This article on lesson planning was a good guide for us future teachers to set up our classrooms and be organized. Without proper lesson planning, our students won't respect what we have to teach them. Kids can always tell when teachers are not prepared. I've taught Sunday school before and I never prepared. I was always stuck on what to do next-I never connected lessons well and I had trouble organizing the students to do what I wanted them to do because I would have to think about the next activity. They would chatter and play while I was thinking. It is not productive to do things impromptu.
There are a few important main points that this article suggests.
1. I think it's very important to figure out what we want to teach and figure out almost the exact times for each activity. Sometimes, we even need to go over the day's lesson ahead of time to make sure times will work out. During my TE labs last semester, I experienced the problem of always running out of time for my activities. I always underestimated the length of what I wanted to do or would add in extra things I thought of last minute.
2. We cannot make the majority of our lesson plans the night before we have to teach it. There is never enough time to come up with a meaningful lesson a day before. There are always things that you think of later, that you'll want to add in. Last minute planning is for fine-tuning-not big planning.
3. I think it's important to plan our lessons with consideration to our students' personalities and needs. We often forget to cater to our different students. For students that don't get as much out of your lesson, they will become a distraction or a wallflower that doesn't participate.
4. We need to prepare for the worst. Unexpected issues come up all the time-we need to recognize possible problems and have a solution or a "plan B". Otherwise, the classroom atmosphere will collapse and we will be left with confused, frustrated, or uninterested students.
5. Lastly, we need to do a variety of activities. I think our students will get bored if every single thing we do in class is a routine. I'm not saying we shouldn't have some sort of routine-but it just can't be the same thing every single class. We need to be innovative and strategic in our lessons.
Over time, if we do not plan our lessons in these four ways, our students will not be interested in our class and will eventually just go through the motions instead of actually learn what we want to teach them.
My task for you is this: If you have ever done a lesson plan and used it on other people, describe the troubles that you encountered and what you think you can do better, or describe the positive strategies you have found and why you think they work so well. If you have never done a lesson plan or have never used one on other people, then please blog about a time when you have experienced a lesson in class that made you really interested in what you were learning (language classes or other classes).
--Mallorie H.
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My senior year of High School I worked in an elementary school with a second grade class. The teacher let me come up with a lesson plan that focused on Native Americans as it was what they were currently learning for history. I found a few different work sheets in a book the teacher had and decided to use them. The first worksheet summarized Native Americans and had a few follow up questions about the summary they had just read. The second worksheet was a word search that involved the key words from the reading. My plan was to give them the first work sheet when they were done come see me and they could get the word search. When all the students were done we would discuss what they had read and make a Venn-diagram as a class comparing the Native Americans lives to theirs. Little did I know that would turn in to complete chaos.
ReplyDeleteI did not take in to account the students that had trouble reading and therefore would struggle reading the summary and going back to find the answers to the questions. The students that excelled at reading and comprehension questions were done in no time. The students that were done early distracted the students that were still working and by the time everyone was done the students that finished early did not have the attention span to focus on the Venn-diagram. If I had the chance to re-do that lesson plan and re-do that day, I would have done it completely different.
I would have had different students read out loud and have the whole class follow along and answer the comprehension question in groups. Then individually I would have had them do the word search and after a set amount of time I would bring the class back together to construct the Venn-diagram. That way they all would still focus and they would complete the important tasks. At the end of the day the word search is not as important as the information they are trying to get out of it. As well as there reading and comprehension skills.
This was a good task because after that day I never really reflected back to see what I could have done differently. Now looking back I realized that I definitely got a lot more out of that teaching experience than I had realized. I also enjoyed reading your summary.
Last year i worked at the refugee center and we had to do lesson plans. What i found that was difficult was thinking of the activties and making sure the students would like it. The first few lessons i came up with activities that i thought the students would really enjoy but then i would see them being bored. It took a little bit but then i figured out what they liked and i focused more on their interests to make sure they were interested in the materials and wanted to do the activity.
ReplyDeleteThis makes me think that maybe the first lesson you do allow time to get to know your students. The more you know about them and what they are interested the easier it is to plan a lesson that will excite them and make them want to learn. Also it gives you a chance to learn how they learn and which approach is best for your lesson.
