from dishonesty and not innovation
· Management vs. innovation
· What are they trying to do and how?
· What makes a bad leader?
o Considers profit the only task to achieve.
o An inability to innovate
o Inability to follow the three tasks
· Where does profit fit in? It’s a NEED not an objective
· What is the importance of profit in a business?
· Is it a need or desire?
· NEED not objective.

X. Summarize discussion based on what class contributed
· It is about human beings, making them work efficiently together by multiplying their strengths and compensating for their weaknesses
· 3 tasks: purpose, productivity, social responsibility
· Profit not the objective

Lesson Plan on Prep for Visit of the Deans

With this session we being to "make the case" for the issues the class project aims to address. Some of these issues we've discussed already from your personal perceptions of them. In this class we want to begin with what others have said about the issues and to identify root causes.

I don't want to talk about cures just yet. That puts the cart before the horse. But I do want to mention a belief that any cure has to exhibit leverage - killing two birds with one stone. So in looking for cures you do look for solutions that do that.

I bring that up here because I want to cement a lesson from the session with the CIOs. The importance of communication was emphasized in that session. How does a student learn about communication? The thought is that a mentor learns something about communication via mentoring. We'll return to that later, but I wanted to mention it here before the idea gets forgotten.

The goal in this session is to cast an underlying framework for the session with the Deans. The two main players we want to think about are first, students, and second, instructors, both those on the tenure track and those who are not.

The underlying framework feature a dual nature to the role of these actors. They are both customers and producers. Usually we think of people as being one or the other, but not both.

Students as customers is pretty easy. They pay tuition explicitly and they pay implicitly with their time spent at school, which could be spent on something else. Students as producers might have been an alien concept before taking this course, but it should be pretty evident now. Consider that Ross piece from Scientific American and stuff we read from the National Academy volume on experts. Their is work at becoming an expert.

The George Kuh article about what they are learning from NSSE says that there is a problem with students as producers, because the evidence suggests many students are not engaged and have unrealistic expectation about the time required for learning.

Let's turn to instructors. Understanding them as producers is easy. Teaching is work. Research is work. Public service is work. Understanding them as customers, which is what the Arthur Levine essay argues, might need some explanation. Work can be thought of as a means to an end. We think of jobs as paying wages, health care and other benefits. But work can also be an end in itself. According to Drucker, this is particularly true with knowledge workers.

When work is an end in itself and you are able to influence the nature of the work environment, you will try to shape the environment so it produces more of the customer benefit. We will spend some time talking about what this shaping looks like. If faculty were 100 per cent researchers, what environment would be most welcoming for that? We'll use that question to frame the answer to the customer benefit.

Given the duality of both student and instructor roles, the question is whether there is good balance with each. Or does the balance get out of whack? Kuh's piece argues there is a problem of being out of balance, which he refers to as the Disengagement Pact, where the customer side seems to overwhelm the producer side and this is true both for students and instructors.

Now throw into the mix what large classes do, which we've talked about somewhat. And put into the soup questions about cost and access. Try to address the Disengagement Pact seriously and it looks like you make the cost and access issues harder.

Consider our class. I hope (most of if not all of) you are engaged in what we are doing. But our class is very small, it is exclusive in being for CHP students only, and I can assure you I'm putting in much more time than I would if I were teaching this course on a regular basis and having other faculty burdens. Our course does not serve as a model to address the larger issues.

In talking with the deans, we want to ask them about the issues. They are struggling mightily with planning for budget cuts. So it is fair game to talk about courses that are lecture-discussion switching to straight lecture as an economy move and having fewer graduate students on campus. But what does that do vis-a-vis the Disengagement Pact?

National Academy Volume - Experts versus Novices - Transfer

Expert versus Novice

What makes an expert? See if the class can flesh out a definition. Pose the question: expert in what? Does the "what" part matter? Most of the students in the class are in their 15th or 16th year of school. Are the students experts at being students? Is that meaningful or nonsense?

We have various metaphors for thinking. One of those is the brain as a powerful computer. With that as starting point, one might imagine the expert to have a more powerful CPU than the novice. That turns out to be wrong. The expert-novice distinction reflects a different kind of processing rather than different levels of processing.

