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The focus of chapter four is on identifying the skills, that students will need to (already) know, in order to accomplish the given goal. There may be several skills that students need to know, or there may be a limited amount of skills that the student already knows. Regardless, knowing what skills are necessary in order to accomplish the goal is a key factor in having a successful lesson. The graphic, at right, shows the system for analyzing the subordinate skills, or as we call in education - necessary background knowledge. Each of the steps of creating a lesson, or unit of instruction, is accompanied by an easy to follow graphic that makes the analysis far easier than any other format I've tried to follow. Using students' common mistakes to analyze the subordinate skills is a technique that was new in this chapter, " The kinds of misunderstandings that students might have indicate the understandings, also known as skills, that they must have (page 65)." After teaching a concept, teachers can list the skills that students struggled with, year after year the lesson becomes more honed based on this subordinate skill analysis. Since so much of math is procedural, it is likely that most of my analysis will look like the graphic below - full of different subsets of skills for each of the steps I have outlined in my goal analysis. It is definitely starting to look more like a complex system, but the chunking of the information has proven helpful in the construction of new lessons and units of instruction. It won't be easy to conduct this analysis on every lesson, every time, but a start anywhere, inherently makes you look at all future lessons and units in a different manner.