By: Miguel Silgado
This article contains mainly the insights on my own lesson planning, which I have been doing throughout
my career. It also includes some principals of neuroscience, didactics, curriculum, and the theory of
multiple intelligences. It is not intended to lay the definitive foundations regarding lesson planning, but to
highlight some details of this step inherent to the teacher's praxis. In a strict sense, lesson planning reflects
the pedagogical intention of the activities that a teacher proposes to his students. A lesson plan based on
neuroscience could potentiate the operational, socio-affective, and methodological strategies that the
teacher uses within the classroom, allowing the transformation of the teacher's professional practice and
the way how to conceptualize teaching.
The success of the teaching is based on curricular intensions. The intentionality is reflected by the teacher,
whose planning answers the questions: What to teach? How to teach? Where to teach? What do I want
my students to do? Teachers rely on the standards, study plans, specific knowledge, their previous
experience, and on theoretical and scientific concepts such as neuroscience. The whole lesson plan has
the purpose of guiding the students through a path of sequential didactic activities that will culminate in
learning reflected in specific performances.
Planning is a series of actions aimed to achieve the essential content standards goals corresponding to
the model of the XXI century human being. Lesson planning based on the theory of multiple intelligences
and neuroscience could help teachers to better understand human intelligence, facilitating new elements
and strategies for teaching and learning.
According to Gorriz and Jyuhanang (2008), most people can develop all intelligences until they have a
reasonable level of competence in each one. Whether the intelligences development depends on factors
like, genetic or hereditary, damage or injury to the brain, personal life history, experiences with parents,
teachers, peers, friends or other people, cultural and historical background, time, nature, and the
environment in general. These factors often occur in early childhood or can occur in adolescence or at any
time in life.Gardner (2005), father of the theory of multiple intelligences,
identified several types of intelligences in humans: linguistic,
logical-mathematical, corporal-kinesics, spatial, musical,
interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. The teacher can
offer students the same content, but each of them will assimilate
it depending on the individual characteristics or dominant
intelligences and the way in which they are used by the students.
There are several facts that the teacher needs to have in mind
when planning. Some have been taken from the book “How We
Learn. The surprising truth about when, where, and why it
happens” (Carey, 2020) in which it is suggested that when
studying, students should break their routines. Breaking their
routines means a variation of the place and time of study would give them and their brains the possibility
of learning in different contexts, which is more like real life. Many people learn better in the long term
when they vary their areas of study, the more varied the study setting, the better for learning. Planning
to study in the library, computer room, hall, on the porch, a café, at the airport leads to different contexts
of learning environment.
In the same way, the teacher must plan time to advise students.
Student should be advised about the
importance of natural processes such as sleep. Sleeping is as an active process in the consolidation and
filtering of the knowledge to be learned. Different areas of the brain are activated according to the task
that is being processed. Currently, students might not be allowed to sleep inside the school, but the
student can practice better learning methods at home depending on the type of study content. For
example, if you are going to study logical content then staying up a bit late is the most recommended,
studying until a little late is going to be the best. On the contrary, if artistic knowledge is being studied, it
is advisable to get up early to practice.
When planning the lessons, units, and courses, these sessions should be divided into short periods
alternated with rest, instead of being a long study session; it has been proven that after a short period of
stimulation followed by a short rest, the brain is able to
cool down and resume activity more efficiently. In this
sense, the metaphor of the muscle, also becomes highly
important in the benefits that forgetting brings to exercise
memory. When forgetting occurs, the need to remember
is generated and it is during this forgetting-remembering
process that learning occurs.The natural process of forgetting-remembering can be powerful through
self-examination and "teaching". No subject or part of it is fully learned
until the individual is in the role of having to teach it. In this sense, self-examination becomes a powerful tool, just like flash cards and any other
teaching technique.
In conclusion, lessons planning that provides an opportunity for self-examination of learning, establishes intervals of short sessions within an
ordered study plan, considers the variation of the context, time, place,
and environment of the study, allows the brain to develop multiple
intelligences and sharpen them within a wide field of situations, which will
allow critical thinking and problem solving to be addressed from different
aspects