The Art of Lesson Planning: Hunter’s Timeless Model
Madeline Hunter (1916–1994) was a highly influential American educator, researcher, and author known for her contributions to instructional theory and lesson planning. Her work focused on effective teaching practices and how educators could design and deliver lessons to maximize student learning outcomes. Hunter worked with educators at all levels, from primary school teachers to university professors, helping them improve their teaching practices. This blog post will look at Hunter’s model and lesson planning templates.
Hunter’s original lesson planning model outlines seven essential lesson planning and delivery steps. She designed these steps to create an optimal learning environment and ensure that lessons are both engaging and effective. Later in her work, she added an eighth step and created a streamlined five-step model. Let’s examine Hunter’s eight-step model.
Hunter’s Eight-Step Lesson Planning Model
Step One—Anticipatory Set: If you took the Massage Classroom Coach course Priming: The Education Game Changer, you know that “anticipatory set” and “priming” are the same thing. Anticipatory set (priming) is an instructional strategy that prepares students for learning by reducing their anxiety, capturing their attention, activating their existing knowledge, and establishing a framework for understanding new material. Anticipatory set (priming) involves connecting students to why they care about the material and how it functions in their personal or professional lives.
Step Two – Objectives and Purpose: Hunter felt it is essential for teachers to share a clear statement of what learners should achieve by the end of the lesson. Instructors share defined learning goals with students in one or two sentences at the beginning of classes. For example, “Today, our topic is values and how they relate to ethics. We’ll focus on how our personal values support or hinder our professional massage ethics.”
Step Three—Input: Input refers to the learning experiences teachers use to provide “input” on what students should know or be able to do. These types of learning experiences outline important terms and concepts (lectures) and demonstrate specific tasks, skills, or protocols (demonstrations).
Step Four – Modeling: Modeling refers to showing students exactly how to apply knowledge or perform a skill. This step aims to offer clear examples for students to imitate. Hunter stressed that both explicit and implicit modeling are important. In explicit modeling, a teacher uses “input” to outline the steps in a client health intake and interview and then models this process before asking students to practice it. Implicit modeling is implied rather than expressly stated. Examples include the instructor wearing appropriate clothing and using clean language free of swear words to model professionalism continually.
Step Five – Check for Understanding (CFU): Hunter advocated for dynamic, ongoing assessments embedded within the teaching process rather than relying solely on summative assessments at the end of a lesson or unit. She used a broad array of methods, from specific types of questions based on the different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy to “signal responses,” where students gave a thumbs up, down, or sideways, indicating their level of understanding or choral responses, where everyone answered together. The most crucial aspect of CFU is that teachers use it to make real-time adjustments in instruction, whether by reteaching content or extending the discussion of certain concepts.
Step Six—Practice: Practice refers to learning activities that require students to apply what they learned in the input segment. It gives learners opportunities to engage with the material and deepen their learning. Examples include group discussions, peer activities, role-playing a scenario, and in our case, massage exchanges.
Step Seven – Independent Practice: Students are constantly progressing. At first, they need instructor support to perform learning tasks. Then, peer activities provide less confident or knowledgeable students with support from more confident or knowledgeable students. Finally, with the proper foundation, students are able to perform tasks independently. Hunter used thoughtful homework that asked students to solidify their understanding of the information and tasks they worked on in class. This encouraged mastery, confidence, and competence.
Step Eight – Closure: While formal closure wasn’t part of Hunter’s original model, she evolved to feel that it was important to plan for structured closing events where students discussed their learning or participated in activities to summarize lesson content. Examples include journaling about how the lesson applies to their understanding of massage therapy or their personal life or asking learners to share a key takeaway. If you’ve taken the 40 Activities to Anchor Student Learning course, you know several methods to close classes.
Based on feedback from adult educators, Hunter developed a streamlined version of her instructional model, which consisted of five steps: anticipatory set, objectives, instruction (input), practice, and closure.
Madeline Hunter’s work remains influential, especially in teacher training programs, where she provides a foundational approach to effective teaching. Elements of her model appear in modern instructional strategies, including differentiated instruction to meet individual student needs, the modern emphasis on dynamic and regular formative assessment, and principles of active learning.
Next Steps
Hunter’s core principles remain a valuable tool for educators seeking to create meaningful lessons. To grow your teaching and instructional design skills, try this activity:
- Download Hunter’s Eight-Step Lesson Planning Template and Example. Review the example and enter the information for one of your existing lesson plans into the template and determine where you need instructional elements.
- If you need ideas for creating an “Anticipatory Set,” check out Priming: The Education Game Changer.
- If you need ideas for ” Checking for Understanding,” “Practicing,” and “Closing,” check out 40 Activities to Anchor Student Learning.
- After you flesh out Hunter’s template, try teaching the new plan and think about what improved your students’ comprehension.
- You can find out more by reading Hunter’s books, especially Mastery Teaching (1982), Enhancing teaching (1994), and The Art of Teaching and Learning (1991).
