The 4 questions you need to answer for reliable and impactful meetings

Educator! Would you like to readily generate lesson plans that are effective and respectful of different learning styles?

I thought so.

Questions are a powerful way to give structure to the learning experiences that you give your students, especially when you use the same questions that are uppermost in your STUDENTS minds. So, what questions do students have about what they are learning? You may well have heard students ask “Why are we learning this?”, or in other ways question and challenge what is being taught. So that’s the first question to answer. WHY. The others are WHAT, HOW and WHAT IF.

In the 1970’s, Bernice Mcarthy produced a comprehensively effective and respectful lesson planning strategy called 4MAT. 

Let me ask you, as if I were your mentor, the four 4MAT questions, so that you can more quickly write a lesson plan that’s going to include all your students in an active learning session

Why are they learning this?
What are they learning?
How will they learn / use this?
What if they want to use this in real life, outside the school environment?

”The 4MAT lesson plan is process of delivering information based on a shared experience. It has four parts each with an exercise for the student’s right-brain and left-brain (in that order). This kind of lesson plan engages students in interactive activities. The students focus more on their learning process than the lesson content - because it is not just what you do do, it’s the way that you do it that’s important for their learning.”, from the 4MAT website.Another way of describing 4MAT

• WHY Connect and Attend
• WHAT Imagine and Inform
• HOW Practice and Extend
• WHAT IF Refine and Perform

The 4-MAT process has plenty of activities. An initial “attention grabber” that teaches a lesson and promotes interactive learning, and a core component where they can practice the learned concepts in another activity. Finally, the lesson wraps up with something to take home so that the learning can be integrated with the students’ real world.