Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.Dwight D. Eisenhower
The list below is your checklist for Module 2, and you'll want each item finished before you start Module 3.
The Videos tab has a walkthrough for each of the seven chapters (Marzano 3 through 7, Seifert 9 and 10), and the Module 2 introduction is coming soon.
This widget tracks your place in Module 2. You can mark it In progress when you open the readings and Complete after you submit the assignments and exit ticket. The progress bar at the top of every page shows your status across all five modules, and the status stays in this browser.
Before you teach a lesson, you have to plan it: the state standard becomes an objective, the objective becomes an activity, and an assessment proves students met it. First-year teachers often skip this step. They teach the lesson anyway and follow the order of the textbook chapter, which seldom matches what the standard asks for.
In Module 1 you set up your classroom, and in Module 2 you plan what you teach inside it. In Marzano Chapters 3 through 7 you'll find the three lesson types in the New Art and Science framework, the cross-cutting strategies used in every kind of lesson, and the engagement moves teachers use to hold attention when the content gets dry. Seifert and Sutton take up the cognitive side in Chapter 9: critical and creative thinking, problem solving, Hunter's effective teaching model with its anticipatory set and advance organizers, and the conditions under which cooperative learning teaches something. In Chapter 10 they turn general goals into objectives with Mager's three features and Bloom's revised taxonomy, and the Chapter 10 tab adds the ABCD and SMART formats and Wiggins and McTighe's backward design.
You'll get more from the module if you plan one lesson alongside the assignments, even if nobody has asked you to teach it yet. You can build all four assignments around the lesson. In Standards & Objectives you name the cognitive target, and in the Model Match Analysis you study lessons from five other teachers' classrooms. The Anchor Chart is the visual support students will reach for during the lesson, and the Lesson Plan puts the whole sequence on one page. By the end of Module 2 you should be able to point at any forty-five minutes of instruction and explain why every part is there.
From a state standard you learn what students should know; from an objective you learn the behavior proving they know it. The ABCD format, which builds on Mager's behavioral objectives, and Bloom's verbs are the tools for bridging the two.
You use direct instruction to introduce new content. In a practicing-and-deepening lesson, students practice the skill until they can use it on their own, and in a knowledge application lesson, they use it on a task with more than one defensible answer. Marzano covers each type in Chapters 3 through 5.
Engagement is a set of moves you build into the plan. Marzano names them in Chapter 7: physical movement, pace modulation, motivational hooks, friendly controversy, and unusual information.
If your assessment measures something different from your objective, you are grading the wrong thing. In Wiggins and McTighe's backward design, you name the results you want, decide what assessment evidence will show students reached them, and then plan the activities.
You'll find everything for Module 2 on this page, in the eleven tabs at the top. You can work through the tabs in order, which follows the logic of the chapters, or jump to whichever tab you need. Each card below opens its tab when you click it.
The at-a-glance checklist, the module introduction, the four core ideas, the guiding questions, the eight learning objectives, the seven required readings, the theorist row, and Part 7 with the four assignments, Module 2's discussion, and the exit ticket.
You can study the direct instruction lesson: chunking content to working-memory size, the processing moves following each chunk (summarize, predict, question, elaborate), and the record-and-represent step that turns processing into something students can return to.
You can study the practicing and deepening lesson: time-boxed practice protocols for procedural skill and elaboration protocols (compare, error-analyze) for declarative knowledge. You'll use this chapter when students understand a skill but can't yet perform it with speed and accuracy.
You can study the knowledge application lesson and the four cognitively complex tasks Marzano names: investigation, problem-solving, decision-making, and experimental inquiry. The chapter connects Module 2 to the unit plan you'll write in Module 5.
You can study the strategies that appear in all types of lessons: highlighting critical information, cumulative review, questioning sequences, and homework. You'll use these moves in every plan you write.
You can study Marzano's engagement strategies: catching attention, feeding energy with movement and pacing, building intrigue by relating content to students' lives, and using friendly controversy and stakes outside school for inspiration.
You can study three forms of complex thinking, well-structured and ill-structured problems, problem-solving strategies, Hunter's effective teaching model, and the conditions under which cooperative learning teaches something.
You can study how general goals become objectives: standards, curriculum frameworks, Mager's three features, and the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor taxonomies. The tab also covers ABCD and SMART objectives and Wiggins and McTighe's backward design.
You'll find seven chapter walkthroughs (Marzano 3 through 7, Seifert 9 and 10) and outside talks on planning and engagement, and the Module 2 introduction is coming soon. You can watch them alongside the chapter readings.
You'll work through branching scenarios, a planning decision tree, a lesson-type quiz, and a drag-and-drop sort. In each one you choose a strategy, an objective, or an assessment, and then you see how the choice plays out.
You'll find a fill-in-the-blank self-check on Module 2 vocabulary and a set of consolidation questions. It's a final pass before you mark Module 2 complete in the status widget on the Overview tab.
You'll see the questions below again in the assignments and in Discussion 3, so keep them in mind as you work through the chapters and activities.
Each objective is tagged with the SEC 507 Course Learning Objective (CLO) it addresses.
You'll want to read each chapter before you work through its tab on this page. Under each reading, you'll find its focus and the assignment it connects to.
The row below is a quick reference to the theorists you're about to meet. You'll find most of them in the chapter tabs, and Webb's Depth of Knowledge is in the vocab deck below.
The deck holds twelve terms from Marzano Chapters 3 to 7 and Seifert Chapters 9 to 10. You can click a card to flip it, then mark Got it or Review again.
Module 2 has four graded assignments, one discussion, and an exit ticket. Each of the four assignments below comes with a rubric listing every criterion you'll be graded on. When you're finished, you can submit each assignment in Canvas.
You choose one state standard in your content area and grade level, take it apart, write the objectives the standard implies, design an activity that hits the right Bloom's level, and write the assessment item that proves the objective was met. You are building a chain from five parts: standard, dissection, objective, activity, assessment. If one link is missing, you can't show the assessment measures the standard.
1. Standard selection and dissection. Pick a standard, break it into its component knowledge and skills, and map each component to a Bloom's level with a justification.
2. Performance objectives. Write two to three objectives in ABCD format (Audience, Behavior, Condition, Degree) using verbs that match the Bloom's level you set. Objectives should be distinct from each other.
3. Aligned activity. Design one classroom activity that requires students to perform at the Bloom's level the objective specifies. Include the materials and procedures so another teacher could run it.
4. Assessment item. Write one assessment item that measures the exact behavior in the objective at the specified Bloom's level. Include the scoring criterion.
Format: Single document, 800 to 1,200 words plus the assessment item.
Open assignment brief → Submit on Canvas →| Criterion | Pts | Exemplary | Proficient | Developing | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard Selection & Dissection | 25 | You break the standard into its component knowledge and skills and map each one to a Bloom's level with a reason for the placement. 25 | You break the standard into components and identify Bloom's levels, with some reasoning behind them. 19 | You restate the standard without taking it apart, and you assign Bloom's levels without explaining them. 12 | You copy the standard without analyzing it. 6 |
| Performance Objectives | 25 | You write objectives in ABCD form, choose verbs that match the Bloom's level you intend, and keep each objective distinct from the others. 25 | You include most ABCD components and choose appropriate verbs, and your objectives overlap a little. 19 | You write objectives that miss components or lean on verbs like "understand" and "know." 12 | You leave objectives out, write ones nobody could measure, or copy them from the standard. 6 |
| Aligned Activity Design | 25 | Your activity makes students work at the Bloom's level your objective names, and your materials and procedures are detailed enough for another teacher to run it. 25 | Your activity targets the right Bloom's level, and the procedures could use more detail. 19 | Your activity exists but works at a different Bloom's level than your objective claims. 12 | Your activity is missing, or it has nothing to do with your objective. 6 |
| Assessment Item | 25 | Your assessment item measures the exact behavior your objective names, at the level it names, and you include the scoring criteria. 25 | Your assessment item targets the objective, and the scoring criteria are incomplete. 19 | Your assessment item relates to the topic but not to your specific objective or its Bloom's level. 12 | You leave the assessment item out, or it measures something other than your objective. 6 |
The five lesson excerpts are printed below. For each one, identify the instructional model the teacher is using, cite the textual evidence proving the identification, and explain how the model connects to its underlying learning theory. Quote the excerpt and name the element or chapter. A generic claim without textual evidence scores Developing.
1. Model identification. Name the instructional model in each excerpt (direct instruction, practicing and deepening, or knowledge application) using Marzano's terminology.
2. Textual evidence. Quote specific teacher moves, student actions, or lesson structures from the excerpt that match the model's defining features.
3. Theoretical connection. Link each model to its underlying learning theory (behaviorist, constructivist, cognitive) and explain why the model fits the content and context of the excerpt.
