A lesson plan by its simplest definition is a plan or a map that identifies all that the students need to learn within any given period and how the teacher plans to go about it. If you are a teacher yourself, you may find the following suggestions from experienced teachers to be quite useful.
Separate the Three Facets of Lesson Planning
The lesson planning process should be separated into three parts first. These would be:
- Objective: Identifying, including, and defining the lesson objectives which must be completed within the given time.
- Action: Defining steps that the teacher will take to complete those objectives.
- Verification: Defining steps that the teacher will take to verify whether the students did truly learn anything or not.
The key is to complete each step of the three-step process chronologically and separately. It means that you should only start to plan on possible strategies to complete the objectives after you have identified them. Similarly, the verification strategies should only be devised after you have completed planning the steps.
This order ensures relevance while also ensuring that each stage is comprehensive and detailed in its planning. As for the templates, you can browse through, customize, download, and then print out free lesson plans and worksheets from Studentreasures Publishing.
Focus on Student Engagement
A bit of personalization in lesson planning is always an essential component, but it should be personalized in line with the students in your class and not the teacher. It’s the delivery that displays the teacher’s own abilities, but the personalization should always be based on your present students. Some classes can focus on the interests of a few students, while others can be centered around a topic that is relevant to some of them. Engagement is the key here and focusing on any topic of interest will almost always work!
As a teacher, you can only do so much to keep students interested in subjects that they may not find interesting, but an effort must still be made. A very small portion of your students will succeed with or without any attention at all, while most of them will need your help, attention, and guidance in varying degrees. There may still be another small group or perhaps even one student in the class who will not be able to succeed without special attention and care from their teachers. Identify who they are and see if there isn’t a way for you to make the lessons easier and more interesting for them.
Dedicate Time Exclusively Towards Student Communication
Anyone who has ever been a schoolteacher knows that two-way communication does not work in the same way in school as it does in a professional environment. Therefore, it is better to dedicate a portion of your daily time exclusively for student communications, rather than allowing too many disruptions in the middle of your classes.
When you specify and dedicate time exclusively to hear from and talk to students about the day’s lesson, each communication session will turn out to be more productive. Relevant questions should still be allowed mid-lesson of course, but lesson time should always remain focused on the planned lesson. In absence of control, it isn’t unlikely for both teachers and students to fall well behind their expected progress.