Lesson Plans – The Keys to Teacher Success - Lesson One
Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? If you do, I hope that the Lord gives you the strength and wisdom to see them all fulfilled! Resolutions are plans that we wish to fulfill during the year.
As a teacher, you will be required to make resolutions as well. For each lesson, you should plan. At the beginning of your career, you will be required to write quite a bit of lesson plans to be submitted to your team leader or administrator. But planning is something that every teacher should do regularly until the end of their teaching career.
A lesson plan is like a roadmap that will help you as a teacher to set realistic goals for your students and to have a plan detailing how you will achieve those goals in the time you have allocated for the lesson. During this lesson, we will review the basic parts of a lesson plan. In the lessons that follow, we will discuss each section. By the end of the unit, you should be able to develop detailed lesson plans in preparation for the five tutoring sessions that you are required to complete for your teacher cadet programme this semester.
Lesson Plan Format:
The Bahamas Department of Education recommends a standard format for all detailed lesson plans in public primary, secondary and all age schools. If you are a cadet at an independent school, you may find that the lesson plan requirements are slightly different. Additionally, in public schools, there are often slight variations based on the subject matter that is being taught. Some subjects require additional elements of the lesson. Find out from your mentor teacher if there are specific lesson plan requirements for the subject that you wish to teach.
Let’s take a look at the detailed lesson plan format recommended by the Department of Education:
1. Summary Information:
First, your lesson plan should give the following summary information:
2. Instructional Resources
After the summary information is included, the Department detailed lesson plan guide tells us that the next bit of information to be included is instructional resources. This is a detailed list of all materials needed by you, the teacher and the students in order for the lesson to be executed successfully. You should include what we traditionally consider materials – such as markers for the board, books, reference materials such as dictionaries and textbooks. Be sure to also include things like technology aids – the projector, speakers, screens, power point slides, hyperlinks, charts, manipulatives (those things that students can touch and move around) and anything else that the activities you will outline will need.
3. Objectives:
After you have listed your instructional resources, you should list the objectives of your lesson. We’ll have a separate session on lesson objectives next week. For now, just remember that your objectives give the destination of the lesson. They tell you the point of all the activities and resources that you will do and use.
4. Major Content:
After the objectives, list the major content. This is a summary of the body of information or skills that the students should know and have when they leave the lesson.
5. Prior Knowledge
You should also list the prior knowledge that the students are expected to know in order to be able to understand what you are teaching in this lesson.
6. Lesson Introduction:
What comes next is a play by play of the lesson itself.
You would plan your introduction – something that would develop or capture the interest of your students and get them ready for the information and activities to come.
7. Development:
Then, you would plan how you want your lesson to develop. Give a step by step outline of what you will do as teacher, and how you expect the students to respond. This section gives details about the strategies that you will use to develop students’ knowledge and skills.
8. Lesson Conclusion:
After you have give an outline of your lesson development, you would list your lesson conclusion – this is where you plan how you would bring the lesson to a close and how key points of the lesson will be reviewed.
9. Assessment:
Finally, your lesson plan should end with details about assessment tools that you will use to determine how well the students met the objectives of the lesson.
10. Homework:
You should also plan for any homework assignments that was given to help students to extend their learning.
11. Lesson Evaluation:
After the lesson is taught, you would come back to this lesson plan and evaluate the lesson in the lesson evaluation section. Your lesson evaluation gives you an opportunity to reflect on what you planned and how well the lesson went. You reflect on what worked well and what didn’t work as well as you had imagined and gives an idea of what you could have done differently to make the lesson more effective. If you say in your lesson evaluation that the lesson was successful and all objectives were met, how do you prove that? What do the results of your assessment say? What percentage of the class, according to your assessment results, truly understand the information and could demonstrate that understanding?
12. Signatures:
Your lesson plan is first signed by you, the teacher, after you have completed the evaluation, then given to your supervisor, who could be the subject coordinator, team leader or grade level leader. The lesson plan is then sent to administration for their comments and signature before being returned to you.
That is lesson planning. At first, lesson plans can be time consuming as you become comfortable with your teaching style and with your students. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes. When I first planned my lessons, thinking through all the different parts took the better part of an hour per class before the lesson and another hour after the lesson working on the evaluation. But now, I can spend about 15 minutes working through a complete lesson plan before evaluation and another ten to fifteen minutes with my evaluation. Sometimes, creating worksheets, workbooks, webquests, and other activities may take some time, but I have a network of teachers with whom I share resources that I have created and who share resources with me. This has made it so much easier in my planning.
Lesson planning is an essential part of teaching. It’s a roadmap that helps you to think about what your students need and prepare effectively for them. At some point in your teaching, you will no longer be required to submit a detailed lesson plan every week to your supervisor. But let me encourage you to not let that lull you into a fall sense of superiority. All the best teachers plan. They never stop planning. It is how they grow as a practitioner and how they improve their practice. If your goal is to be the best teacher you can be, you want to become the best planner you can be as well.
Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? If you do, I hope that the Lord gives you the strength and wisdom to see them all fulfilled! Resolutions are plans that we wish to fulfill during the year.