You may submit as a written document or as a 10-minute screencast in which you annotate the lesson excerpts on screen and walk through the analysis aloud. The rubric is the same either way, so choose the format that lets you do your best thinking.
Format: Document of 1,500 to 2,000 words, or a 10-minute screencast.
The Five Lessons
Each lesson below is one class period in a different secondary classroom. Two of the five use the same Marzano lesson type, so read for the kind of knowledge students are working with as well as the activity. Quote the lesson when you make your case.
Mr. Delgado teaches balancing chemical equations to tenth-grade chemistry. He writes one unbalanced equation on the board and says, "By the end of the period you will balance any equation with three or fewer compounds. Write that sentence down." He teaches the word coefficient in six steps: a short explanation, a student restatement, a sketch of two hydrogen atoms, an elaboration on why subscripts stay fixed, a partner discussion, and a round of a matching game. He then splits the procedure into three chunks. After the first chunk, counting atoms on each side, he stops and tells students to summarize the step to a partner in one sentence. He listens to four pairs and corrects one. After the second chunk, adding coefficients to the simpler compound first, he stops again and asks pairs to predict the next move. After the third chunk, checking the count a second time, students write the full procedure in their notebooks and draw a box diagram showing the atoms on each side as circles. Mr. Delgado tells them, "Write the rule in words. Draw the check in circles." He circulates with a clipboard and marks who has the diagram and who has only the words. The period ends with three equations on the screen and the class balancing the first one with him, out loud, step by step.
Ms. Whitfield's eleventh-grade English class read two op-eds on school start times last week and annotated both for claim and evidence. Today she puts the two side by side on a split screen. "You already know what each writer argues," she says. "Today you decide which writer argues better." She gives each student a three-column chart: the move, the example, the problem. She models the first row with the opening of the first op-ed, where the writer cites a study with no date and no sample size. "Weak reference," she says, and writes it in the chart. Students work alone for ten minutes and find three more moves. Ms. Whitfield then runs a classification round: she reads a sentence from either op-ed aloud and students hold up one of four cards labeled faulty logic, attack, weak reference, and misinformation. The class splits on one sentence, and she gives the disagreement four minutes under one rule: argue about the sentence, not about each other. Students then write a paragraph naming which op-ed reasons better and pointing at two rows of their own chart as proof. She closes by asking for one move students now expect to find in their own drafts. Three of them name the undated study. She reminds the class that they used the same chart on the Steinbeck unit in September, with different labels.
Ms. Boone's ninth-grade Algebra I students have written and graphed linear equations for two weeks. Today she hands each group a folder she assembled: three phone plans from local carriers with their monthly fees and per-gigabyte charges, a usage log from an anonymous family of four, and a blank sheet headed Claim, Grounds, Backing. "Pick the best plan for this family," she says. "More than one answer is defensible, and I will ask you for your reasoning, not your answer." Groups work for twenty-five minutes. Ms. Boone does not demonstrate a method. She stops at two checkpoints. At the first, she asks each group what they chose as the variable, and she sends one group back when they treat data use as fixed. At the second, she reads one group's backing aloud and asks the class whether that sentence gives the reason the evidence supports the claim, or only repeats the evidence. Four groups revise their backing after hearing it. One group argues for ten minutes about how much to weight the overage risk, and Ms. Boone does not stop them. Groups present a claim, a graph, and one sentence of backing. Two groups pick different plans and both defend the choice with the same data. Ms. Boone writes both claims on the board and asks students to find the assumption that separates them.
Mr. Ferraro's eleventh-grade US History class is studying the New Deal. Before he hands out a single document, he spends eight minutes on one skill: how to disagree with a group member's reading of a source. He models the sentence stem, two students rehearse it in front of the class, and he posts it on the wall. He then splits the class into five groups of four and gives each group a different slice of the New Deal: banking, agriculture, public works, labor, and the court fight. Each group reads three documents and builds a one-page brief on its slice. Mr. Ferraro circulates and tells one group their brief has four facts and no argument. After twenty minutes he reshuffles the room so that every new group of five holds one person from each original group. Each member now teaches a slice to the new group, and the new group answers one question together: which part of the New Deal changed daily life most? The group turns in a single ranked list with a written rationale, and each member turns in a separate half-page on the slice they taught. Mr. Ferraro tells the class that both carry points. "If your list is strong and your page is thin, you win on the list and lose on the page," he says. He ends by asking which slice the groups could not have ranked without the other four.
Ms. Aldridge taught the preterite endings for stem-changing verbs to her tenth-grade Spanish II class on Monday. Today she opens with the same six verbs on the board. "You know the rule," she says. "Today we make it fast." She models two conjugations out loud, thinking through each step: identify the stem, check whether it changes in the third person, attach the ending. Students then conjugate four verbs on paper while she walks the room. The first pass is slow, and most students mouth the rule to themselves as they write. Ms. Aldridge stops the class after those four verbs, not after thirty, and reads two common errors off the papers she just saw without naming the students who made them. Students correct their own four. In the second pass, students conjugate eight verbs with a partner checking each one, and Ms. Aldridge coaches three students on the third-person check they keep skipping. The third pass is a one-minute timed round: she calls a verb and a subject, students write the form, and nobody says the rule out loud anymore. She closes with four verbs from a unit two chapters back, which the class has not touched since October, and tells students she will bring those four back every Friday. "Fast is the point," she says. "You cannot think about the ending and the sentence at the same time."
| Criterion | Pts | Exemplary | Proficient | Developing | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model Identification | 25 | You name the instructional model in every excerpt using Marzano's terms. 25 | You name all but one model right and reason your way partway through the one you miss. 19 | You name some models and confuse two or more, and your terminology drifts. 12 | You cannot tell the models apart, or you give them the wrong labels. 6 |
| Textual Evidence | 25 | You quote the teacher moves, student actions, or lesson structures that match what defines the model, and you explain what each quotation shows. 25 | You cite relevant evidence for most excerpts and connect it to the features of the model. 19 | You cite evidence that stays general, like "the teacher taught," instead of pointing at what makes the model that model. 12 | You cite no evidence, or your evidence does not support the model you named. 6 |
| Theoretical Connection | 25 | You link each model to the learning theory underneath it and explain why that model fits the content and the setting in the excerpt. 25 | You connect most models to a learning theory with adequate explanation. 19 | You mention learning theory in general terms without connecting it to the model or the excerpt. 12 | You make no theoretical connection. 6 |
You'll make an anchor chart you could pin on a classroom wall Monday morning. You'll choose one key concept in your content area, design the chart in Canva (a free account works), and submit it with a one-page rationale explaining your design choices and how students will use the chart during instruction.
1. The chart. Submit an image or PDF a student can read from the back of the room and use as a quick reference during instruction.
2. Written rationale. Write one page (250 to 400 words) explaining why this concept, why this layout, how students will use it, and how the visual design supports students who struggle with text-heavy material.
Format: Image or PDF for the chart, plus the written rationale as a separate document.
Open assignment brief →| Criterion | Pts | Exemplary | Proficient | Developing | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Content Accuracy & Relevance | 18 | You present a key concept from your content area without error, organize it for quick reference, and pitch it for grades 9 through 12. 18 | Your content is accurate and relevant, and the organization works but could be easier to scan. 14 | Your content holds up apart from small errors, or it does not tie to a specific standard or concept. 9 | Your content carries errors, stays too vague to use, or does not fit the grade level. 4 |
| Visual Design | 16 | You use color, hierarchy, and whitespace to move the eye, and a student can read the chart from across the room. 16 | Your design is clean and readable, and the hierarchy could be stronger. 12 | Your design is cluttered or text-heavy, and a student at the back would struggle to read it. 8 | Your design is hard to read, has no visual hierarchy, or is unfinished. 4 |
| Written Rationale | 16 | You explain the choices you made about color, layout, and content, and you connect them to how students will use the chart during a lesson. 16 | You address your design choices with some connection to how students will use the chart. 12 | You describe the chart without explaining why you made the choices you did. 8 | You leave the rationale out, or it does not address your design decisions. 4 |
You'll write a complete lesson plan for one class period in your content area. You'll build it on your Standards & Objectives work, turning the standard you took apart and the objective you wrote into a teachable forty-five minutes.
1. Objectives and standards alignment. Write measurable objectives in ABCD or SMART format, aligned to specific state standards, and make the connection between standard, objective, and assessment explicit on the page.
2. Instructional sequence. Sequence the lesson through opening, direct instruction, guided practice, independent practice, and closure, and name the Marzano strategies with their timing and transitions.
3. Differentiation. Build specific accommodations for at least three learner profiles, including English learners, students with IEPs, and gifted students, into the lesson body rather than appending them.
