Secondary Lesson Plan Template

Name of class:
Length of class:
12th U.S. Politics and
50 minutes
Government
LEARNING GOALS/STANDARDS to be addressed in this lesson (What
goals for learning to you hope to accomplish and/or national or state
standards will you address?):
Understand the role of the United States in current world affairs.
(SS.912.PSCL.8)
LEARNING OBJECTIVES (What will students know or be expected to do
in this lesson? Use verbs from Blooms Taxonomy):
Students will be able to analyze the effect that the United States
foreign policy has on another country.
Students will be able to evaluate a scenario about U.S. foreign
policy and summarize their evaluation.

CONTENT (What specific

concepts, facts, or
vocabulary will be taught in
this lesson?):

Afghanistan
Taliban
U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers
Foreign Policy

SKILLS: (What skills will students practice

or apply?)

How to work well in groups

How to think critically about a
problem

RESOURCES/MATERIALS NEEDED (What materials and resources will I

need?):

Copies for all of the students in the class of the article The
Road to Tarin Kowt from the book Cases in Intelligence
Analysis by Sarah Miller Beebe and Randolph H. Pherson
Whiteboard

LEARNING PLAN (How will you organize student learning in this lesson?
LESSON PLAN SEQUENCE & PACING (How
will I organize this lesson? How much time will
each part of the lesson take?)
1. Before the students get to class I will
write on the board the different sections
to the problem solving technique that
the students will be using. It will look
something like:

ENGAGE/EXPLORE
Capture student
attention, activate
student prior knowledge,
stimulate thinking, raise
key questions, Allow
students to observe,
design and plan
experiments, etc.
EXPLAIN

U.S. Strengths

U.S. Weaknesses

Opportunities for
the U.S.

Threats to the U.S.

2. Students will have read the article

before coming to class to better
facilitate the discussions that the
students will have in their groups. I will
begin the class by giving a brief
description about the scenario that they
will be working on. The scenario is
about a project that the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers was working on in
Afghanistan in 2005. They were building
a road in a very heated part of the
country and they thought if they
finished the road before the election
five months away that the elections
would go smoother. (10 min)
3. The students will be broken into groups
that I will create. These groups will be
heterogeneous groups based on
achievement level. In these groups, the
students will have copies of the article
that they will have already read, and

Introduce laws, models,

theories, and vocabulary.
Guide students toward
coherent generalizations,
and
help students understand
and use scientific
vocabulary to explain the
results of their
explorations
ELABORATE
Provide students
opportunity to apply their
knowledge to new
domains, raise new
questions, and explore
new hypotheses. May
also include related
problems for students to
solve.
EVALUATE
Administer assessment
(although checking for
understanding should be
done throughout the
lesson)

they will use a problem solving

technique from the article to attempt to
solve the question of whether or not the
building of the road should be
expedited. As the students come up
with ideas on how to fill out the table,
they will be allowed to go up to the
board and fill in their own groups ideas.
(20 min)
4. After the students feel they have filled
out the table to the appropriate amount,
we will debrief the activity and to try to
figure out what the best idea for the
U.S. is. This will be done as a large
group with as many of the students
participating as possible. (15 min)
5. ASSESSMENT: The students will be
asked to write a one page paper on how
the foreign policy of the United States
might or might not affect the outcomes
of other countries issues. (5 min)

How did you/How might you differentiate for student READINESS,

INTEREST< or LEARNING PROFILE in this lesson?
I differentiated for student readiness by having the students read the
article before class, and then providing the article to them if they (a)
didnt read it or (b) forgot to have it with them in class. Also, because
the students are working in groups and we are having a full class
discussion, they are being differentiated by learning profile. Im not
sure I differentiated for interest in this lesson.

What educational learning theories did you incorporate into this

project plan (e.g., Social Learning Theory, Scaffolding, Vygotskys,
Zone of Proximal Development, Cskszentmihlyi's flow concept, etc.)
and how did you incorporate them?
I incorporated Social Learning Theory into this lesson because I am
having the students work in groups. The students will learn more and
they will learn better when they are able to bounce ideas off of their
peers.