We know that increasing experience and knowledge in a specific field (chess, for instance) has the effect that things (properties, etc.) which, at earlier stages, had to be abstracted, or even inferred are apt to be immediately perceived at later stages. To a rather large extent, abstraction is replaced by perception, but we do not know much about how this works, nor where the borderline lies. As an effect of this replacement, a so-called 'given' problem situation is not really given since it is seen differently by an expert than it is perceived by an inexperienced person….

What is the difference between abstraction and perception in the above paragraph?

Abstraction

2. the act of considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.

Perception

2. immediate or intuitive recognition or appreciation, as of moral, psychological, or aesthetic qualities; insight; intuition; discernment: an artist of rare perception.

Metaphor - learning a foreign language. Initially the foreign words or sentences get tranlated (mentally) into the native language. Translation takes time. There is awkwardness with the foreign language for that reason. Later on the thinking is directly in the foreign language. There is no mental translation. One comes to understand in a different way.

Different metaphor - A plastic straw is encased in a piece of paper covering it to keep it clean till use. That covering can be folded up into little rectangles back and forth until the entire thing is folded up, giving the appearance of an accordion. The expert in learning about a situation does so like unfolding of that paper with a new perception at each stage. The knowledge doesn't come out all at once. But it is there when needed. Novices have each stage as a separate rectangle that they have to construct at the time, so they don't get nearly as far.

Still different metaphor - A novice sees the idea from one perspective only so has a very "flat" seense of the idea. The expert has many different perspectives and can switch from one to another at will.

Activity. Get students to talk about how they read for courses. How do they know whether they understand what they are reading? What do they do to create confidence in that understanding? Do they have a method? Does it matter whether the stuff is for their major or something outside like this CHP class? Can they recall back to when they were Freshmen and comment on whether their way of reading for understanding has changed?

Ask specifically about reading Gawande. Was there a methodology in making for understanding there? I made a claim when reflecting about our discussion on his Bell Curve chapter that there was really only one way to read that chapter, and I gave a model of that. Did anyone try to come up with a model of their own?

Then switch gears and talk about video games. Are there in gamers in the class? Can they talk about how they become masters at the current game they are playing. Does the novice expert distincton carry we've made carry over to that area?

Transfer

Ask students about testing. Is there such a thing as a good test? What does that entail? What does it mean to know a subject well? Talk about using the knowledge in a different context. How much does the context need to vary before the student loses sight of the knowledge and that it is relevant? Talk about riding a bicycle. What knowledge is like riding a bicycle and what is use it or lose it? Talk about depth of learning in this sense. Talk about "learning to learn" skills and being able to self-teach. Note that experts constantly learn themselves, so they do a lot of transfer of knowledge.

Gawande - Naked, What Doctors Owe, and Piece Work

On the content, the goal is to make as many parallels with college education as possible. Let's start very simply with forms of address - formal (Mr., Ms., Dr.) or informal (first name basis). Let's see if we can get agreement on the usual practice and then ask whether the students have had experience with other than the usual practice. Move from that to how the the students view the practice affecting the learning - better under formal, better under informal, or doesn't matter. Then gloss over student-faculty dating, and move on to a discussion of cheating.

Get a sense of the prevalence of cheating as perceived by the students. Talk both about deterrence and about prosecution of a cheating chase after detection. Bring back formal and informal and ask whether it matters here. Try to make a connection between what is done about cheating and promotion of learning. Ask if we're cutting off our nose to spite our face. Talk about the role of trust and talk about incentives for both students and faculty.

Talk specifically about incentives for research after mentioning the botch about faculty incentives for teaching and that they are more subtle than I indicated in class the last time. Talk about non-pecuinary incentives like having good colleagues, good facilities, capable graduate students. Talk about why faculty superivise doctoral students and what they get out of it. Then ask whether teaching might be constructed so as to encourage those type of rewards.

Move into pecuniary incentives. Talk about 9-month salaries and the consequences of that. Talk about the faculty member as an entrepreneur.

Then switch modes and get the students to reflect on the style of discussion that day. The goal is for some hybrid where there is some direction from me but still substantial discussion by the students.