4. Assessment alignment. Tie formative and summative checks to specific objectives. You should be able to describe what mastery looks like for each one.
5. Materials and preparation. List every material, with links or attachments, and include a technology backup plan.
Format: Single document, 1,000 to 1,500 words plus the materials list.
Open assignment brief →| Criterion | Pts | Exemplary | Proficient | Developing | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Objectives & Standards Alignment | 20 | You write measurable objectives in ABCD or SMART form, tie them to specific state standards, and make the line from standard to objective to assessment explicit. 20 | You use Bloom's verbs and reference state standards, and the line to the assessment is there but not spelled out. 15 | Your objectives are vague or unmeasurable, and you list standards without connecting them to the activities. 10 | You leave objectives out, write ones nobody could measure, or connect them to no standard. 5 |
| Instructional Strategies | 20 | You sequence the lesson through opening, direct instruction, guided practice, independent practice, and closure, name the Marzano strategies you use, and specify timing and transitions. 20 | Your lesson follows a recognizable sequence with appropriate strategies, and the timing or transitions need tightening. 15 | Your lesson has a beginning and an end, and the middle is thin and the strategies generic. 10 | Your lesson has no structure, or it leans on one strategy from start to finish. 5 |
| Differentiation | 20 | You build specific accommodations for at least three learner profiles into the body of the lesson rather than appending them at the end. 20 | You address two or more learner profiles with relevant modifications, listed apart from the lesson itself. 15 | You mention differentiation in general terms without naming which learners or what changes. 10 | You do not address differentiation. 5 |
| Assessment Alignment | 20 | You tie your formative and summative checks to specific objectives, and you can say what mastery looks like for each one. 20 | Your assessment connects to your objectives, and your formative checks are there while the mastery criteria stay vague. 15 | Your assessment exists but does not map onto the objectives you stated. 10 | You describe no assessment, or your assessment has nothing to do with the lesson. 5 |
| Materials & Preparation | 20 | You list every material, link or attach it, specify what technology the lesson needs, and include a backup for when the technology fails. 20 | You list materials and most are reachable, and you note the technology without a backup plan. 15 | You list some materials and reference resources you neither provide nor link. 10 | Your materials are missing or too thin to teach from. 5 |
| Criterion | Pts | Exemplary | Proficient | Developing | Needs Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Content & Depth | 18 | You show you understand the module's core concepts, name specific readings, theories, or Marzano elements, and connect them to what happens in your classroom. 18 | You engage the core concepts and reference the readings, and your connections to practice stay general. 14 | You stay on topic at the surface and mention the readings in passing without an example. 9 | You do not engage the module content, or you go off topic. 4 |
| Peer Engagement | 16 | You reply to at least two peers and add something: a follow-up question, a counterpoint, or a new example that extends their idea. 16 | You reply to two peers with relevant, constructive comments, and one of them could go deeper. 12 | You reply, and the replies are brief affirmations without substance. 8 | You reply to fewer than two peers, or your replies do not engage what they said. 4 |
| Presentation Quality | 16 | Your video is clear and organized, runs within the time guidelines, and you talk to the cohort rather than read to them. 16 | Your video is clear and holds its shape, and you read from notes while keeping the audience with you. 12 | A viewer can follow your video, and it is disorganized or read start to finish from a script. 8 | Your video is unclear, too short, or missing. 4 |
You can choose a lesson you taught (or will teach) this month. In two to three minutes on camera, you'll name the instructional model you used (direct instruction, cooperative learning, inquiry, or something else) and walk us through it. Then you'll name one decision from the lesson you'd change now that you've read Marzano Chapters 3 through 7, and tell us which chapter or element changed your thinking.
Initial post. Your post names a specific lesson, the model, one redesign decision, and the chapter or element behind the decision.
Two peer replies. Each reply suggests a specific Marzano strategy from a different chapter than the peer cited and explains how it would work in their lesson context.
Open Discussion 3 prompt →Module 2's four graded assignments form a chain. In Standards & Objectives you choose the standard and write the objective the rest of the work depends on. In the Model Match Analysis you practice identifying the instructional models other teachers use in their lessons, and in the Anchor Chart you build the visual support students will reach for during the lesson. The Lesson Plan puts the standard, the objective, the strategy, and the support into one forty-five-minute plan.
If your objective and your assessment don't measure the same behavior, reconcile them before you submit.
Once you've finished the readings, activities, and assignments for Module 2, you can post your response to the prompt below in the Exit Ticket: Module 2 assignment in Canvas.
Conducting Direct Instruction Lessons is the chapter you reach for when students meet new content for the first time. Marzano frames direct instruction as the deliberate work of chunking new information, processing it with students, and recording and representing it so students remember it.
Some teachers distrust direct instruction because they confuse it with lecture. Marzano separates the two. The research he cites shows that when students meet new material, a teacher who chunks content, models thinking, and checks for understanding gets stronger learning than a teacher who leaves students to work with no scaffolding. In Module 2 you make the planning decisions, and before you pick a strategy, you have to know what type of lesson you're writing.
Marzano places the chapter in a larger frame of four content design areas: direct instruction lessons, practicing and deepening lessons, knowledge application lessons, and the strategies that show up in all three. In Chapter 3 you'll find the moves for the first.
The teacher delivers new information in small pieces sized to working memory instead of one long monologue.
After each chunk, students do something with it: summarize, predict, question, or elaborate.
Students capture the new content in two channels: linguistic (notes, summaries, paraphrases) and nonlinguistic (diagrams, sketches, graphic organizers).
Words and images use different memory systems. Using both gives students two paths back to the content.
A PLC moves a lesson through a cycle of plan, teach, observe, revise, and reteach so the lesson improves with each pass.
You'll use this chapter when your standard introduces new content. The chunking and processing moves belong in the instructional sequence of the Lesson Plan Assignment (100). Your Canva Anchor Chart (50) is the nonlinguistic representation that supports the verbal explanation. In Discussion 3: Strategy Selection, if the lesson you describe used direct instruction, you can borrow Chapter 3's language to name the model and the decision you'd change.
Each tier shows a cognitive verb family and a sample objective for a planning task. You can click a level, then test any objective on your desk against it.
Click a level to see its definition, sample verbs, and a planning example.
The example shows one objective in four drafts, and you can hover over the numbers to see the notes.
Draft 1: Students will understand photosynthesis.
Draft 2: Students will explain photosynthesis.
Draft 3: Given a labeled diagram, students will explain photosynthesis in two stages.
Draft 4: Given a labeled diagram of a leaf, biology students will explain the two stages of photosynthesis (the light-dependent reactions and the light-independent reactions) in writing, scoring at least 3 on a four-point rubric.
"Understand" names a mental process nobody can observe, so you can't tell from across the room whether a student understands.
"Explain" is observable, but the objective has no condition and no degree.
With the "Given" clause, the student knows what materials are on the table.
Audience (biology students), Behavior (explain in writing), Condition (given a labeled diagram), Degree (at least 3 on a four-point rubric). You can write tomorrow's assessment straight from it.
Teachers often confuse direct instruction with lecture. In a direct-instruction lesson, the teacher chunks new content, processes it with students, and has them record it in two channels. A lecture delivers the content, and it often skips the processing and the recording.
What is the most common failure point of direct instruction lessons in secondary classrooms? Take ten seconds to decide, then click Reveal.
Tonight, take a lesson you taught last week, rewrite its objective in ABCD format, and ask whether the lesson measured the objective you just wrote.
You can practice on the standard from your Standards & Objectives assignment. Once you rewrite its objective in ABCD format, the verb shows whether you're planning a direct-instruction lesson or a Chapter 4 or Chapter 5 lesson. You need to know which before you write the procedure.
Open assignment briefConducting Practicing and Deepening Lessons covers the lessons after students meet new content. Once students have a first encounter with the material, they need to practice it, examine it, and pull it apart. In this lesson type, students move from having heard of the content to being able to use it or explain why it works.
Marzano splits the work in two. Procedural knowledge, the knowing-how kind, gets practice in three stages: an early stage where the steps are clumsy and effortful, a shaping stage where students refine and correct, and an autonomous stage where students perform the procedure without conscious attention. Declarative knowledge, the knowing-that kind, gets deepened through comparison, classification, and the examination of errors in reasoning.
Teachers often treat practice and repetition as the same thing. In repetition, students copy a move thirty times; in practice, they refine the move with feedback between attempts. You decide whether students need massed practice that builds fluency, distributed practice that builds retention, or focused error analysis that builds judgment.
Procedural knowledge is a skill you perform, and declarative knowledge is information you understand and can use.
The three stages are cognitive, shaping, and autonomous, and each one needs a different kind of practice.
