Select a single challenging concept and place it in the center of a sheet of paper. Then, write down what the learner actually needs to be doing once that lesson is complete. Don’t write what they should know, what they should understand, or what they should remember; write what they should do with their hands, their voice, their notes, their worksheet, or their learner response. That is all you do: you turn a massive teaching concept into smaller, actionable steps.
“Classroom feedback” is a very large beginner topic. It has many potential elements, such as: tone of voice, timing, task-focus, learner motivation, teacher correction, praise, written comments, spoken comments, and follow-up activity. If you try to include all of these elements in one clear beginner lesson, the lesson flow becomes very crowded, and the learner is exposed to a lot of great ideas but isn’t given enough guided practice of any single idea. You might instead choose to teach one smaller topic such as: recognize whether a teacher feedback comment is pointing the learner to a task or is judging the learner.
Once you have your smaller topic, you can write a clearer lesson objective. Instead of “Learners will understand what good teacher feedback is,” you might write, “Learners will identify feedback comments as examples of task-focus or person-focus.” With this small topic, you can now plan the lesson warm-up, explanation, and guided practice activity, and a follow-up review activity so that everything fits nicely together. Your warm-up could involve giving two teacher feedback comments for the learner to identify. Your explanation could name the difference between task-focus and person-focus feedback. Your guided practice activity could involve sorting more teacher feedback comments into one of those two categories, and a follow-up review task could involve learners explaining why they put one piece of feedback in that category.
You can do this for other pedagogy topics as well. Instead of “checking understanding,” you could teach one small step such as “write one question to check learners on how to do this next step.” You could teach one small step of “lesson pacing” such as “put a warm-up task, main activity, and follow-up review activity on a timing map.” You can teach one small step of “scaffolding” such as “write a version of a task that uses scaffolding and a version that does not.” You now have a small and clear teaching step for your learner to do, and a way for the teacher to notice when a learner is confused before moving on to the next topic.
Another thing to look for is a small teaching step that you already did not see in your lesson explanation. Does the learner need to compare two examples? Does the learner then know which aspect they are comparing? Does the learner then need to write a correction cue? Did they see an example of a weak cue and an example of a stronger cue? Does the learner need to organize a group activity? Do they know the task instruction, the length of time the activity will take, and the expected learner response in the activity? You will often find that small teaching steps that you do not know the answer to cause your lesson to get stuck.
By doing this, you are not removing a deep understanding of a topic from the teacher course. You are simply making a list of the order in which you will give the learner exposure to this deep understanding of that topic. If a learner can identify a misunderstanding, choose an effective correction cue, write a new feedback message, and explain how this new message encourages a learner to keep working, that is great progress. You can do all of these in a teacher development course, but the teacher does not need to teach them all within a single explanation, because if you do, then there is no time to give your learner time to learn the step.
After planning your lessons, read the lesson from a learner’s perspective and look for any questions that you do not have a clear answer to: what do I expect the learner to do? What support am I providing for that? Am I checking to see if the learner has learned what I expect them to do? If you cannot answer those questions, you still do not have a good smaller topic. A good smaller topic is so plain that a person might almost think the lesson explanation needs more content: one action to do, one example to see, one thing to check, one thing to fix. That is when the lesson feels like a lesson.