Gawande - Bell Curve + Apgar

Consistent with changing the approach we take during the class discussion, I will change the lesson plan to a narrative format. I prefer narration to lists, but seemingly have fallen into a trap feeling a need to produce them. So this is an attempt to get out of that.

The good part of what we've accomplished in the first three classes is that everyone has had a chance to speak up and it seems that most students are comfortable participating. Also, I have the general sense that the readings and the subject matter are to people's liking. But the participation is uneven and we are not getting a conversation. Instead we are getting students giving their two cents on a question I've posed and with possibly a diversity of views, but no real way that one expressed view informs the other, instead a set of snippets that don't add up to a conversation. There are probably a bunch of subsidiary issues that flow from that main one. Furthermore, I'm driving the bus way too much. We need to get the students to drive. That is a goal. A big one.

So I've asked that students plan questions in advance of class. When they have the chance to ask their question, they should drive, select people to respond and then it's this next part that probably still needs a fair amount of tweaking but what I will make a start here with the aim to make our discussion more like a conversation.

If student A is the one originally posing the question and student B is the first respondent and gives an answer, then A should have some discretion at that point, depending on B's response. Some possible things A could do are:

(1) Say, "Great response B. That is sensible and provides a really good answer to my question." or

(2) Say, "Thanks, B. Very interesting. But what about xyz, how does that fit?"

or

(3) Say, "Thanks, B. But I'm not sure I understood what you were saying."

or

modifications of any of these that I will not enumerate further.

If (1) happens, it is time to move on. If A had a second question, then A should proceed with that. If not, the role of questioner should move to another student. When either (2) or (3) are the case, we can't leave it there and move on. There needs to be further response. At that point A needs to decide whether B should be given another chance or a third student, C should get a turn. This has a better chance of producing a sense of conversation than what I had been doing previously. It means that not everyone will get to answer each question that is posed. But if we rotate the role of A, B, and C, and people do have questions prepared in advance, we should get broad participation overall. At least I hope so. Some repetition of ideas may come out this way because people might come up with questions that are similar but not identical. The repetition is ok to me as long as the questioner genuinely still feels there are some things unanswered that the questioner is curious about. If the questioner feels the prior discussion has covered the question, the questioner can pass. That's ok too.

If that works reasonably well then I will try not to interfere much if at all when the flow seems like it is going well and might assist the questioner in identifying a student to play the role of B in case nobody volunteers for that. (I hope that is a rare occurrence.) Then when the set of questions has concluded I'll have to make some determination where we are on the topic. If you've gone beyond what I had wanted to cover with some interesting points of the class' creation, I'd want to make note of that then and there. If I feel something important has been missed, I might then play Socrates at that point for a bit to extract the missing ideas. And if you've done the job I'd wanted to do, I might jut leave it at that or make a summary sentence or two just to wrap up.

So those are process change ideas I hope we can try. Let's switch to content coverage. The Bell Curve chapter, and to a certain extent the preceding chapter called The Score, and the one that follows it called For Performance are each about the following idea. Best practice needs to be constantly reinvented. During the process of reinvention one necessarily goes beyond known science. One tries things in a quasi-experimental (or even less experimental than that) manner, mindful of results and with an eye on performance but not caring much if at all whether there are proper controls, so potentially mis-identifying causality. The aim is not primarily to understand causality (though in retrospect that would be nice). The aim is to improve performance. If there is belief that a newly tried practice should be able to improve performance, then the practitioner should feel impelled to implement that practice. This, as much or even more so than diligence, is how we get...better. It makes a significant part of the practitioner's job finding that next thing which improves performance and turns the practitioner into a type of experimenter qua tinkerer.

The Bell Curve Chapter looks at this in the case of Cystic Fibrosis treatment, which is a good place to look because there are specialized centers for that treatment and they have substantial variability in their performance in keeping patients in good health.

Time permitting we will then talk about Apgar and her scoring system for the health of a new born baby. It is instructive how the simple measuring system completely changed obsterics. Reading that chapter about Apgar is what inspired creating the little survey we've implemented.