Another thing that i thought was important was being flexiable. Many times i put the wrong amount of time for an activity. I either thought it would take longer or shorter and i learned that you always have to have a back up plan. Whether it be an extra activity or which thing you can cut shorter. I really learned that teaching is alot of improv and it takes thinking on your feet as you figure out how you want to do each day and what really happens.
When I taught in Korea last year, I was given a template lesson plan to follow but I had the freedom to invent activities to help the students learn the material. With my lesson plan, I found that the students preferred to have a structure so they knew what to expect. For example, they always knew that we would do reading first and do grammar second in one class period. However, the students also enjoyed having a variety of activities to keep things interesting (as the article suggests, and as Mallorie mentions in point 5).
ReplyDeleteIn one particular week of teaching, we would start with reading. I had a couple of different ways to teach reading. At times, I would have the students break up into teams and the best readers (those who made the fewest pronunciation mistakes) would get a prize. Other times, we would play "popcorn" and students could pick the next reader when they finished. For grammar, I would give an explicit explanation of the grammar concept for the day and then have students practice this concept by making sentences of their own-- the funnier, the better!
I think having a structured lesson is very important because the students are already nervous about speaking a new language and when they know what to expect, they will be able to "mentally prepare" themselves. However, I also think the activities to practice language need to be varied so the students (particularly elementary students) don't get bored.
I have never really had a chance to use a lesson that I planned out on actual students in a classroom, however having been a student for most of my life I have lots of opinions on what I think students respond to best in lesson plans. The most important thing in any lesson I think is student involvement. Straight lectures or having the students copy notes for an hour off an overhead, which I did the majority of high school is not very effective in my opinion. I do think lecture style lessons work as long as their are activities and student involvement/participation involved. An example of this would be how my TA for my TE301 class taught. She spent maybe 30 mins on a lecture from a power point then had us do lots of in class activities that re enforced what we were learning about. These were all really fun ways of re enforcing the learning and encouraging collaboration between students and getting everyone involved. This was one of my favorite classes I have ever taken at MSU and I got a tremendous amount out of it I think in part because of how the TA taught us and planned her lessons.
ReplyDeleteI also volunteered at the Refugee Development Center (like Karen mentioned; we were in the same class that semester and therefore volunteered together), and created lesson plans for an after-school program for ESL students. What was most difficult about this, in my opinion, was creating a lesson that incorporated the curriculum properly, but was also somewhat enjoyable for the students. Because it was an after-school program, one of the most important factors was keeping the students engaged with a "fun" activity as well as teaching them literacy. However, what we (the MSU students in my class) considered "fun," was completely relative, and sometimes disengaged the students instead of engaging them as planned.
ReplyDeleteBecause we wrote a new lesson plan each week, what I would change about the lesson plans is general. Having "back-up" plans are crucial, so if students seem incredibly disengaged with an activity you felt feasible, you can immediately change the direction of the lesson.
I have written and performed a lesson plan before, and I have found that the hardest part for me is getting the audiences attention. It seems like most of the time I rely on the students themselves, that they actually care enough about what I have to say to stop talking to each other and listen. This approach worked well for the fifth graders that I taught (most likely because I was a big person, and big people are interesting), but when I taught ninth graders, they needed a bit more of an attention graber. The best attention graber I had was a joke. The lesson was about homonyms, and the joke played on words. After I told the joke, not only did I have the classes attention (some even laughed), but I was also able to launch into the lesson by asking what made the joke funny. From there, I was able to move on and give the lesson. I have always found the introduction to the be the hardest part of the lesson, but I have found that a simple, quick beginning that doesn't directly relate to the class can often be one of the best ways to get students attention.
ReplyDeleteMy first experience with lesson planning was when I taught Sunday School lessons. On one hand it was easier because the content was provided for me, but as I soon found out it was very difficult to keep the kids engaged the whole time. The biggest lesson that I learned was definitely time management skills. I would come up with really great ideas or activities, and then realize that they took about two seconds and I had no backup plan. Obviously, the lesson learned was to have a few backup plans, or to do what might seem like "overplanning", but it would actually result in having enough material.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing that was difficult was making sure instructions were clear. Part of my problem was that I always spoke way too fast, but the other part was that it took a lot of practice to really get a feel for how much direction the kids needed (a lot!). I found that the more I could show, as opposed to tell, the more that they would be able to successfully complete the task. Even though I was working with very young kids, these seem like lessons that could be applied to any age group.
