Harris & Hofer

Judi Harris and Mark Hofer are two researchers who have focused on prefessional development for educators in technology integration. Haris & Hofer then came up with 5 steps to follow when planning a lesson:

1. Determine Lesson Purpose

2. Make Pedagogical Decisions

3. Select Acticity Types

4. Select the Appropriate Assessment

5. Choose the right tool(s)

There are many ways to "plan" a lesson out there and this is one of them. Do I think it is the best one? Well, to be honest, yes and no. I think it is a great lesson planning tool for technology integration and also if you are a TPACK user. If you do not have the option to have technology integrated, then this may not be your niche. I think that it is extremely important to decide on the lesson purpose first. Before deciding what you will do, you have to know what you want your students to understand. Once you figure that out, you are on to step two. There are 8 pedagogical questions that Haris & Hofer want you to answer for yourself to help mark the parameters of your lesson. I do think that these questions are extremely important. As a teacher, I believe that you should go through these questions, deciding time, prior knowledge, and structure. Finally, after you set your parameters, you can decide the activity types. To be honest, I probably would already know the activities I wanted to do when I was answering the questions for step 2, but now you can say how they will show they have met the purpose of the lesson. Lastly comes picking the assessment and the integrating technology. I think that it is extrememly important to integrate the technology last. This allows teachers to focus on what they want students to learn and then incorporate technology so that it can help benefit your lesson. The only reason I believe it would not be beneficial to plan the tool last would be that you do not know if it will have any use to your class. If you are able to  know what tool you are using before, you may be able to pick something that will support your lesson better. Whether you integrate your technology last or in the middle, a great way to see if it is benefitting your students is to ask yourself these questions:

http://tech4urcontent.edublogs.org/2010/08/27/thought-process-for-integrating-technology-into-the-classroom/

I like to use these questions when thinking about the importance of the technology in my classroom. Finally, when thinking of Harris and Hofers steps, no teacher comes to my mind. I have not witnessed someone planning like this, but I would love to see it in action. I think being able to see it in action would help me understand it more and decide if I wanted to use it in my future classroom. 

I will leave you with this to ponder... If you were or are an educator, do you think it is important to use Harris and Hofers five steps for lesson planning?