The mini-lesson is not a new idea. Mini-lessons are smaller lectures that provide a targeted skill or set of knowledge in a very short period of time. Learners can generally implement these skills or knowledge sets immediately following the mini-lesson. The power mini-lesson adds an element that requires some preparation for in the instructional design. In a power mini-lesson, there is nothing different about the lesson information or the way it is delivered but there is a key difference in the timing. In a power mini-lesson, the instructor waits for the learners to need the information before delivering the mini-lesson. Grab the PBL template as well.

Instructional design factors of power mini-lessons

    In order to be able to plan for a power mini-lesson, the instructional sequence must have some key features. Learners are interacting with a larger proficiency. The teacher must design the tasks so that learners will encounter an obstacle for which they need information or strategies. This will give them a purpose for accessing the information that you can give them. While they may be able to look up this information on Google, the difference is that they don’t know what they don’t know. 

Example:

Jo Boaler does a math task called 4-4s and in this task, learners are asked to try and make the numbers 1-20 using only four 4s. Some are easy to find and some are harder. It is a task that most students can get started on fairly easily using just the four basic operations. When I have done this task with students, I let them get to a point of struggle; to a point when they could really start having success if they had just one more strategy and that’s when I show them one of two new ideas depending on where they are in their math learning. One math idea that can help them is the idea of factorials and the other one is the order of operations. In a conventional lesson, one might teach these concepts first. When designing instruction for a power mini-lesson, we wait until learners need the information and then we provide it which makes it more “powerful. 

Designing for Power Mini-Lessons

It can seem a little bit tricky to begin thinking about instructional design in this way but here is an easy strategy that can get you started. Once you get started, it’s pretty intuitive and also requires the creativity that makes designing lessons fun. Do you remember learning how to ride a bike, play the piano, read a book, ski, drive or any other host of tasks that you currently do automatically? In all of those situations, you interacted with the entire process from the start. There were smaller parts that you may have practiced separately but not without knowing what the entire proficiency looked like first. Learning to read starts with learning how to open a book and face it in the right direction. Sure, you didn’t know how to read immediately but you interacted with the book and you watched other people read in order to understand what needed to happen. This is a key understanding of proficiency-based learning experiences and it isn’t new! This is how we have been learning since the beginning of time. We haven’t had someone spoon-feeding us along the way. While it isn’t new to learn this way, it may be new to think about classroom instruction and teaching various types of content this way. One easy way to get started with proficiency-based instruction is to simply look at what you are already doing and see if just rearranging the order of the activities might create a more holistic learning experience. In a PBL experience, we want learners to interact with the entire proficiency early and often. 

Examples

In the examples below, we haven’t created any new activities. There are some small tweaks to the reflection and assessment piece at the end and this is because in the initial lesson, the lesson was about the micro-part of the persuasion elements and in the second example, the assessment is focused on the larger proficiency.

Conventional Lesson Design

Unit Objective	Review the learning scale for persuasion
Anticipatory Set (background knowledge)	Listen to a famous speech
Direct instruction	Mini-lesson on persuasive techniques/strategies
Guided practice	Work with a partner to find examples of persuasion in well-known speeches
Individual practice	Write a speech that argues for or against open campus
Quick assessment	Exit ticket elements of persuasion

Proficiency-Based Lesson Design

Scaled-down version of summative assessment	5) Write a speech that argues for or against open campus
Learning Scale	Compare that speech to the learning scale for persuasion
Direct instruction	3) Mini-lesson on persuasive techniques/strategies
Paired interaction with the proficiency	4) Work with a partner to find examples of persuasion in well-known speeches
Interaction with events that model the summative assessment	6) Revise original open campus speech
Reflection	6) Compare revised speech to learning scale. Create a learning goal for the next class.

What lesson can you start to think about shifting around to create a more holistic experience? Or What mini-lesson can you design around? Ready for more? Try the PBL lesson planning template.