Comparison, classification, metaphor, and analogy push students past surface features into structural understanding.
Faulty logic, attacks, weak references, and misinformation are the moves students need to spot in college, in careers, and online.
Habits of mind are productive dispositions, such as seeking accuracy, resisting impulsivity, and persisting when stuck.
If your Lesson Plan Assignment (100) is the second day on a topic, you'll draw most of your strategies from this chapter. The "examining similarities and differences" moves give you a clean structure for your Standards & Objectives (100) when the standard verb is "compare," "contrast," "analyze," or "classify". The Model Match Analysis (75) often depends on whether the lesson you are evaluating is a Chapter 3 lesson, a Chapter 4 lesson, or a Chapter 5 lesson, and Marzano's split between procedural and declarative gives you the vocabulary to name what you see.
Drag each teacher move into the lesson type Marzano assigns it to. Click Check when you're done.
For the next two weeks, label every lesson you plan with one of the three lesson types: direct instruction, practicing and deepening, or knowledge application. If you can't pick one, the lesson doesn't have a clear purpose yet, so rewrite the objective until the type is obvious.
If you run one comparison move from the chapter on Friday, using content you taught Monday, you'll see what students notice the second time through.
What one move could you use tomorrow to deepen practice without taking extra class time?
Conducting Knowledge Application Lessons covers the lessons where students take what they know and use it on tasks with stakes, ambiguity, and a need for evidence. In this lesson type, students produce the work you'll want to grade.
Marzano separates unassisted discovery from enhanced discovery. When a teacher leaves students to work with no resources and no scaffolding, they seldom reach the deep learning discovery methods promise. In enhanced discovery, the teacher selects resources, sets up the cognitive task, and steps in with timely guidance, and students learn more. You stop being the source of content and start designing the task and coaching beside it.
Marzano builds the chapter around cognitively complex tasks: investigations, problem solving, decision making, and experimental inquiry. When the task is well designed, students stay on the problem, generate their own questions, and argue about evidence.
Students work on open-ended tasks with resources the teacher selects and coaching along the way.
Marzano names four: investigation, problem solving, decision making, and experimental inquiry, and each has its own structure.
A claim is what you assert. The grounds are the evidence behind it. The backing is the reasoning that links the evidence to the claim.
Backing is the hardest move for students: they can name a fact but struggle to explain why the fact supports the claim.
The teacher provides the materials, models the thinking, and intervenes at the right moments.
If you build the Lesson Plan Assignment (100) on this chapter, you'll write an ambitious version of it. If your standard asks students to use what they know on a task with more than one defensible answer, you're writing a Chapter 5 lesson, and the verbs in your Standards & Objectives (100) have to match: "investigate," "justify," and "decide" rather than "list" and "define." Your Canva Anchor Chart (50) can serve as a claim-grounds-backing scaffold students keep in view while they work. In Discussion 3, if your lesson asked students to apply what they know, you can use Chapter 5's terms to name the model and the decision you'd change.
If a student fails a knowledge-application task, which issue is most common: a lack of effort, a lack of prior knowledge, or a mismatch between task and skill? Pick one, then reveal.
What task in your content area asks a student to apply what they remember?
Students carry the fluency they built in practicing-and-deepening lessons into knowledge-application lessons. Without the fluency, an application task becomes an invention task. Students struggle in ways the teacher didn't plan for, and the results look like a failure of the students when the sequence was misaligned.
In Using Strategies That Appear in All Types of Lessons, Marzano collects the moves that show up in every lesson he describes. Whether the day is direct instruction, practicing and deepening, or knowledge application, you'll use these strategies in the background.
Teachers use all three lesson types for one purpose: changing what students know and can do. Marzano draws on Rumelhart and Norman to name three kinds of knowledge change. Accretion is the slow accumulation of detail onto an existing structure. Tuning is the gradual refinement of a structure as you work with it. Restructuring is the rare, hard moment where the structure itself has to be torn down and rebuilt. Each kind happens at a different speed, and your strategy choice has to match.
When you highlight critical information, students know where to put their attention. With cumulative review, students keep using prior content after the unit test. A questioning sequence takes a single piece of content from detail to category to elaboration to evidence. Homework, often misused, can extend practice when it's focused on what students can already do.
Accretion, tuning, and restructuring happen at different speeds and call for different teaching moves.
The teacher pauses, signals, and repeats. Students can't remember everything, so the teacher names, out loud, the parts students need to remember.
The teacher schedules brief return visits to earlier content across the year, so the review doesn't pile up in the week before a test.
The questions move from detail to category to elaboration to evidence, and students' thinking goes from concrete to defended.
Homework helps when it extends fluent practice and hurts when students have to learn alone.
These moves belong in every Lesson Plan Assignment (100), whatever the lesson type. When you write your procedures, mark where you highlight critical information and where you embed cumulative review. A questioning sequence gives structure to the discussion portion of any lesson. In the Model Match Analysis (75), you'll often have to decide whether the teacher makes critical information visible to students or buries it. In Discussion 3: Strategy Selection, you can draw on this chapter if the decision you'd change is one of the smaller routines in your lesson.
Marzano describes strategies you can use in all three lesson types, and the Solution Tree study guide's Chapter 6 questions focus on four of them. Each one takes little class time, and you can use it alongside the main strategy of any lesson.
The teacher names what counts by pausing, signaling, and repeating. Students can't remember everything, so the teacher says, out loud, which parts students need to remember.
You bring earlier content back in short reviews across the whole year, so students keep using it after the unit ends. Marzano lays out four steps for the review, and the study guide asks you to list them.
You ask four types of questions in order, moving from details to categories to elaboration to evidence, so students build a defended understanding of one piece of content.
Homework helps when it extends fluent practice on what students can already do, and it hurts when students have to learn new content alone.
d = 0.40 is John Hattie's hinge point, the average effect across all the influences he studied. A move above 0.40 helps students more than the typical influence does. A move below 0.40 can still help, but it helps less than average.
Source: Hattie's ranking of 252 influences, December 2017 update, at visible-learning.org. The values shift between Hattie's updates, so read the chart for the ranking rather than the exact values.
Which strategy from this chapter do you use in every lesson you teach? Which one do you almost never use?
When a lesson in the Model Match Analysis uses one of these four strategies, you can quote it as textual evidence. The most common gap on the assignment is a named model with no evidence from the lesson to show it's there.
Open assignment briefUsing Engagement Strategies is the chapter on how you get students' attention and keep their interest.
Marzano treats attention as the most basic level of engagement, followed by energy, intrigue, and inspiration. Each level needs different teaching moves, and the moves for each level build on the moves for the level below it. Physical movement raises energy in a way both intuitive and physiological: more oxygen, more blood flow, more wakefulness. When you change speed inside a lesson, which Marzano calls pace modulation, students don't settle into a rhythm they stop noticing. A motivational hook draws students into a topic before the topic holds their interest on its own.
Students pick up your intensity and enthusiasm whether you mean them to or not. A teacher who shares a personal anecdote, offers a piece of unusual information, or stages a friendly controversy is planning for engagement. Friendly controversy works because the disagreement has one rule: students argue about the content and leave each other alone.
The four levels are attention, energy, intrigue, and inspiration, and each level needs the one below it in place.
Stand-and-share, four corners, and gallery walks get students moving, which raises energy and resets attention.
The teacher varies the speed inside the lesson, balancing fast-moving direct instruction with slower think time.
A hook is a short entry point that wins student attention before the content itself can.
Students disagree about content under norms that protect them from each other.
Unusual information is the specific, surprising detail students won't Google, tied to the standard.
Engagement starts in the opening of your Lesson Plan Assignment (100), one of the five parts the rubric asks you to sequence, and you'll find more than one move for it in Chapter 7. In Standards & Objectives (100), you'll name the cognitive target, and the engagement move goes in the Lesson Plan. Your Canva Anchor Chart (50) can hold a piece of unusual information students keep returning to. In Discussion 3: Strategy Selection, if the decision you'd change is an engagement move, you can use this chapter's language to describe it.
Friendly controversy turns unfriendly the moment students argue about each other instead of the content. Everything depends on the norms, so write them down before you set the topic.
With engagement strategies, you get students into the lesson. In Module 3 you'll find out whether the engagement produced learning, starting with Marzano Chapter 1 (Clear Learning Goals).
Which engagement strategy do you reach for by default, and which one have you never tried?
The engagement strategy you choose from this chapter should fit the lesson behind your anchor chart. The chart can hold the unusual information, the claim-grounds-backing scaffold, or the friendly-controversy norms. You'll want to plan at least one point in the lesson when students go back to the chart.
Open assignment briefOn your next lesson plan, you can add one engagement strategy you've never tried and track how your students respond to it.
