Over
the years of teaching EXCEL, I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of lesson plans.
Some have been great, but others have needed lots of improvement. Why is it so
important to have a good lesson plan form that you use regularly? Often
teachers forget to think about basic structural parts of their lesson, and as a
result, their teaching is not very successful. Are they using many different
kinds of groupings in their lesson? What materials do they need to remember to
bring? Does the lesson involve different skills? Also, I have seen some lesson plans that were
great, but they were so messy that the teacher couldn’t follow them. After
seeing teachers have these problems time and time again, I realized how helpful
a good lesson plan form could be. I realized that all teachers have different
likes and dislikes about how to write their lesson plans, but I think that if
you look carefully at this form you will find ways to adapt it for yourself.
The
top part of the lesson plan includes basic information so that you can know
what book and unit the lesson is for just by glancing at it. It is also helpful
to know the page number so that you, and your student, can get to the right
spot in your book without wasting your precious class time. Also included in
the top part of your lesson are objectives.
Objectives
are extremely important. There is a saying that goes, “If you aim at nothing,
you will hit nothing.” It means that if you have no purpose in mind when you
plan your lesson, if you have nothing specific that you are trying to achieve,
then you will simply waste time and not accomplish anything in your class.
Objectives must be measurable. You cannot simply say that in this lesson
students will learn about clothing—your objective must be something that you
can actually check. For example, “By the end of this lesson students will be
able to correctly describe what they are wearing” or “By the end of this
lesson, students will be able to correctly identify items of clothing.” For both
of the example objectives, I could design an activity that would let me know if
I met the objectives of the lesson or not.
The
warm-up or review part of a lesson should be interesting, but should make good
use of your class time. It is best to use this short time at the start of class
to do a fun review activity. Remember, if you don’t review previously taught
information, your students will forget it. This could also be a time to grab
your students’ attention by reading a story, showing pictures, or singing a
song that relates to what you will be teaching in this lesson.
Most of you have heard of
three-stage lesson plans. I hope that you all use them! The three stages are
presentation, practice, and communication. The presentation part of your lesson
is when you introduce the new vocabulary or grammar that your students will
study that day. It should be interesting, but understandable. Sometimes you may
need to do a lot of explaining, other times you can use pictures, miming, and
timelines to teach the topic.
The
second main part of your lesson is practice. This is a time for your students
to use what you’ve taught them in a structured way so that they become more
familiar with the material, and gain confidence with it. Dialogues are a good
example of a practice activity.
The
third part of your lesson should be communication. This is when your students
get to use what you’ve taught them to communicate new and unknown information
to each other. If the information isn’t new, then it isn’t real communication.
Instead of dialogues, you could use role-plays for a communicative activity and
have your students make up their own words.
In the form, for
each of the parts of a lesson, there is a section for you to write brief
explanations of what you and your students will do. Next there is a column to write what skills
you have your students use (speaking, listening, reading, writing). Remember
that if students don’t have any practice activities for a certain skill, you can’t
expect them to be able to communicate using that skill. There is a grouping
column in which you can keep track of what groupings you use (pairs, whole
class, individual, groups) and what structures you use. For example, you do a
pairs activity and used double-lines as the structure for it. Materials is a
very important column. There have been countless times when teachers have
planned excellent activities but have forgotten the necessary cassette, scotch
tape, drawing pencils, or other necessary items and so they couldn’t use the
activity. Finally, when you are planning your lesson, it is important for you
to think about the amount of time that each activity will take.
At the end of
the lesson, you need to have a way of evaluating if your students met your
lesson’s objectives or not. Also, you should think about what homework you want
to give to your students before you get to class, not at the end of the lesson.
Finally, one of the most important things you can do to improve your teaching
is to think about your lesson afterwards, and evaluate what was good, what
needs to be improved, and how would you alter the lesson if you taught it
again. You should think about these things and write them down right away
because if you wait, you might forget some great ideas.
Sarah Hardin is currently an EXCEL
supervisor for students in Dornod and Tov aimags as well as a teacher at Zuunmod College