LESSON PLANNING

 

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Whether you do in on a sticky note or an Excel spreadsheet, whether you have been teaching for 3 months or for 15 years, planning is at the heart of being an effective teacher.  Actually, planning is at the heart of being effective.

If you happen to work or have some experience in the world of business, you have probably heard of “The Rule of the 6 Ps.” The moment I read about it in the book Eat That Frog (a recommendation by my student Javier, the CEO of an international company) I made it my own and took it to heart:

Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance

How’s that for alliteration creating pneumonic value?

First and foremost, lesson planning allows us to set a clear lesson objective and to organize the activities around it (if necessary, with some kind of adaptation of our material). It also helps us time and articulate each part of the lesson and foresee possible areas of difficulty. But above all, we have this unique chance to deploy all of our creative potential.

 

LESSON OBJECTIVE

All lessons are different, even when your goal is simply to practice specific structures or semantic fields. The goal will depend not only on what happened on the previous lesson and how it will articulate with future ones, but also on the students. We know our students well, have an idea of what they enjoy the most and what kind of activities work well with them. Having a clear lesson objective will allow us to choose the best resources and to prepare ourselves.

 

ACTIVITIIES AND MATERIAL

Bear in mind that there is always the need for some kind of adaptation or improvement to suit our students’ needs.

You might use the best coursebook on Earth, but that shouldn’t restrict your choice. Although there is a reason why we have chosen a coursebook in particular, the perfect book simply doesn’t exist.

The same happens if you use a well-known website, radio or newspaper articles. You might probably need to adapt vocabulary, grammar, speed of the audio, and so on.

For lessons online, check whether the links work well and solve the exercises yourself in case there is a glitch. If your plan is to share your screen with your students, have a window ready exclusively with the exercises you will use.

Once you have the resources to be used, organize them along the recognition-production continuum, from simplest to toughest, and make sure they all contribute to the lesson objective. In that way, your students will progressively build a sense of achievement.

Always have 2 or 3 extra activities prepared. They might come in handy. Trust me.  

 

TIMING

Once you have determined the lesson objective and the material you will use, imagine yourself delivering the lesson and consider how much time would be necessary for students to accomplish each task. We all agree that we need to be flexible, but that should also be taken into account when designing our lesson.

When you are reading the rubrics and explaining what to do, don’t forget to tell students how much time they have. And if they need an extra minute, also time it. This will help them focus and will also prevent fast finishers from getting anxious.

But, of course, the actual pace of the lesson might be a bit different from the one we imagined, for several reasons. You probably considered extending discussion or checking an activity aloud lead to reviewing specific contents.

This is not the end of world. If you have time to spare, use the extra activities you have prepared. If you run out of time, consider assigning homework or recycling the tasks you didn’t work with into a new lesson.

 

CREATIVITY

We mentioned this earlier and we will cover this topic in future posts, but remember that the fact a coursebook or webpage presents a succession of activities doesn’t mean you have to do them all or in that order. If you feel you have to bridge some activities providing more meaningful practice, then do it.

Whether your students work well in teams or whether they love playing games, this is your opportunity to create highly motivating activities tailored for your class.  

While planning, timing and organizing activities for our lessons, we should never forget the objective and the participants. But neither should motivation and fun be left aside.

 Use lesson planning to your and your students’ advantage.

No matter our experience, lesson planning is a must if our goal is to create meaningful and fruitful lessons for everyone.

 

How do you plan? Do you follow a structure, use a template or app?