Perserverance in pursuit of known best practice

Goals

Learning

1. H1N1 Contingency Planning

2. Quick Review of Reflections/Encouragement for next pieces

Before we get to 3, who is Gawande

3. Hand washing - what's the problem, why is it important?

4 Hand washing - why doesn't it happen by itself?

5. Generalizing - the Handwashing lesson to learning, what translates?

6. Polio eradication in India - what art the characterisitics of the the diligent practitioner?

Administrivia

7. Survey

8. Assigning teams to projects.

9. Show Compass - team names.

Activities

Learning

1. Discuss lessons from Friday morning meeting with Peter Mortensen and IT Pros.

2. Anyone read Argyris? Mea culpa - first non-Econ class, first writing intensive class. I was feelng defensive. Try to be your advocate. Don't want to be a policeman or your mother. Value casual tone in the writing but precision in expresion. Also value subtlety. There is benefit in digging deeper on a subject and not just touching surface level.

Ask students if they knew of Gwande before this class.

3. Before talking about hand washing, ask if anyone is a univeristy employee. Talk about the ethics training requirement. Use as a way to illustrate it isn't diligence per se that is the value. It is diligence in pursuit of good ends that are hard to achieve otherwise.

4. Then ask why medical professionals don't always wash their hands when they see a patient. Ask about gloves. Ask if they can go beyond what's in the book for reasons. Is it rational behavior? Is there an intellectual problem that needs correcting? What about solutions, can we talk things through on solutionss?

5. Is there a diligence issue with being a student? What is best practice? Do many students miss achieving best practice.

6. Switch to talking about the character of a practitioner of best practice. Use polio eradication as an example. Let the student discuss the features of the guy Gawande rides around with.

Take a break

Go to computer -

7. Show survey

8. Get teams assigned to projects.

9 Show Compass

Second Class - August 26

Goals

Learning

1. Cover the basic economics of borrowing and lending. Get students to understand the role of colateral and of interest payments.

2. Reason through the paradox of why there have been so many mortage defaults in the last couple of years yet micro credit has flourished with a very high repayment rate.

3. Talk about motivation and learning from the viewpoint of Yunus.

4. Talk about conventional wisdom and micro credit.

5. Talk about effective change and empowerment.

6. Discuss the issue in moving from micro credit to micro finance.

Administrivia

7. Get the students into teams.

8. Work through how the reflective posts will be graded.

Activities

Learning

1. Talk through why there is a spread in interest rates between what savers can receive and what borrowers have to pay. Discuss loan default. When is it rational? When do rich borrowers default? When do poor borrowers default?

2. What does the word micro mean in the context of micro credit? Why do micro loans work when macro may not loans may not?

3. How did Yunus come up with the micro credit idea? What was his motivation to keep at it. Why do most micro loans have women as the borrowers? Are there any broader generalizations we can draw from that?

4. What stereotypes existed before micro credit came into existence. Discuss effective change as insight in light of contrary conventional wisdom, first, and then discuss implementation issues that ensue thereafter.

5. What is the relationship between morale and effective change? How do the micro credit borrowers change as a consequence of the experience? What happens to their own confidence.

6. Discuss the financial institution that makes micro loans. What is the difference between such loans made by for profit institutions and loans made by banks such as the one Yunus founded, the Grameen Bank. Explore the consequences of this.

Administrivia

7. Sit students by 395 and 396. Get two teams of four from 396. And three teams from 395, one with four students, the other two with three. Have them pick a team name. Tell them the first letter of the team name.

8. Talk about portfolio approach. Talk about measuring level versus measuring growth. Talk about not knowing what to expect in student performance.

First Class - August 24

Goals:

1. Icebreaker. Need to get the class relaxed and willing to open up.

2. Learning. Do informal data collection by getting students to talk about their own experiences. Make a point of noting whether the students concur on their assessment or if there is a difference of opinion. Use data collection as a launch point for asking about implications and for a way to get harder data on the issues.

3. Taking pulse. What if any of the books did students read this summer?

4. Administrivia. Make sure the students are aware of class the Web site and are up to speed on the immediate next things they must do to get on track for the class.

