A mini lesson focuses on a specific teaching point and lasts five to twenty minutes. You can teach a mini lesson with a full group, a small group, or with individual students. Mini lessons are ideal for quick lessons that lead to active participation.
Steps to complete a mini-lesson
Before planning your mini-lesson, you need to determine your teaching point. A teaching point is a specific objective. What will the student do? A teaching point could look like this: the writer will select a topic to write a nonfiction magazine article. Once you have a teaching point, you can start planning your lesson.
Step one: model
The first step in teaching a mini-lesson is modeling what you want your students to do. If your teaching goal is to get your students to select a writing topic, then you must model the selection of a topic. You can show students a list of ideas for writing magazine articles that you brainstormed the night before. You may have ten ideas on the list. Write the list on graph paper or post it on a projection device. Think out loud about your thinking when considering your topics. What topic do you know more about? What topic is the most interesting? What topic could you take time to write without getting bored? What topic has enough content to fill the space of the article? These are the types of questions you would ask yourself (out loud) for this particular teaching point. Your goal is to show your students how to remove topics and select the best topic to write about. You can complete this step in less than five minutes.
Step two: active engagement
The next step in teaching a mini lesson is to actively engage your students. Active participation can range from using a partner and speaking to hands-on experience. The keyword is “active”. Students participate in practice (trial and error) while the teacher supervises and assists their students. In the case of our writing teaching point, students could work in partners to help each other talk about their writing ideas to choose the best idea. At the end of the session, students should be ready to write. This step can take five to ten minutes.
Step three: share the learning experience
Before you leave the mini-lesson behind and leave the students to the responsibility, reconvene your class (or get together with your small group or individuals) to share the learning experience. In the case of selecting topics, students could share their writing topics with the rest of the class and say how they decided on their topic. In this case, it is not the topic they chose, but the process they participated in when choosing the topic. Spend no more than five minutes on step three. You have to make your students work now! Time to write (or read).
Mini-lessons are a great tool to keep students engaged and moving forward. Children are connected to television, video games, and the Internet to the point that they quickly lose interest. Shorter, more engaging lessons keep your students engaged and your teaching fresh.