As a teacher, you will be required to make resolutions as well. For each lesson, you should plan. At the beginning of your career, you will be required to write quite a bit of lesson plans to be submitted to your team leader or administrator. But planning is something that every teacher should do regularly until the end of their teaching career.
A lesson plan is like a roadmap that will help you as a teacher to set realistic goals for your students and to have a plan detailing how you will achieve those goals in the time you have allocated for the lesson. During this lesson, we will review the basic parts of a lesson plan. In the lessons that follow, we will discuss each section. By the end of the unit, you should be able to develop detailed lesson plans in preparation for the five tutoring sessions that you are required to complete for your teacher cadet programme this semester.
Lesson Plan Format:
The Bahamas Department of Education recommends a standard format for all detailed lesson plans in public primary, secondary and all age schools. If you are a cadet at an independent school, you may find that the lesson plan requirements are slightly different. Additionally, in public schools, there are often slight variations based on the subject matter that is being taught. Some subjects require additional elements of the lesson. Find out from your mentor teacher if there are specific lesson plan requirements for the subject that you wish to teach.
Let’s take a look at the detailed lesson plan format recommended by the Department of Education:
1. Summary Information:
First, your lesson plan should give the following summary information:
- The Department you are a part of at your school
- Your subject
- The date of the lesson
- The topic being covered
- The duration of the lesson
- The class being taught
- The lesson number – that is, if you are teaching a series of lessons on the present tense, for example, is this lesson 1, lesson 2, lesson 3?
- The number of students you anticipate will be attending the class
- The ability Range of the students – whether they are low, average, high or mixed abilities represented in the class.
2. Instructional Resources
After the summary information is included, the Department detailed lesson plan guide tells us that the next bit of information to be included is instructional resources. This is a detailed list of all materials needed by you, the teacher and the students in order for the lesson to be executed successfully. You should include what we traditionally consider materials – such as markers for the board, books, reference materials such as dictionaries and textbooks. Be sure to also include things like technology aids – the projector, speakers, screens, power point slides, hyperlinks, charts, manipulatives (those things that students can touch and move around) and anything else that the activities you will outline will need.
3. Objectives:
After you have listed your instructional resources, you should list the objectives of your lesson. We’ll have a separate session on lesson objectives next week. For now, just remember that your objectives give the destination of the lesson. They tell you the point of all the activities and resources that you will do and use.
4. Major Content:
After the objectives, list the major content. This is a summary of the body of information or skills that the students should know and have when they leave the lesson.
5. Prior Knowledge
You should also list the prior knowledge that the students are expected to know in order to be able to understand what you are teaching in this lesson.
6. Lesson Introduction:
What comes next is a play by play of the lesson itself.
You would plan your introduction – something that would develop or capture the interest of your students and get them ready for the information and activities to come.
7. Development:
Then, you would plan how you want your lesson to develop. Give a step by step outline of what you will do as teacher, and how you expect the students to respond. This section gives details about the strategies that you will use to develop students’ knowledge and skills.
8. Lesson Conclusion:
After you have give an outline of your lesson development, you would list your lesson conclusion – this is where you plan how you would bring the lesson to a close and how key points of the lesson will be reviewed.
9. Assessment:
Finally, your lesson plan should end with details about assessment tools that you will use to determine how well the students met the objectives of the lesson.
10. Homework:
You should also plan for any homework assignments that was given to help students to extend their learning.
11. Lesson Evaluation:
After the lesson is taught, you would come back to this lesson plan and evaluate the lesson in the lesson evaluation section. Your lesson evaluation gives you an opportunity to reflect on what you planned and how well the lesson went. You reflect on what worked well and what didn’t work as well as you had imagined and gives an idea of what you could have done differently to make the lesson more effective. If you say in your lesson evaluation that the lesson was successful and all objectives were met, how do you prove that? What do the results of your assessment say? What percentage of the class, according to your assessment results, truly understand the information and could demonstrate that understanding?
12. Signatures:
Your lesson plan is first signed by you, the teacher, after you have completed the evaluation, then given to your supervisor, who could be the subject coordinator, team leader or grade level leader. The lesson plan is then sent to administration for their comments and signature before being returned to you.
That is lesson planning. At first, lesson plans can be time consuming as you become comfortable with your teaching style and with your students. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes. When I first planned my lessons, thinking through all the different parts took the better part of an hour per class before the lesson and another hour after the lesson working on the evaluation. But now, I can spend about 15 minutes working through a complete lesson plan before evaluation and another ten to fifteen minutes with my evaluation. Sometimes, creating worksheets, workbooks, webquests, and other activities may take some time, but I have a network of teachers with whom I share resources that I have created and who share resources with me. This has made it so much easier in my planning.
Lesson planning is an essential part of teaching. It’s a roadmap that helps you to think about what your students need and prepare effectively for them. At some point in your teaching, you will no longer be required to submit a detailed lesson plan every week to your supervisor. But let me encourage you to not let that lull you into a fall sense of superiority. All the best teachers plan. They never stop planning. It is how they grow as a practitioner and how they improve their practice. If your goal is to be the best teacher you can be, you want to become the best planner you can be as well.