AI-Powered Lesson Planner
The AI-powered Lesson Planner allows teachers to generate a lesson plan based on a piece of Newsela content, one or more standards, and a learning objective.
What does the Lesson Planner include?
Teachers are prompted to provide an objective and up to three standards for a given Newsela article. Newsela's lesson planner will then return a lesson plan that includes the following components:
Objective: This describes what students will learn in the lesson.
Reading instructions: These are student-facing instructions that describe what they should do while reading the Newsela text, including highlighting and annotation instructions. These are designed to be easy to copy and paste into the assignment instructions.
Activity Ideas: A list of activities that teachers can choose from when building their lessons.
Lesson Breakdown: A step-by-step lesson plan that describes how teachers can implement the Newsela text in their classroom, with specific activities and links (where relevant) to Newsela's AI-powered graphic organizers.
Project Ideas (optional field): A section with ideas teachers can use for projects, that act as extensions for students who could benefit from additional challenge or practice.
Supports for Multilingual Learners (optional field): A section with ideas the teacher can use to scaffold their lesson for students who are learning English as an additional language, including sentence frames, modification ideas, and other strategies.
What can teachers do with the lesson plan?
Teachers can edit the lesson plan, copy and paste it into their desired doc or LMS, or download it as a PDF to print.
How many articles in the Newsela platform feature the Lesson Planner?
Any article in Newsela that incorporates AI-powered teacher tools includes a ‘Lesson Planner’ tab to generate lesson plans. This includes the majority of articles in the Newsela platform library.
Who has access to this feature?
All Newsela teachers and administrators have access to the lesson planner, regardless of plan type.
Using the Lesson Planner
To use the Lesson Planner, begin by clicking into your selected Newsela article, and scroll down to locate the AI-Powered Teacher Tools section (note: most Newsela articles have these tools, but not all of them)
Select the 'Lesson Planner' tab
Type in your preferred learning objective, and click on Add standards +
Search standards by typing in a standard code or keyword and use the suggested filters to narrow down the results. Check-mark up to 3 standards and when ready click Add standards
(Optional) Toggle on Include project idea to receive ideas for projects that act as extensions for students who could benefit from additional challenge or practice
(Optional) Toggle on Include support for multilingual learner to receive ideas for scaffolding the lesson for students who are learning English as an additional language, including sentence frames, modification ideas, and other strategies
(Optional) Define how long you would like your lesson to last
When satisfied with your entries, click Generate Lesson Plan
Allow Luna the time it needs to process your request. You can hit Cancel if you changed your mind
Review the generated lesson plan to make sure it is right before using it with your class
If your lesson plan needs editing, click Edit lesson and use the editor window. When done, click Save edit
Once satisfied with the lesson plan, you can either copy it to your clipboard and paste into a doc or your LMS, or download the lesson plan as PDF for printing
If you are building a Newsela assignment following the generated lesson plan, here are a few additional tips:
Copy the Reading Instructions from the generated lesson plan into your Newsela Assignment's instructions field
Refer to the Activity Ideas in your lesson plan to decide which Newsela activities to assign to your students. The Luna authored lesson plan will also refer you to Newsela's AI-powered Graphic Organizers. Simply click the hyperlinked suggestion, and Luna will generate and pre-populate graphic organizers with information from the selected article, that you can then edit to your liking, download as PDF and print