How to Create a Lesson Plan

Lesson plans on Learn.WordPress.org are available for Meetups, educators, and trainers to present the material. This video will demonstrate how a lesson plan goes from idea to published on Learn.WordPress.org.

Learning outcomes

Participants will be familiar with how a lesson plan topic is suggested, how the team reviews lesson suggestions and prioritize these, what format lesson plans use, and the journey from idea to published plan.

Comprehension questions

1. Who can use a lesson plan? (anyone)
2. Is there a standard format for lesson plans? (yes)
3. Are contributors exclusively trained educators? (no)
4. What team creates lesson plans? (training)

Transcript

Learn WordPress that work contains workshops and lesson plans. If you’re interested in contributing a lesson plan, it’s really important to know how that process works. Let’s take a look at some of the lesson plans that are here. And I see that I can select how to create a reusable block.

A lesson plan will have a title, a description, objective statements that specify what the person receiving this training will be able to do upon completion. Any prerequisite skills somebody should possess before beginning this class, readiness questions and the materials needed notes for the presenter, an outline of the lesson exercises or assignments that can do assessment questions to review if they learned what our objectives stated, and any additional resources. below you’ll find an example lesson or a walkthrough. Think of this as an outline of what the presenter should say.

So an example lesson the presenter may use different words than that. But somebody could take this lesson plan and go to a Meetup or use it in a classroom or in any number of different circumstances and present, how to do this particular thing.

As we scroll through, you’ll see screenshots and text and descriptions, any type of tips that you might need. And then finally, if we go back to the top on the right hand side, you’ll see approximately how long the lesson should take, who the audience is that should be receiving this, how experienced somebody should be and any type of instruction that we think would be included. So if you have an idea for a lesson, you can let us know using the link below.

You can also join the training team that meets weekly on Tuesdays over at Make wordpress.org/training. There you will find information on how to join the Slack channel, how to get started and filling out the contact form.

You can also see that each month we have a sprint planning goal. The sprint planning goals involve all of the information about what lesson plans the team is currently working on and what new proposals have come in for lesson plans.

The way that we work is a little bit different. We don’t just write any lesson plan that we have an idea for. It goes through a team review process, and then it moves on to full audit and review before being published.

So if you head to the training teams handbook under getting started and see the how we work together, you can find all of the development workflows shown here with links to developer docs, writing the objective statement for each lesson plan and that would be in a very specific format that educators and trainers are more familiar with marketing communication resources, we let the marketing team know what we’re working on and getting into. And then we use keywords throughout our lesson plans that are the things people are searching for. We look at what do people actually say, when they want to learn the thing that this lesson plan includes to make sure that we’re using the right lingo. We review any related materials that might be found elsewhere online. And then the lesson plan is ready to draft. That’s quite a few steps before it’s even ready to be written.

So in order to draft a lesson plan, and what happens is that the one of the training team reps or a few other folks have access to go to Learn wordpress.org administrator dashboard and we will add a new lesson plan under the lesson plan post type. There we will include the title of the lesson plan. And in the blocks area, we will go to add in a reusable block. And we have a lesson plan template that includes all of those fields that are required to be submitted.

We’ll convert this to regular blocks. And then at the beginning, we can take out the secondary instance with the title that was in the example back that and this would be an area to write a description. We don’t actually need the word description in there. But you can begin typing your information please convert it from a blockquote to something else. And then the objective statements are often fill them before we even provide access to this lesson plan for the person that is drafting it will fill in as a team with the objective statement should be. And once that’s done, we’ll save a draft.

And we’ll make sure that whoever is completing this lesson plan has access both to the training team and to learn websites will get the link and usually private message that to the person that has signed up to draft it. They’ll come in and review all of this information. And then down below on the right hand side you’ll find some ways that we keep track of the content that’s in this that make it easier to audit as well as all of those fields that will help us filter this information from the front end.

So on the right hand side, we see these are the things We’re filtering on the front down below. These are ways to internally audit the content that’s happening online.

Finally, once the draft has been written, it comes back to the team, somebody leaves a message in the channel and says, hey, I’ve got the draft done. That will then go on to those that are ready to do instructional review to make sure that the content that’s included is approximately what we were expecting. Some folks will come in and do some grammar, copy, edit reviews, make sure screenshots look good, make sure that we’re following our style guides. It will get one final review by those that are part of the training team to make sure that this is ready to publish. And then it will be published and announced soon after that.

That’s an overview of how to create a lesson plan. These are really valuable at helping shape the content that happens on learn whether they get repurposed as courses or workshop videos, they can be taken to meetups, anybody can present this information. And of course as part of our licensing, they are completely available for folks to take into classrooms and all sorts of locations to we really look forward to having your help creating more lesson plans.