Carolyn Eaton sits next to Joey, reading Goodnight Moon. The book is short, and Joey can guess most of the words from the pictures. Mid-page, Eaton has to choose whether to prompt him to look at the words or let him keep succeeding by guessing. Seifert and Sutton spend the rest of Chapter 9 on the question behind her choice: what kind of thinking do you want from your students, and what move from you produces it?
Seifert and Sutton name three forms of thinking, each with its own definition, kind of task, and teaching moves. You can use the three as a checklist for the lesson plan: which form does the objective ask for, and does the activity produce it?
Critical thinking is the skill and disposition to evaluate the validity of evidence, to ask key questions, and to reason about ideas without being swept along by them. Metacognition (thinking about thinking) is central to it. The word astute fits the disposition better than the word skeptical.
Creative thinking is the generation of ideas that are new, useful, and appropriate. It starts with divergent thinking (open-ended questions, many possible answers), and students need convergent knowledge of the content so the new idea isn't random.
Problem solving is the analysis and solution of tasks where the path to the answer isn't obvious. Most classroom problems are well-structured, and most problems outside school aren't. Students need teaching on both kinds and on the obstacles (functional fixedness, response set).
You can test your own assessments: pick a typical item from your subject and name the form of thinking it requires. If most of your items ask for recall and nothing more, your students aren't practicing any of the three forms, and you'll need to fix the gap when you plan, before you grade.
Which form of thinking does a multiple-choice question with one correct answer test? Which form does a one-paragraph response with multiple defensible answers invite?
A teacher draws nine dots on the board in a three-by-three grid. The instruction is one sentence: connect all nine dots with four straight lines. Two volunteers try at the board, then several more try at their seats. None of them solve it. The teacher offers a hint: "Think about how you have set up the problem in your mind. Have you made any assumptions about how long the lines ought to be?"
Alicia hears the hint and stares at the board. She tells herself the lines should not be longer than the matrix. She tries several arrangements with that constraint, and none of them work. Then she lets go of the constraint, draws a line that runs past the edge, and finds the answer. Willem in the next row solves it without hearing the hint at all. He has worked many puzzles, and his rule of thumb is to suspect a trick when a problem is posed this way. Rachel has seen the puzzle before and draws the answer in three seconds.
The story illustrates two obstacles Seifert and Sutton name in the chapter. The first is functional fixedness: a tendency to lock onto one purpose for an object or one definition for a term. The second is response set: a tendency to frame a new problem in the same way as the previous problem, even when the framing no longer fits.
You'll see functional fixedness in your subject every time a student insists a tool works one way, the way it was first taught. You'll see response set every time a student attacks a new problem with the strategy that worked on the previous problem, even when the new problem rewards a different strategy. You can counter both with your questions, for example by asking whether the tool has another use or whether the new problem matches the old one.
Willem solved the puzzle without hearing the hint. What general rule did he apply, and why does naming the rule matter for the students who struggled?
Seifert and Sutton split classroom problems into two kinds, and you choose the strategy by the kind. The split changes how you write the prompt, what materials you put on the desk, and how you read student frustration when it appears.
All the information for the solution is in the problem statement. The procedure follows a known set of rules, and you can check the answer. A textbook word problem is the prototype: "A train leaves Chicago at 60 mph...". Algorithms work here, and students who get stuck tend to stall at the procedure step.
The information is incomplete or contested, so students can try several procedures and defend several solutions. Most questions outside school are this kind: "How should the city improve bicycle transportation?" Heuristics work here and algorithms don't, and students who get stuck tend to stall at the framing step.
A common mistake in lesson design is mixing the two kinds without warning. You ask an ill-structured question, then grade the answer as if it were well-structured. The student gives a defensible answer, you score it as wrong, and the student concludes the prompt was a trap. To avoid the mismatch, write the rubric for the same kind of problem the prompt poses.
Is a question you'd ask in your subject well-structured or ill-structured? What single change would flip it to the other kind?
When students hit an ill-structured problem and stall, Seifert and Sutton offer three general strategies that work across content areas.
Students break the problem into smaller parts and work each part on its own. The chapter's example is the bicycle-transportation problem: it splits into bike lanes, education for cyclists and motorists, road conditions, and traffic law. Each subproblem has its own answer, and students put the answers together to build the whole solution.
You start from the desired end state and ask what the previous step would have to be. The water-lily problem in the chapter (the lilies double their coverage each day and cover the whole lake on Day 100; on what day is the lake half-covered?) takes one step when you work backward from Day 100 to Day 99. Working forward from Day 1 takes students through many steps, and most of them don't lead to the answer.
Students borrow from a similar problem they've already solved and use it as a template for the new one. Seifert and Sutton describe a first-grader decoding the unfamiliar word screen by analogy to green and seen. The same move scales: a researcher solving a new theoretical problem looks for a problem with a similar structure in a different field.
Which strategy would you teach first in your subject area, and what's your one-sentence reason?
Seifert and Sutton organize the second half of the chapter around two broad approaches to instruction. Most working teachers move between the two in a single class period, and when you name the move out loud, you can defend the lesson plan.
The teacher organizes the content, sequences it, and delivers it. Strategies include lectures, readings, advance organizers, mastery learning, direct instruction, and Hunter's effective teaching model. The strength is efficiency: a well-organized lecture transmits more content per minute than any group activity. The risk is passivity: students take the structure as given and stop building structure of their own.
The student organizes some or all of the content under the teacher's guidance. Strategies include independent study, self-reflection, inquiry, discovery learning, and cooperative learning. The strength is depth and transfer: students who built the structure remember more of it and apply it in more situations. The risk is time: most student-centered approaches cost more class minutes per concept covered.
In Table 24, Seifert and Sutton place strategies on a grid with two axes: how much the teacher or the students direct the work, and how much the strategy emphasizes groups or individuals. Each axis is a matter of degree, and the authors call the teacher-to-student axis the more important one. A teacher-led lecture can include a five-minute jigsaw, and an inquiry session can include a three-minute mini-lecture when students need content they don't have yet. In the lesson plan, you decide which approach fits each segment and how students will move from one segment to the next.
In one lesson you taught (or will teach) this week, which approach dominates? What would you change to make the choice deliberate rather than habitual?
Hunter's model combines several direct instruction strategies into one teacher-directed approach. Hunter divides the whole lesson into four phases. Each phase has a purpose, and you can see from across the room whether the class is meeting it.
Students pay the most attention in the first minutes of class. The teacher uses an advance organizer to point students at what's coming and states the lesson objective in plain language. Seifert and Sutton call this opening activity an anticipatory set.
The teacher gives the lesson one basic structure, uses familiar terms and worked examples, and cuts anything that doesn't serve the objective.
The teacher starts with questions everyone answers (raised hands, choral response, written one-liners), then samples individuals and adjusts the next chunk based on what students said.
The class works the first one or two problems together, and students do the rest on their own with frequent feedback breaks. The teacher keeps monitoring the whole time.
Critics call the model formulaic, and the criticism is fair when a teacher follows the phases without adjusting them to the class. The fix is to treat the four phases as a planning checklist. A lesson doesn't need every phase in equal weight, and the phases show you what to plan for rather than how long to spend on each.
Teachers have assigned group projects for generations. What's newer is the research on the conditions under which students learn from group work and the conditions under which they don't. Seifert and Sutton draw the conditions from Johnson and Johnson and from Slavin. Johnson and Johnson's own model lists five elements, and the module video on positive interdependence covers the first one. In this module, you'll plan with Seifert and Sutton's four conditions.
Groups need protected class minutes and a room arranged for conversation. If you tell students to "work together" without blocking out the time, the groups will fail, so put the talk on the schedule.
Younger students and some older ones need explicit coaching on how to focus on the task instead of their partners' personalities. You teach the skills the way you teach procedures: model, rehearse, reteach.
If you grade the group product alone, freeloading creeps in. If you grade individual contributions alone, the work splits into separate solo projects. The answer is both: a group score for the joint product and an individual score for each member's contribution to it.
Students who think their partners have nothing to contribute will skip the cooperation and do the work alone. You can counter the belief by designing tasks that require a diversity of skills and then naming each member's contribution to the group out loud.
Freeloading: some members coast on the group's effort and take the same grade as the members who did the work. It happens when tasks are graded at the group level alone.
Overspecialization: members divide the task and never integrate it, so the group turns in separate solo projects with one cover page. It happens when tasks are graded at the individual level alone.
You fix both failure modes with the task itself. A "rich group work task" (Cohen, Brody, Sapon-Shevin) requires a diversity of skills no single member has. A presentation about medieval castles needs writing for the report, drama for the skit, and visual art for the poster. Most students have one of the three and almost none have all three, so they have to cooperate.