Activities:

1. Icebreaker. Rearrange furniture in the room so we can see each of us can see all other's face. Remind them we have to get the furniture back to how it was at the end of class. Talk about having a break about 50 minutes in. Indicate whether the restrooms and vending machines are. Ask students if their parents went to the U of I. Among those who said yes find out if any had me as their teacher for intermediate micro. Do another survey of the students to identify which colleges they are in. Ask whether they know each other. Do my mea culpa about having little formal education on the topics of the course.

2. Learning. Mention that you like to start in the middle when discussing issues and then iterate toward the beginning and then end. Use as the focus question: How do other students on Campus compare with CHP students? In essence are they the same or are there noticeable differences? Ask what experience they base this on. Try to get everyone to give an opinion on this. Ask about ethical behavior. Then begin to draw out implications of what they've said. If there are differences, can they hypothesize as to the cause. If there are no differences, can they hypothesize as to why the CHP program exists? If there is some disagreement in the responses, can that be explained, perhaps by the colleges where the students major? Only near the end of this should I mention my own prior held beliefs.

3. Taking pulse. Talk about student impressions from the reading. What are the lessons learned? Ask if they read my post on Schon and Gawande.

4. Administrivia. Show course site. Implore students to create a blog if they haven't done so already. Encourage them to make comments on the course blog and on other students blogs. Mention the site in Compass. Cover the parts of the syllabus where students receive course credit. Mention that for the next class they should be ready with Yunus and that they need to have their first reflection done for Friday at 5 PM. Tell them that in the next class we'll assign students to teams and then we'll have a discussion about grading. Talk about using some of the class time for office hours.

Why lesson plans?

I haven't done lesson plans in the past in my regular teaching. Early on I had lecture notes that I used. Then I stopped doing that. I found that I'd go too quickly through the content if I relied on lecture notes, because it all seemed transparent enough for me. So I found instead it was better to derive ideas from first principles. That approach matched my disposition. Incidentally, I'm using lecture notes just to refer to the content itself while with lesson plans I have in mind less of the content and more on goals, sidebars, and overriding issues.

All of that stuff would be in my head, but not written down anywhere. Even when I co-taught with other faculty we didn't make lesson plans. Instead we planned in advance in office visits, divided up the work, and then we each had ownership of our own piece. Common exams forced some integration of those pieces but within broad guidelines we were free to vary how we covered things based on our own discretion.

More recently, I've been involved in a week long professional development activity for learning technologists. I've done that for each of the past three years as one of the six "faculty" for the institute. We do a lot of planning for this and in the planning the lead faculty and the organization that sponsors the institute want plans for each session. Part of the reason for the plans is to communicate to the others what is intended so they can comment and advise. Another part of the reason is to create assurance that we're ready for the sessions. Here is a plan for a sidebar on budgeting I did. I ended up not sticking with the plan. And I never told the joke on opportunity cost. In fact, I'm not very good at sticking with a plan. I know that if I'm over prepared I'll be stiff. I don't want that.

But we are going to have teams conduct class sessions. Lesson plans make sense in that context, for communication among team members and as a getting ready activity. I will try to model that for you, though there is certainly room for improvement in my demo. For instance, I note that I've got a bulleted list there, which I critiqued elsewhere, wanting sentences instead. Let's see if with the next few there is improvement.

Demo Lesson Plan

Lesson plans are like meeting agendas and as such there is value in learning how to make a good lesson plan. That skill will be usable down the road. The lesson plan differs from a meeting agenda in that is mainly for the instructor. So it might have notes, goals, and justifications that might be omitted if the lesson plan were distributed to the students.

a. Broad Overview of Lesson Plans (See above).

b. Pacing and how much time to spend on an item. ( See Eisenhower quote below.)

b.1 Cut off discussion to stay on schedule?

b.2 Will there be carry over to the next class session?

c. Is there a main idea to the Lesson? If so, what is it?

c.1 Sacrifice the main idea or some subsidiary idea?

c.2 How much drill down should there be in the plan?

d. What activities best support the lesson?

d.1 Small group work or ensemble discussion?

d.2 Are there tangible products produced in the process?

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

Dwight D. Eisenhower