Lesson Planning with Purpose Means You Can’t Ignore Learning Objectives

Lesson planning with purpose is crucial for all teachers. State mandated learning objectives serve as a framework for what students are expected to learn and what you are expected to teach in a given subject or grade level. In Texas, that means we are looking at the TEKS. But if you teach in another state you may be focused on the Common Core State Standards.

According to TEA, as of August 2014, there were more than 5 million students enrolled in Texas schools. At that time our state population was about 26.9 million. In 2021, our population is estimated to be 29.2 million.

It stands to reason that the number of students in our school system has increased, just like the population. That means we, as Texas educators, are responsible for a lot of students.

Our State Board of Education works with educators, parents, and community representatives to review and modify our mandated standards. Our Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, or TEKS, tell us what students should know and be able to do at the end of each grade level.

 

TEKS Are a Roadmap

If you are lesson planning with purpose, then standards should be the driving force. After all, they are the end goal for all of your students. Some standards are easily met through any lesson, whereas others must be intentionally planned.

It is imperative that we follow these standards because they build upon each other each year. As students progress through grade levels, the standards become more complex.

 

TEKS Guide What You Teach

As students need to meet their grade level TEKS each year, it is important that the TEKS are not an afterthought in your lesson planning. Lesson planning with purpose means the standards should be guiding your plans, not just something you try to fit within the plans you’ve already made.

This means you can’t really say, let’s learn about dinosaurs for the next six weeks because that sounds fun. And then hope that you can piece the TEKS together after you make your plans.

It also doesn’t mean that you can’t teach by theme or interest! It is just important to make the topic fit your standards and not the other way around.

 

Let’s look at a first-grade classroom. Perhaps these are some of your goals for the next week:

Reading – text features
Writing – correspondence
Math – addition word problems to 20
Science – living and non-living

 

If you are wanting to talk about dinosaurs, here are some ways you can meet these standards:

Reading – use a non-fiction dinosaur book for a read-aloud and have students identify the text features in the book

Writing – students can write a letter to the principal about why their school mascot should be a dinosaur

Math – create a set of addition word problems using dinosaurs as the characters

Science – read a book such as “We Don’t Eat Our Classmates” and then sort living and non-living things from the book (i.e. living: dinosaurs, trees; non-living: books, desks)

 

The TEKS Provide Measurable Goals for Learning

By utilizing the TEKS when lesson planning with purpose, the hard work is already done for you. We have the end goal given to us, so we just have to work backward and find a way to meet our students where they are and bring them to the goal.

This helps you target learning and get students to master a specific skill.

If you teach kindergarten and were told by the end of the year your students needed to count, know shapes, add, subtract, and be able to measure you would have no idea where to begin or end.

By having specific standards like students must be able to rote count to 100, add and subtract within 10, and be able to identify circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares, you know exactly what to work on, and when students have mastered the objective.

So the bottom line is that the TEKS are your yellow brick road. They lead you exactly where you want to go. When you decide to leave TEKS out of your planning process, you may end up in a forest of flying monkeys or asleep in a field of poppies!

 

Lesson Planning With Purpose and Tracking Your Use of the TEKS

Now that you know TEKS are essential to your lesson planning with purpose (or have a better understanding as to why they are required by your admin), it’s time to think about how you can make sure you are hitting all your students’ standards throughout the year.

A simple way to track your use of TEKS is to print off a copy of your grade level standards from TEA and highlight the objectives as you cover them. You may also want to note the dates in the margins for future planning.

You could also create a checklist or spreadsheet to track your planning.

If you’re a kindergarten, first grade, or second grade teacher, I’ve got just the solution for you! These FREE Google Sheets resources have all the TEKS for language arts, math, science, and social studies. There are also places for you to record dates you teach the standard, a column to link to your resources, as well as a spot for general notes.