Seifert and Sutton name four strategies that put the conditions above into practice. Each strategy has a different structure, and you choose the one suited to how the content is organized.
The teacher poses a question, gives every student silent think time, pairs students, and then has pairs share with another pair. It takes the least setup of the four, and you can use it in any lesson without preparation.
The teacher splits a complex topic into parts, and each group becomes expert on one part. The teacher then mixes the experts into new groups, one member from each original group, and each member teaches their part to the new group.
In Student-Teams Achievement Divisions, the teacher teaches the whole class, then assigns teams to study together. Individuals take the test, and each grade depends on both the student's improvement and the team's. Because each grade depends in part on the team, teammates have a reason to help one another improve.
The teacher poses an extended question or problem of interest, and students plan their investigation, do the work over many class periods, and present a product (report, presentation, exhibit). It has the highest cost per concept covered and the highest depth and transfer.
Think-pair-share is the right starting move when students are new to cooperative work or new to each other. Jigsaw works best on dense content that splits into several parts, and STAD fits content the whole class learns together before an individual test. Project-based learning takes many class periods, so it belongs in the unit plan. Your Lesson Plan assignment should name the strategy you chose and why.
You'll lean on this chapter in Discussion 3: Strategy Selection. When you name the model your lesson used, you can place it on the two axes of Seifert and Sutton's Table 24 grid: who directs the work, and whether the strategy emphasizes groups or individuals. In the Model Match Analysis (75), the grid can help you name each teacher's model by who directs the work and how students are grouped. In your Lesson Plan Assignment (100), you can use the same grid to choose an approach for each segment of the period.
Before you move to Chapter 10, you can spend five minutes with the ungraded prompt below and notice how your view of what planning is for changed as you read.
Casey Stengel put the chapter in one line: "If you don't know where you're going, you could end up someplace else." In Planning Instruction, Seifert and Sutton treat planning as the work of deciding where students are going, in language specific enough that students, the teacher, and anyone reading the lesson can recognize the destination on arrival.
Seifert and Sutton split planning into four moves: select general goals, transform goals into specific objectives, balance and combine goals, and connect goals to students' prior experience. They also lay out the source documents (national and state standards, frameworks, guides), the two main approaches to writing objectives (cognitive and behavioral), the three classic taxonomies (Bloom's, affective, psychomotor), what to do when students are a source of goals, and four "bridge" moves that connect any goal to what students already know.
Educational goals at the most abstract level are uncontroversial: "develop individuals to their fullest potential," "prepare students to be productive members of society." Few teachers would disagree, and none of those statements can drive tomorrow's lesson. In Chapter 10, Seifert and Sutton work down from abstraction: from broad purpose to a concrete objective a student can hit and a teacher can verify in one class period.
You select general goals, transform them into specific objectives, balance and combine them so the year doesn't fragment, and relate every goal to students' prior experience so students hold on to what they learn.
If students know the specific thing they're supposed to learn, they focus attention and effort. If the teacher knows the same thing, the teacher uses class time better and designs fairer, more valid assessments.
If you can't say where today's class is going in language specific enough to recognize the arrival, you haven't finished planning. You run the test on the objective before you plan the activity.
National subject-matter organizations and state departments of education have already done most of the work of translating purpose into goals. National standards are summaries of what students can be expected to learn at particular grade levels in particular subjects, published by groups like NCTE (English), NCTM (mathematics), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (science), NCSS (social studies), and ACTFL (foreign languages). State standards serve a parallel purpose at the state level. Both are starting points: they tell you the destination for a unit or a grade band, and you set the destination for each class period.
Subject-area organizations propose what students should learn. The standards are voluntary: a state follows them only if it adopts them, and they're written at a broad level. A national ELA standard might say "students cite specific textual evidence to support analysis," and a single class period can cover one part of it.
Each state issues its own version. Most align with the relevant national standards, sometimes with state-specific additions (state history, state geography). When you cite a standard in your lesson, you cite the state code, because the state code is the document the school answers to.
You write the verb a student will perform tomorrow, the conditions, and the level of acceptable performance yourself.
Two intermediate document types come between the standards document and the lesson plan, and Seifert and Sutton take care to distinguish them. A curriculum framework explains how content standards can be organized for a particular subject and grade range. A framework breaks each general standard into more specific skills, often a dozen or more per standard, and names observable student behaviors. The California reading/language arts framework, for example, is over 300 pages long and breaks one third-grade standard on English conventions into nine specific skills, grouped under five headings: sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. A curriculum guide, by contrast, is the activity-level document. Guides describe specific activities, list materials and time, suggest grouping arrangements, and sometimes script what to say to students. A guide may show one activity that hits four standards at once.
The framework shows the structure of the whole year. You can see which standards belong where in the year, each one broken into observable sub-skills, and sometimes the assessment moves. It's useful when you're mapping a unit and less useful when you're writing tomorrow's lesson.
The guide is written for use in the classroom. It names the activity, level, themes, materials, time, cautions, and discussion prompts. It is closer to a lesson plan than to a standards document, often organized by activity theme rather than by standard.
From the framework you learn what to teach and in what order, and from the guide you learn what students will do tomorrow. Without the framework, you teach the year in fragments, and without the guide, you start every lesson from blank paper.
You read a state standard: "students will analyze how a particular sentence, paragraph, chapter, or section fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the ideas." How many lessons do you need for the standard? Decide, then reveal.
Given a standard or framework, there are two ways to write the objective for a single lesson. The cognitive approach moves from general to specific: name the long-term goal, then list a representative sample of specific behaviors that would count as success at the goal. The list of indicators is meant to clarify the goal, not to be exhaustive. The behavioral approach reverses direction: name the specific behaviors first, then trust that the collection of behaviors describes the goal. In the behavioral approach, the listed behaviors are the complete set of what counts.
The cognitive approach handles long-term, abstract goals (becoming a careful reader, learning to think historically) better than the behavioral approach can. The behavioral approach handles short-cycle, observable skills (using safety equipment, running a software program, executing a free throw) better than the cognitive approach can. Most experienced teachers compromise: they write a general goal at the unit level and behavioral objectives at the lesson level.
"The student will understand the nature and purpose of photosynthesis" plus five indicators (explains the process, diagrams the steps, describes how plant photosynthesis affects animals, writes a plan for testing leaves, presents the experiment orally). The indicators are examples of success, and the goal is larger than the list.
"Beginning roller blading" plus four observable behaviors (ties boots, puts on safety gear, skates 15 m without falling, stops on demand within three meters). Every behavior on the list is required, and together the behaviors make up the goal. Doing well on a written quiz about roller blading would not count.
Teachers write a general goal at the unit level (the students will become careful readers of literary nonfiction) and a behavioral objective at the lesson level (given a 600-word op-ed, the student will identify the author's claim and the supporting evidence with 80% accuracy). The pair covers both time scales.
Robert Mager's three-part objective sets the floor for the behavioral approach. Every behavioral objective should specify (1) a behavior you can observe, (2) the conditions under which the behavior is performed, and (3) a minimum acceptable level of performance. If you drop any one of the three, the objective stops being measurable. In the chapter, Seifert and Sutton pair each correct example with a flawed one, and the three cards below follow the same pattern.
An observable behavior is something a student does or says, rather than something a student thinks or feels. "Make a list of animal species that live in the water but breathe air" works. "Understand the difference between fish and aquatic mammals" does not, because no one can see understanding.
Conditions are the special circumstances around the task. "Given a list of 50 species, the student will circle..." names a condition. "After three days of instruction, the student will identify..." does not. The phrase describes what the teacher does, and a condition has to describe the student's working conditions.
The minimum level is the criterion that turns the behavior into a measurement. "The student will do so within 15 minutes with 100% accuracy" is a level. "The student will circle..." with no criterion at all is not.
If a colleague who has never met your students could read your objective and use it to grade student work without calling you, you have written a Mager-shaped objective. If they would have to call, you have not finished.
Educators have proposed taxonomies in three domains: cognitive (thought), affective (feelings and emotions), and psychomotor (physical skill). Teachers use the three as menus to keep a curriculum from monotony. A unit that hits only the recall level of Bloom's taxonomy will produce students who can recite but not reason. A unit that hits only the cognitive domain will leave the affective and psychomotor sides untaught.
Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) cross six processes (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create) with four kinds of knowledge (factual, conceptual, procedural, metacognitive), which gives you twenty-four cells for any unit's verbs.
Krathwohl, Bloom, and Masia (1964) describe five levels of commitment: Receiving, Responding, Valuing, Organization, and Characterization by a value complex. A student moves from being willing to attend to integrating a value into a comprehensive value system.