While I was studying abroad in Spain, I took daily language classes at a community center. The classes were organized by level (from a speaking/reading placement test), and so I was with students of relatively similar ability as me. Our teacher spent time teaching grammar & vocabulary each day, and the way he moved through the entire class period held our attention extremely well. He always began with grammar, whether introducing a new verb tense or part of speech, and would give detailed explanation on how to handle the technical aspects, such as conjugation or placement. (This wasn't the part that enthralled us.) He would have us do an assessment to gain an understanding of our comprehension before moving on. The great part of this lesson was how extensively he would explain context for usage. I had never been in a foreign language class that focused so heavily on actual usage of material. He would spend a good amount of time interacting with us in conversation, asking us how we would use our new grammar in practical ways. When we made suggestions, he would correct any errors in our usage. He would then give us some of the ways he used the language as examples. This exchange of suggestion and information kept all of us alert and interested in what he had to say, and we recieved and retained a LOT of information because of it!
ReplyDeleteI also volunteered at the Refugee Center last year for my TE class. It was very interesting to see the different types of students that come in and out of the center, and how each of their learning skills are different. I met a lot of different kids, but one in particular stood out to me like a sore thumb. His name was Rafael, and he hated school with a passion. He didn't care about anything other than listening to music, playing on the computer, or just in general being a pain. It took a lot of time and effort to make him understand the value of an education, but in the end I knew I had to figure out a way to do it. Students usually work better when you relate an idea to something they are interested in. As you may know, the kids at the refugee center have a very low reading and writing level for their age group. So, Rafael, at the age of ten, didn't really even understand what a noun or a verb was. What I had Rafael do was to look up the lyrics of an appropriate song that he enjoyed. I had him write out the lyrics and tell me what the grammar of the text meant to him, along with capturing what the nouns, verbs, and adverbs were. Throughout the course of the semester, I discovered Rafael's improvement in the willingness to learn. Every week, he brought in real questions he had about his homework, and I could sense the desire in wanting to actually learn the material. It is difficult to reach out to students who do not hold this desire to obtain an education. However, you need to make your students trust you, and keep them interested in material they can actually learn from AND enjoy too. Rafael progressed from analyzing song lyrics to analyzing actual texts. The positive strategies I had found have a lot to do with the interests of the learner, but also you cannot factor in only the fun aspect of learning, as the people above me have mentioned. I was very proud of my work by the end of the semester, and I know I contributed to his future success, which I believe he will indeed obtain.
ReplyDeleteI have never used a lesson plan on other students before, but as a student I have developed an opinion on what type of lesson plan seems to have grabbed my attention over the years. I am an active learning and in high school my teachers for the most part made it part of their daily routine to leave time in class for student interact with each other to grasp the concept being taught. I was always more interested when my teachers would incorporate current information into their lessons. It allowed me to relate to the ideas and form my own opinion and branch off from the original topic. For me, I understand information better when I can relate to it because in the end that is the information I will remember and be able to elaborate on. In college most of my classes have been lectures, which are boring and I end up having to do more work for because I can never retain all of the information presented in class. I find it more beneficial when my professors assign homework at the end of class that needs to be turned in because it forces me to go over what was taught in lecture and go through the notes I copied in class. Aside from my lectures in college I have taken a hand full of classes that I have really enjoyed. These for the most part are my smaller classes and the lesson plan incorporates both lecture and student involvement. The courses are usually for my major so the information relates to real life experiences which make the lecturing portion not so painful. When the teacher plans activities where there is student involvement it allows for the students to speak their opinion with people they can relate to and hear other student’s opinions. These are the courses I find most interesting and benefit from the most because I am involved and interested and learning from a variety of perspectives and experiences.
ReplyDeleteI have never had to create a lesson plan.. But I can remember one particular teacher I had in high school whose class I was never bored in. It was a French class and my teacher was.. a pretty weird guy. He was hilarious which always made the subject matter interesting. He did creative class activities like having barbie dolls act out scenarios.. But they were like, old beat up barbies with one leg and cut off hair. I remember one specific scenario he had the barbies act out where one doll was asking the other one to go rollerblading.. But the other doll couldn't because she had one leg.
