Planning the Lesson

 

Walking into a class of new students sometimes can be a daunting experience, even for an experienced teacher. 
So all teachers use lesson plans to give the class direction. 
But the lesson plan has other benefits, both for us as teachers and our students.
Some of the reasons for planning lessons include:

• allowing the teacher to time the individual components
•  providing for a logical progression of activities 
•  showing students that some time has gone into preparing their lesson
•  enabling the teacher to see whether there is a balance of activities and skills within the lesson 

Planning will take a lot of time for the new teacher, initially perhaps as much time to plan one lesson as the lesson itself. But this time is worth investing. Tried and tested lesson plans can be repeated with other classes and adapted to suit other levels. Also there is nothing like the feeling of a good lesson when students are learning in a positive atmosphere that you have helped to create. This is unlikely to happen by chance. 

The purpose of a lesson plan is to provide us with a lesson framework. Our lesson will need to include a variety of components, because students will quickly get bored if we just do one thing (30 minutes of dictation is not very inspiring), and the plan helps us order these components. 
This order should be logical and enable us to see a link between each of the components, which leads us to achieve the aim of the lesson plan. 

We need to consider four elements in our planning which are listed in the boxes below:
  

1. Lesson Aim What do we want to achieve in this lesson?

 2. The Class How many students, ages, sexes, group dynamics etc.

3. How to achieve the lesson aim Which combination of activities will be successful?

 4. The unexpected What will we do if something goes wrong?

Also you might find useful