Seifert and Sutton cite Harrow (1972) and Simpson (1972) for psychomotor taxonomies and show one scheme with five levels of physical skill: Imitation, Manipulation, Precision, Articulation, and Naturalization. It's most visible in physical education, but it applies to lab equipment, drawing, instrumental music, and a first grader's handwriting.
"Memory for facts" (recall the names of cell parts) is a different objective from "memory for concepts" (recall the function of each cell part), which is different from "memory for procedures" (recall how to view a cell under a microscope), which is different from "memory for metacognition" (recall a technique for remembering the cell parts). The verb stays the same across four different lessons.
The cognitive levels form a rough progression from simple to complex, but they don't form a fixed sequence for every topic. Some math topics work better when the general idea ("what does it mean to multiply?") comes before the specific facts. You can use the taxonomies as a menu of choices, and students don't have to climb them one step at a time.
Teachers use the taxonomies to keep a unit from leaning on simple recall. Students who spend all their time at Remember won't learn to apply what they know or create something new.
You read this objective: "Given the play Romeo and Juliet, students will appreciate Shakespeare's use of dramatic irony." What is wrong with it under Mager's three features? Decide, then reveal.
Up to this point, Seifert and Sutton assume curriculum writers and teachers select the goals. The assumption holds most of the time, but it leaves something out. Advocates of two practices challenge the assumption: emergent curriculum, in which goals arise from the students' expressed interests; and multicultural / anti-bias curriculum, which requires planning to take students' cultural backgrounds into account.
A first-grade teacher reads a Halloween book; students fixate on the moon in one illustration. The teacher sets the Halloween unit aside, brings in books about the moon, invites a local astronomer, and lets the children build paper-mache moons. The new unit came from what the children wanted rather than from the framework. Emergent curriculum works best in early childhood, but you can use it at any grade level.
In careful, continuous observation, the teacher watches and listens, keeps informal records of comments and activities, and uses the data both to respond and to assess. In curriculum webbing, the teacher (sometimes with students or co-teachers) brainstorms connections among student-suggested initiatives and teacher ideas, mapping where the interest could lead.
Content integration uses examples from different cultures to illustrate concepts. Equity pedagogy is instruction that allows for the varied learning styles shaped by cultural background. Knowledge construction pays attention to how cultural groups produce knowledge. Prejudice reduction uses activities that surface and address negative evaluations. In an empowering school culture and social structure, every teacher and staff member shows respect for cultural differences, in the classroom and beyond.
Whatever the goal, students reach it more often when teachers draw on more than the textbook. Seifert and Sutton walk through four resource categories: the Internet, local experts, field trips, and service learning. Each one makes a lesson more vivid and relevant, and each one takes extra planning.
The Internet is a virtual library many times larger than the largest physical library. The first cost is information overload: a search for "photosynthesis" returns six million pages, and choosing among them is a skill students have to learn. Inequity of access is a second cost: well-resourced schools have a connection in every classroom; under-resourced schools share one connection in the library.
A city forester can explain stresses on urban trees, and a teacher aide can describe growing up in a Spanish-speaking community in New Mexico. Local experts counter the tendency to equate school learning with book knowledge. The risk is a visitor who doesn't pitch the talk to the audience.
The class travels to the police station, the fire hall, the water-treatment plant. A trip makes the content more vivid, and it also takes more planning (funds, parent supervision, transportation). Virtual field trips cost less, and Seifert and Sutton note they're seldom as vivid.
Service learning pairs community service with analysis and reflection on the service. Students might pick up trash in a stream bed, then read and write about the ecology of the watershed and the community. Service learning shouldn't be sporadic, and it shouldn't be punitive.
In the last section, Seifert and Sutton move from planning to teaching. A goal selected from a framework, written in Mager's format, and supported by good resources will still fail if it doesn't connect to what students already know. Seifert and Sutton name four bridge moves: modeling, activating prior knowledge, anticipating preconceptions, and providing guided practice.
The teacher or a peer performs the desired behavior; students observe and imitate. This is Bandura's observational learning, and it works best when students see the model as important (the teacher), similar to the learner (a peer), or warm (a friend). In vicarious reinforcement, students who see another student praised for politeness imitate the politeness.
A model can be a simplified representation of a phenomenon, such as ping pong balls in a room standing in for gas molecules under pressure. Two-dimensional models work too: drawings of medieval castles, maps of the neighborhood. The model uses objects already familiar to students to scaffold the new idea.
Before introducing the biologist's classification of species, ask students how they already classify plants and animals. Surface the existing schema, then connect the new content to it. Concept maps, brainstorming lists, and short writes all activate prior knowledge. Without activation, students have nowhere to attach the new knowledge.
Activating prior knowledge has a risk, because some of what students already believe is wrong. A kindergartener thinks the sun rises, and a high school student thinks heavy objects fall faster. The teacher anticipates the misconceptions and designs the lesson to counter them, treating the wrong belief with respect while replacing it.
Students often believe stars appear in the same place every night, though the stars shift. Some think the Earth is flat because it looks flat from the ground. Many believe force is needed to keep an object moving, when inertia keeps it moving. Others treat volume, weight, and size as the same thing, or think seasons happen because Earth changes distance from the sun, when axial tilt causes them. You'll want to plan the counter-demonstration into the lesson.
Students work on their own with the teacher close at hand. It's the same construct as Vygotsky's ZPD and instructional scaffolding from Chapter 2. The success of guided practice depends on focusing on the task, asking questions that break the task into manageable parts, reframing, and giving frequent feedback. Over time, you fade the guidance into independent practice.
Before introducing a new topic, write down on a slip of paper the two most likely misconceptions students will bring. Plan one counter-demonstration into the lesson body, and after class, check the slip to see whether you were right.
Without a measurable objective, you have no way to tell whether the lesson worked.Course note
The game has six pairs of planning terms from Module 2. When you click two tiles that match, they stay open.
When a unit plan fails, you can almost always trace the failure to a single piece of the plan. Which piece? Decide, then reveal.
Sketch the alignment chain (standard, then objective, then activity, then assessment) for one upcoming lesson. Where is the weakest link?
You can drop your lesson into the eight fields below. The builder saves to your browser as you type, and the Print button sends a clean copy to paper or PDF.
You can run the eight checks below against your draft before you submit, and your progress saves item by item.
In backward design, you start with the results you want, decide what assessment evidence will show students reached them, and plan the activities last. You choose each activity as a way to reach the results the assessment measures.
Which of the four bridges (modeling, activating prior knowledge, anticipating preconceptions, guided practice) was present or missing in a lesson you've taught or observed? What changed for students because of it?
You'll find the seven chapter walkthroughs and the module introduction here, along with four outside talks on planning and engagement. Each walkthrough is a short video by another educator that previews the chapter, so you know where to focus before you read. While you watch, try writing one sentence per video that ties something in it to a specific point from your reading, and you can build your Discussion 3 post from those sentences.
The seven walkthroughs are below in chapter order. You can watch each one before or during your reading of the matching chapter, whichever helps you process the material.
These four short talks come from outside the textbook, and each speaker teaches a Module 2 concept from a different angle than the chapters.
In each branching scenario, you face a standard and a planning fork of the kind teachers meet every week, and you answer it with Marzano's design questions and Bloom's hierarchy. Once you pick a move, you'll see how it shapes the lesson.
You have a state standard for your content area in front of you. The standard reads: students will "analyze the role of geography in shaping a historical event" (or your subject equivalent). You have to write a measurable lesson objective by tomorrow. What do you write?
Which objective would you put on the board?
A colleague asks which Bloom's level your verb hits. What do you say?
The objective has all four ABCD parts: audience, behavior, condition, and degree. The verb identify is observable, the 80% sets the threshold for proficient, and the map is the condition that makes analysis possible. The Bloom's level is analyze.
The objective itself is solid ABCD. Identify can belong to remember when students are listing memorized facts, but pulling three geographic factors off a primary-source map is closer to analyze. Tag it as analyze and your assessment will line up.
The essay implies a behavior and a condition, but it has no measurable degree and no clear cognitive level. An ABCD scaffold and a verb naming what you want students to do would fix it.
Seifert Ch 10: understand isn't measurable. You can't tell from across the room whether a student is understanding. Rewrite using an ABCD objective with an observable verb.
It's Monday, and tomorrow you're introducing a new concept students have never seen. By Friday, students need to apply the concept to a problem they have not seen before. Marzano 3-5 give you three lesson types. Which one is for tomorrow?
Which lesson type do you plan for tomorrow?
What do you run on Wednesday and Thursday?
Marzano Ch 3: you introduce new material with direct instruction. Wednesday and Thursday are practicing-and-deepening lessons (Ch 4), and Friday is your knowledge-application lesson (Ch 5). Over the week, students move from meeting the concept to practicing it to applying it.