ReplyDeleteSo I think creativity is something that should be considered when making a lesson plan.
He also did do a variety of activities such as skits, videos, singing songs..
Oh and on Valentine's Day we had to make valentines in French and then we put them in random lockers in the hall way - he always kept the class interesting. :D I know that I am probably going to use some of his ideas in my future classes.
My favorite thing though was when we were learning about animals.. He made an activity where we all went outside and we had to follow clues (in French of course) to find little stuffed animals he had hid outside - it was a safari! Hahahah.
And of course I have had teachers with awful lessons plans and very boring classes. I think boring lectures are really the worst, but I can understand doing them for the large classes we can have at MSU. What else are you supposed to do at that point? It's just very easy to get distracted with almost anything around you. You have to keep yourself engaged and most of the time the teacher isn't very interesting or doing anything really to keep your attention.
I strongly believe the better a lesson plan, the more the students will learn and the better teacher you will be. Obviously because the more you can keep the students interested, the more they will think about the lesson being taught and the more they will learn it. And I very much agree with planning it out well in advance. It is true that you come up with more and more ideas the more something is on your mind. And like Senta said, organization is one of the most important skills a teacher can have. :)
I have had the opportunity to teach a lesson in my field placement at Everett High School. It was a first year Japanese class, which is the language I want to teach so I knew it would be a good experience for me. My lesson plan was based on classroom commands so I wanted to show them the written expressions on the board first and the gestures following the command. I had written out the words they needed to know ahead of time and planned on putting them on the board. Little did I know that the words were way too small for the students to see. They were complaining about how they couldn't see it and weren't able to write it in their notebook. I knew this wasn't going to work so I decided to write them on the white board. I also had them do a simon says game and if they didn't do the right gesture to the command they would have to do a dance. This definitely didn't work out either because some students would dance on their own even if they didn't get something wrong. I knew it wasn't working out so I ignored the dancing and students eventually did too. This lesson definitely helped me think on the spot and make accomodations for the students. Another positive thing that came out of it was that I learned how to classroom manage. My mentor teacher told me I walked up to students that were talking while I was teaching the lesson which is a way to get students to stop talking. Overall it really helped me realize that all students have different needs and as teachers we need to accomodate to those needs.
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ReplyDeleteI have never written a lesson plan before, but I love the lesson plans that my current Japanese teachers create. My teachers always write an outline of our lessons on the board so that we know what we're covering, and there's always something interesting for aural, kinaesthetic, and visual learners. It amazes me how they fit so much information into 50 minutes without it becoming overwhelming. We always start out with a review, which is very helpful in Japanese since it is so easy to forget. Next, we learn new characters and create words with them. After that, we practice grammar with our partners or play a fun game. She keeps everyone focused and asks us to participate in order to understand the lesson more and learn from our mistakes.
ReplyDeleteI've learned a lot about lesson plans from my Japanese class because I plan on teaching either Japanese or English one day, and it helps to see how other people do it everyday. My teacher is always organized and has back-up lessons if something is wrong with the overhead projector. I really benefit from her lesson plans and knowledge because I am looking at the lesson from both, a teaching and a learning standpoint. You have to make sure to cater to the needs of every student in the classroom, and I think that she does a great job
Oh the joys of lesson planning. The first lesson plan that I did was actually for an ESL class. We had to do a 10 minute lesson on a grammatical aspect of English that we chose off of a list. It amazes me how much work goes into a 10 minute lesson and how quickly the time goes! There I was worrying about not having enough information for 10 minutes and I ended up having 3x too much!
ReplyDeleteI had three examples that I wanted to go over with the class to show the three types of that particular grammatical aspect and what I really should have done was just focus on one. I ended up using all of my time explaining these three types and had no room to do the couple activities that I had planned. In hindsight, it was better to have too much information instead of not enough. That would still be my advice today -plan an extra activity to do in case things do go faster than you expect.
