How to Plan a Lesson

pic source: TeachHUB

Lesson is a unified set of activities that covers a period of classroom time. The essential elements of a lesson plan are:

ü  Goal(s)

The overall purpose that is expected to be accomplished at the end of the class.

ü  Objectives

Spesific purpose that that students will accomplished. It is usually in the form of stating what students will do. There are two objectives, terminal and enabling. Terminal is final learning outcome that needs to be measured and evaluated, while enabling is steps that lead to terminal.

ü  Material and Equipment

Good planning includes knowing what you need to take with you. A good teacher must have material and euipment prepared beforehand.

ü  Procedures

A very general guideline for a lesson plan is to do warming up or opening first, a set of activity, then closing.

ü  Evaluation

Evaluation is needed to determine whether the objectives have been accomplished or not. Teacher needs to assess the success of students and making adjusment for next lesson plan based on evaluation.

ü  Extra-Class Work

Students need to do some learning beyond class hour to reinforce the knowledge given by teacher.

Guidelines for Lesson Planning

a)      How to begin planning:

1)      Familiarize yourself with the curriculum

2)      Determine the purpose and topic of lesson

3)      Make terminal objectives for the lesson

4)      Create an exercise based on the objective

5)      Draft an outline of what the lesson will look like

6)      Plan step-by-step procedure and state enabling objective

b)      Variety, Sequencing, Pacing, and Timing

1)      Is there sufficient variety in techniques to keep the lesson interesting?

2)      Are the activities sequenced logically?

3)      Is the lesson paced adequately?

4)      Is it appropriately timed?

c)      Gauging Difficulty

Put yourself in your students’ shoe and anticipate their problem areas. Figure out whether a certain task, technique, or lesson elements will be too easy or too difficult for them.

d)     Individual Difference

Put it in mind that students are individuals with their own traits. A teacher should reach out to every students be it low achiever, high achiever, or average achiever. Some steps to account for individual difference are:

1)      Design techniques that have difficult and easy aspects

2)      Solicit responses for those below the norm and harden items for those above the norm

3)      Use judicious selection

4)      Use small group and pair work time

e)      Student and Teacher Talk

Give balance between student talk and teacher talk. A teacher shouldn’t dominate and not giving enough time and space for student to talk.

f)       Adapting to an Established Curriculum

Teacher’s job is to take current curriculum into account and then adjust is to students, their need, and goal. However, in some cases, there is a textbook driven curriculum where it simply tells teacher to teach everything in a text book. If that so, it is wiser to devise your own curriculum. There are two factors that contribute to curriculum planning:

1)      Learner factors: students’ proficiency level, age, need

2)      Institutional factors: practical constraints and supporting material

g)      Classroom Lesson “Notes”

What kind of notes that you will carry into the classroom? Too much details will slow you down and give no room for spontaneity. However, too short details may give you confusion.