You got Tuesday's lesson right. Skipping Wednesday and Thursday compresses two days of practicing-and-deepening work into none. Most students will hit Wednesday's transfer task without the procedural fluency they need. Keep the middle of the week for Ch 4 work.
Practicing and deepening needs students to have met the content, so run direct instruction first, even for twenty minutes, before peer practice.
Marzano Ch 5: knowledge application lessons require students to have the underlying knowledge, and these students don't have it yet. You'll spend the period rescuing them, and the misconceptions from today will follow you through the unit.
It's the third Friday of the unit, and half the class has glazed over while the other half is still with you. You have eighteen minutes left in the period and a planned worksheet. What do you do?
Which move do you make?
How do you debrief the partner work in the last four minutes?
Marzano Ch 7 and Seifert Ch 9: a structural change resets attention. When you pair across the engagement gap, the engaged half is accountable for a partner and the disengaged half gets a working model. The debrief with two volunteers and one cold call closes the activity.
The structural reset worked, but skipping the debrief throws away the consolidation step. Even ninety seconds of share-out shows the disengaged half what the right thinking looked like, so build the closure in next time.
Marzano Ch 7: when engagement collapses, pushing through guarantees the disengaged half won't retain the lesson, and by now the engaged half has started to drift too.
The question became a reprimand. The student may look up, but the class has learned disengagement gets you named in front of everyone. Save cold calls for students you've built rapport with, and use them on a pattern the class can predict.
You'll make five planning decisions across one week, and each choice carries a point value.
Your department chair drops a new state standard on your desk. You begin the unit Wednesday. The standard reads "Students will analyze..." and you have ninety minutes before lunch. What is your first move?
The objective is on paper, and the assessment is sketched. The standard is new content for students, and Wednesday is the first day of the unit. Which lesson type do you plan for Wednesday?
Two chunks in, you ask "any questions?" Nobody answers, so the class moves on. Twenty minutes later, the formative check shows half the class did not catch chunk two. What was the failure?
Your class has one ELL student, one student with an IEP for reading comprehension, and two gifted students. Today's practicing-and-deepening lesson uses a comparison-matrix activity. How do you differentiate?
Friday is the knowledge-application day. In the cognitively complex task, students use what they have learned on a problem with more than one defensible answer. Five minutes before class, you realize there is one task option for the whole class. What do you do?
Each of the four scenarios has one right answer: the Marzano lesson type that fits the day. You'll see feedback after each pick.
Scenario 1 of 4. Tomorrow you're teaching the Pythagorean theorem, and none of your students have seen it before. By Friday they need to use it on a word problem with three steps and a hidden constraint.
Scenario 2 of 4. Students learned the law of conservation of energy on Monday, and they can apply it to a roller-coaster diagram, but they're slow and make errors. Today you want them to apply it with more speed and accuracy.
Scenario 3 of 4. Students have spent two weeks on the Constitutional Convention. They know the players, the compromises, and the timeline. Today you ask them whether a present-day issue would be settled the same way the Convention settled the slavery question.
Scenario 4 of 4. Students finished the practicing-and-deepening unit on quadratic equations. The unit summative is in two days. Today you want to bring out common errors so students catch them on the test.
Drag each move to the lesson type where it fits best. Some moves cut across types; place each one in the type where it's most central.
Each card shows a planning question on the front and the answer on the back. After you flip it, mark Got it or Review again.
Type the term in each inline blank, and use Tab to move between them. The checker accepts synonyms and abbreviations where they fit. Hit Check when you're done.
In the ABCD format, which builds on Mager's behavioral objectives, the four parts of a performance objective are , , , and . The verb in the objective should match the level on Bloom's taxonomy; the six revised levels in order from lowest to highest are remember, understand, apply, , evaluate, and .
Marzano's three lesson types in The New Art and Science of Teaching are (Chapter 3, used the day students meet new content), (Chapter 4, used to build fluency on procedural skill or to deepen understanding of declarative knowledge), and (Chapter 5, used for cognitively complex tasks with more than one defensible answer).
In Wiggins and McTighe's planning move, you name the desired results, then plan the before the activity, and the move is called . Hunter's opening hook that orients students to the day's objective is called the set. Ausubel's pre-content scaffold that gives students a place to put new information is called the organizer. Webb's four-level framework for cognitive complexity, which you can use alongside Bloom's, is called .
Cooperative learning fails in two predictable ways. When the group product is graded but individual contribution is not, creeps in and a few members coast on the group's effort. When individual contribution is graded but the group product is not, takes over and the work splits into separate solo projects. The fix for both is a rich group work task that requires a of skills no single member has.
Two obstacles Seifert and Sutton name in problem-solving are (a tendency to lock onto one purpose for an object or one definition for a term) and (a tendency to frame a new problem the same way as the previous problem). General strategies that help across content areas include problem analysis, working , and thinking.
The self-check covers the key terms and ideas from the Module 2 readings in fill-in-the-blank prompts that accept synonyms where they fit. You can use it as a warm-up before you submit the Standards & Objectives assignment and the Lesson Plan Assignment.
Type the term that fits, and use Tab to move between blanks. The checker accepts synonyms where they fit. Hit Check when you're done.
1. The four-part objective model that builds on Mager, with audience, behavior, condition, and degree, is the .
2. The acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals is .
3. Bloom's six cognitive levels in the revised taxonomy are remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and .
4. Marzano's lesson type for introducing new content is .
5. Marzano's lesson type for transferring learning to novel problems is .
6. Group instruction with positive interdependence and individual accountability is called .
7. Ausubel's framework for giving students the big picture before details is the .
8. Webb's four-level framework for cognitive complexity is .
9. The opening of a lesson, which orients students to the day's objective, is the .
10. The deliberate end-of-lesson summary that consolidates learning is the .
11. Planning specific accommodations for different learner profiles inside the lesson body is called .
12. When you plan from the desired results and the assessment back to the activities, you're using Wiggins and McTighe's approach, called .
In each of the three scenarios below, the right answer is the learning theory behind the strategy. You'll see feedback after each pick.
Scenario 1 of 3. A teacher uses choral response to check understanding mid-lesson, follows correct answers with specific praise, and runs short repetitions on items the class missed. Which theoretical lineage best explains this set of moves?
Scenario 2 of 3. A teacher poses an open-ended question, gives silent think time, has students sketch their reasoning on whiteboards, then runs a small-group consensus task before a whole-class debrief. Which lineage best explains the move?
Scenario 3 of 3. A teacher opens with an advance organizer (a labeled diagram of the day's three big ideas), chunks new content into three blocks of seven minutes each, and checks understanding after each chunk with a one-sentence summary task. Which lineage best explains the move?
These "answer first, then check" prompts cover the alignment work, and each one is the kind of question you'd face in a planning conference.
In one sentence, what's the shortest test of whether a lesson objective is measurable?
You inherit a unit plan with a state standard, an objective, an activity, and an assessment. The chain is supposed to connect all four. Which link breaks first in most planners' work?
A lesson plan claims differentiation, but the activity doesn't change for any student. What signals the gap on the page, and what would the lesson look like if the differentiation changed what students do?
You can ask one question of any lesson plan: which Marzano lesson type is this? If you can't answer in one word (direct, practicing, application), what is missing?
Each card front asks a readiness question, and the back shows what "ready" looks like. It's a last sweep before you submit.
Everything below is optional. The links go to outside sites that support the Module 2 work on objectives, lesson types, engagement, and complex thinking.
This book introduced backward design as a planning framework. You'll use its backward design logic in the Lesson Plan Assignment. ASCD publishes the book.
In this short talk, Wiggins argues for planning backward from the results you want, the move behind the Lesson Plan Assignment. The talk also appears in the Videos tab.
The single-page guide covers the revised Bloom's with verbs and example tasks for each level, and you can use it when you write the verbs for the Standards & Objectives assignment.
Webb's DoK is a cognitive-complexity frame you can use alongside Bloom's verbs to name what students are doing in an activity.
Norman L. Webb · Wisconsin Center for Education ResearchSeifert and Sutton draw part of their Chapter 9 cooperative learning conditions from David and Roger Johnson's research at the University of Minnesota. The institute's site has research summaries and design templates.
Spencer Kagan's structures (Round Robin, Numbered Heads Together, Quiz-Quiz-Trade) are practical templates for the cooperative-learning conditions Seifert Ch 9 names.
Kagan Publishing · Search "Kagan structures" for examplesMarzano Resources has free materials on The New Art and Science of Teaching, the book behind Module 2's Chapters 3 to 7.
ASCD's monthly journal has issue archives going back decades on lesson design, instructional strategies, and engagement. Search the archive when you want the research base behind a specific Marzano element.