BACK TO SCHOOL
15 September 2018/ By Zineb DJOUB
Teachers’ tasks differ from preparing lessons and providing instructions for monitoring students’ learning, assessing and providing feedback. Still, most teachers’ focal concern is on lesson planning. Whether they are novice or experienced, their preoccupation is centred around making their planning more effective to achieve the course objectives.
So, what procedures and tips do you need to follow to attain such an essential aim?
Before discussing effective procedures and tips for lesson planning it is necessary to understand what this process involves and what makes it more effective.
Planning for lessons is a process that involves 3 stages:
- Pre-planning (before writing the plan): At this stage, you think about what to include in the lesson; selecting resources while considering the lesson objectives and students’ needs.
- Writing the plan: This is the stage of writing the lesson plan following a given template.
- Post-Planning: This concerns how you revise your plan and remember the main points of your plan. It also includes reviewing your plan and making the necessary decisions to refine it more.
Effective planning of lessons involves :
A well-crafted lesson plan
• This supports a lesson’s coherence and flow. Indeed, a well-crafted lesson plan is expected to clarify how your lesson needs to be managed, i.e., how you need to proceed from one lesson stage to another. Besides, the rationale for each activity is stressed and students can learn when there is a transition from one activity to the next.
• It also gives sufficient time and attention to the most important aspects of the lesson. So, every lesson contains some takeaway value, something that supports students to leave the class knowing they have moved forward in their learning.
• Such a plan includes engaging and thought-provoking tasks that meet students’ interests and needs in the course. Providing variety in a lesson and a series of lessons is a way of achieving this.
Adapting your plan during the lesson to suit the circ*mstances
• Effective planning also considers optional or alternative tasks to deal with the unexpected: students’ response to a particular task, a task may take longer or shorter than anticipated, a material runs short, etc. This makes you feel more secure since you have something to fall back on.
These are essential features of effective planning. To make this real in practice, here are some procedures and tips along the 3 stages that can support you make your planning of lessons more effective.
Effective planning of lessons: The process
1. Pre-planning
You might have collected a variety of resources related to your lessons and you feel excited to introduce them into your classes. But, because you have to be more selective, making the right choice may seem difficult in such cases. So, how to decide?
You need to select resources that are more relevant to your students. What is considered relevant is defined by the intended learning outcomes of the lesson, i.e., the skills or competencies students need to master at the end of a lesson or a unit and your students’ needs.
Students’ needs are learning gaps or what students have not developed yet. They can include those needs that relate to previous learning and are essential for attaining your learning outcomes. You can have students who are still struggling with certain basic skills which they were supposed to master to develop the targeted ones in your syllabus.
Because learning is meant to build upon students’ previous knowledge and skills, such types of needs should not be ignored.
Besides, there are current needs of students which concern what you are teaching. You can find out about them along the course through your interaction, observation, feedback and assessment.
To make your process of selection more structured here are the steps to follow :
- Check your resources and try to put them into categories within one file on your computer. You can categorize them according to your lesson’s stages (See below the lesson template).
- Read each unit’s objectives or learning outcomes and ask yourself: What do I need to do to support students achieve those objectives? What are their needs in relation to 1) what they already know and can do and 2) what they are learning now? Write your statements.
- Select what resources are relevant taking into account the learning objectives and your students’ needs.
- Decide whether each selection meets the following criteria and how you need to adapt it more to your context:
- Time: Think about how much time your selected resource takes. Do you have time for it? What you need to tune out in such a resource and whatto focus more on in case it takes time?
- Facilities: Check out whether you have the required facilities for your resources. If you intend, for instance, to use Skype to connect your students to other classes, do you have internet access? In case you have it, is the internet connection good?
- Variety in a sequence: Provide variety to sustain students’ motivation. If much of your recent teaching has involved the same type of tasks as your selected resource, you need to rethink your selection.
- Differentiation: Try to respond to your students’ differences (learning styles and needs). Does your selected resource allow for differentiation (path, pace, performance and task)?
You can use the following charts for each selected resource to clarify the reason why you opt for it and what decisions to make in order to adapt it more to your context (Click to view a larger image).
2. Writing the plan
It would be better to plan your lessons ahead so that you can have enough time to revise your plan. You can plan for the 5 days in advance and revise daily your plan.
You may think of planning a number of lessons to have time for revision. Yet, this is not advisable at the beginning of the year because you still do not know your students and thus you can not identify what works better and how for them.
The time you spend knowing your students can support you plan for more lessons in advance (mainly during the holidays). Yet, keep updating and mending your plan on the basis of students’ reactions to previous lessons.
To make your planning more effective, you need to have a template for your lesson plan. Here is My Lesson Plan an effective template that can show you clearly your lesson’s objectives and the process you need to go through to achieve them. You can also find instructions on how to write this plan.
3. Post-Planning
After writing your lesson plan, it is time to revise it to remember its stages. Reading your plan, reciting its content and keeping bullet points may help you achieve this.
But, I have found using process mapping or flowchart far more useful because it makes your plan more visible, thereby supporting you to understand the flow of your activities.
You can create your process mapping by hand (I prefer this because it helps you remember) or using software programmes such as Microsoft Word, and PowerPoint. In your process mapping, you include the activities or the stages of your lesson, and you describe briefly their objectives (Why ?) and the way you will introduce them to your students (How?). You can use symbols (T: teacher, SS: students, etc). Here is an example of process mapping I have created for one of my lessons of a pre-service teacher education programme).
Lesson planning is essential. It makes you more organized, thus knowing what to do next. However, do not over-plan because this will deprive you of exerting your creativity and flexibility in the classroom.
Consider your plan as the gateway to your students’ learning, indicating where you are going and what you are doing. Meanwhile, keep an eye on how students are reacting, get their feedback and collaborate with your colleagues to modify things. Your planning pocess can lead to your students’ progress.
