My quick Google search for "closure in education" brought up a couple of things that were helpful, and some that were not.
First/last (it didn't really take long to find what I really wanted) on the "not" list was one dealing with the closure of I-405 in Los Angeles. They pontificated on whether or not homeschooling or other "alternatives" to traditional public schooling were viable alternatives to the "situation" in public education today.
About.com actually provided what it was that I really wanted to know about closure. Essentially, closure is what you do at the end of the lesson to reconnect students to the content. You want to review what it is that was learned and how they can relate themselves or the content as a whole to that lesson. H. Jurgen Combs provides a fairly comprehensive site on lesson plan design. In his page on closure he lists that closure helps teachers to decide upon three things: 1. if additional practice is needed; 2. whether you need to reteach; 3. whether you can move on to the next part of the lesson.
Synthesizing this into a statement for myself:
Closure, when relating to lesson planning, is the act of review with a class what was learned during the lesson to accomplish two main purposes: one, to determine understanding of students; two, to determine whether or not the students are ready to move on or if reteaching is required.
As for anticipatory set, About.com strikes again with another article in the lesson planning series. Having been familiar with terms like, "activate existing knowledge" or "scaffolding" or even "building upon prior knowledge," I finally have a group to which they will be assigned. Essentially the anticipatory set is where you introduce the students to what they will be learning and getting them to relate what they already know to what they will learn during that lesson.
Combs describes the anticipatory set as the "attention getter." I couldn't think of a better definition for part of it.
Some things that I may do as part of the anticipatory set are have quick discussions about past material that leads into the day's lesson. Adding and subtracting in solving one-step equations as a lead-in to multiplying and dividing to solve one-step equations would be one example. For my LEGO robotics class, I may ask students if they have tried to organize their robot's missions before they take off of if they just start out and go for gold. This would be an anticipatory set conversation for a lesson on mission planning. (Further discussion on getting stuck and frustrated for that one as well...)
Yes, important to know what it's NOT. Paraphrased in clearly stated language with examples. Will now go into the lesson plan and see how you applied these ingredients.
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