The 5 E's Strategy

When I began the lesson planning process this week I was a little overwhelmed. Seven pages of lesson plan template were daunting to me. My regular lesson plans are very thorough and often times are three to four pages long which, by most teachers’ and administrators’ standards, is excessive. So you can image my astonishment to see that our lesson plan this week was beginning as a seven page template.
I did find the 5 E’s Strategy to be helpful in this week’s lesson planning. The 5 E’s is a strategy with which I was already familiar, however it is a strategy that is relatively new to me and I had not yet had the opportunity to carry it out in my classroom. What I appreciate about the 5 E’s strategy is how it begins with a hook into learning. The 5 E’s strategy starts with a students’ prior knowledge or a fairly simple engaging demonstration, maybe a discrepant event, and gets the students excited and engaged in what they will be exploring. Because students are already invested in the content, it makes it very easy to keep the students on task and focused on their lesson because they are already invested in learning more about this baffling event; they want to know how the magician performed their trick, so to speak. I also like the way that the 5 E’s strategy allows for exploration of each topic followed by explanation (Buxton & Provenzo, 2007). It is critical that students be able to reflect on their own findings and make new understandings from what they have experienced because it allows students to process for meaning (Hammerman, 2006)
The 5 E’s strategy was different from the methods that I typically take during lesson planning because I typically work from an over-reaching theme or question, plan activities that can help the students grasp the concepts and work with the vocabulary from those big ideas, and then after exploration we debrief about all of our activities and create meaning together. We very rarely elaborate or extend on our concepts due to time constraints, and often times, the explanation process happens many days after the exploration because the students are exploring different topics on multiple days. I think that more immediate explanation would help the students make more immediate connections to prior knowledge.
If I were to implement the 5 E’s strategy into my everyday lessons, I would be most concerned with the time constraints that would hamper these types of activities. To incorporate the 5 E’s strategy thoroughly and properly, it would take at least 2 days of class instruction for each lesson that was taught. To remedy the time constraints while still being able to teach all of the content, power standards as discussed by Dr. Reeves or paring back the curriculum, as referenced by Project 2061 would be essential (Laureate, 2010; AAAS, 2009).