If you’re like most teachers, you think lesson plans are pains. It may possibly be the worst part of the job for you. You have to spend time—perhaps hours even—planning every minute of every class in a week, month, or even the entire semester or year, and you have to send all that to your administrator for review. “Why do I need to plan?” you might ask. “If I know what I’m going to do, and if I always give a good class, why do I need to write everything down?”
Whether you are required to send lesson plans to your boss or not, there are several compelling reasons why keeping some kind of written plan is a very good idea. Let’s look at a few of them.
To remember what you’re doing.
You’re in the middle of an exciting activity—perhaps a game of some kind—and you’re excited and having fun with your students. As the activity calms down, you start to think about what you’re going to do next… and you can’t remember! On the outside you’re all smiles, but on the inside you’re sweating bullets. You have 15 minutes left, and you can’t remember what the last activity was. Now, you have two options: Stretch the current game out for the rest of the class, risking that it will become boring to the students and maybe ruin all the good you’ve accomplished so far; or, you can come up with a follow-up task on the fly and hope it works out for the best.
A great reason to have a written plan is to help you remember what you should be doing next. A quick glance to jog your memory, and you can finish the class in the way you’ve prepared.
To remember why you’re doing it.
One excellent feature of a written lesson plan is the aim or objective recorded clearly at the top of the paper. This major aim is the purpose of your class or lesson. Your objective may read like this, “By the end of this class, my students will be able to ask the time in English and understand the answer.” This aim helps you keep the whole class structured and focused. Additionally, if each activity has an aim or objective, you can keep yourself “on topic” as it were. The written objectives for both the class and each activity help you measure if your class was truly meaningful for your students or not.
To remember how long you have to do it.
Imagine you are teaching a class, and you’re only halfway through the list of activities you had in mind for the day, and you suddenly realize that you have only 5 minutes left before the finishing bell! Has that ever happened to you? With a lesson plan in front of you that has time guidelines for each activity you can better measure your schedule and not run out of time or be left with too much of it.
To prepare a sub in case of emergency.
If can be very easy to say that you’ll never wake up too sick to teach, but we all know that the day will come when we need a last minute substitute. If you have to call a sub and explain over the phone what pages of the textbook to consider with the students, you’re really running a risk. If you have a full lesson plan, a quick click in your email can instantly prepare a sub to teach the class similarly to the way you would. Which would you prefer: allow the sub to do what he or she wants, and you have to reteach most of the lesson later; or, would you rather have a complete lesson plan ready to prepare the sub to teach the class well the first time?
To measure your progress as a teacher.
One last great reason to have a written plan of each class is for your professional development. Lesson plans can be saved after the class for future reference. Not only might you have to teach the same class again (in which case, your preparation time would be greatly reduced with a previous plan), but you may want to look back over a semester and reflect on what kinds of activities you’ve done, and which ones worked well. Sitting down at the end of each class to take a few reflective notes can really come in handy later, and this practice will certainly make you a much better teacher in the long run.
There are many great reasons for you to keep lesson plans for your classes. We shouldn’t think of planning as an annoying requirement from the administrator, but as a tool that can help us aspire to being and become master teachers.
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