I feel like figuring out the timing of a lesson plan is something that will come with experience. We as teachers need to be very flexible and willing to use our Plan B to make sure that we're giving our best to our students. The more we make lesson plans and use them in our teaching, the better we will get. :)
I had to do a mini-lesson for my TE 301 class. At the time, my internship was in a first grade classroom. My lesson focused on making self-to-text connections. I practiced this lesson with my study student, who was very distracted throughout the majority of the time I spent with him. I think that part of the problem, was that the book I had chose to use for the lesson didn't interest him. Looking back, I realize that the lesson would have worked much better if I had used a book that he was more interested in. From this mistake, I learned how important it is to get to know your students and learn what interests them. Finding something that really interests your students not only shows that you care about them but that you are trying to get them motivated and excited for learning. Paying attention to the little things kids say or do in class can really provide a lot of insight into what they like/don't like. It can be hard to pick up on these things because there are so many kids to watch, but it can really help with lesson planning. I also learned that it is important to anticipate time for questions in lesson plans, I was surprised at how many questions my study child had about my lesson and how much time it took up. I really liked when Jenson mentioned a flexible lesson. If I were to go back and re-teach this lesson, I wish that I had thought on my feet and switched to another activity that would have helped my study student understand it better.
ReplyDeleteIn TE 401 I had to teach a math lesson. I had to introduce the concept of money to a third grade class. My initial thought of teaching this lesson was that many of the students should have a handful of prior knowledge pertaining to money because it is used in everyday life, however I was wrong. The purpose of the first lesson was to teach students how to count different combinations of coins and bills.
ReplyDeleteWhen my CT teaches a math lesson, she teaches it very explicitly so that was how I taught my lesson. I used the math book as my guide. For the introduction I asked the students how much is a quarter worth, a dime, a penny, and so on. The majority of the students were able to answer these questions. As the lesson continued I realized quickly that many of the students became very confused. They had a hard time counting quarters, dimes, and nickels all in one combination because when counting different combinations of coins and bills you switch your counting between counting by tens, fives, and ones. I then began to struggle teaching the lesson because I didn’t know if I should totally scrap the math book and start teaching the students the basics of money (i.e. 100 pennies equals 1 dollar and practicing switch counting between fives and tens) or continue on. What I ended up doing was continuing on because at the time I didn’t know what else to do.
After the lesson I talked with my CT. She said overall the lesson did go well. The class was engaged and listening to what I was saying. I told her I didn’t know what to do when I could see that the majority of the students were not understanding the lesson. She said the more you teach and the more practice you get the better you will become with changing your lesson on your feet. This was encouraging advice.
Last year I would have to come up with lesson plans for an after school program for a writing workshop of 2nd graders. The first few weeks we would come up with an objective for the lesson, plan out an activity and have some sort of assignment for them to produce. We never really planned out exactly what we would say or do, how we would introduce the lesson and how we would bring it all together at the end of the lesson. Each week that went by, we sat down and discussed our problems of the lesson. Then we would work it out. We started to realize that there needs to be a specific lesson plan filled out and ready to put into action. There needs to be more than might be used, because situations may happen where a back up plan would be in order.
ReplyDeletePlanning is a huge part in making a lesson plan successful. We had to come up with the lesson a week in advance so there would be time for editing and rearranging things and of course, to get the materials together. Another key point of the article that I agree with is when it mentioned to aim the lesson at students personalities and needs. This makes good sense for my experience as well because for one week we had to teach the students about media through television and what media tells us about race and ethnicity stereotypes from that. We immediately started thinking about the kinds of things that the kids would see on T.V. We related it to them and showed them clips of shows that they would be interested in. This sparked their interest and they were able to relate to it well. As the article stated, it is also imperative to have a handful of different activities planned for the students so that they aren't doing the same types of lessons day after day. Keeping the students motivated and energetic to learn about the topic is important in order for them to learn well!
When I was taking TE 150, they had the students write a lesson plan and then teach the lesson. I created and designed a lesson plan to show a student the difference between upper case letters vs. lower case letters when writing. It was aimed for a student who was struggling with writing and the concept of size, relating to upper and lower case letters.
ReplyDeleteI designed a three lesson plan. I thought about the student that I would be teaching (a friend of mine). I thought about her learning style and her learning process. I then created three detailed lesson plans.
After each lesson that I taught, I then reflected on how it went. Then after the unit (three lessons), I reflected and evaluated on how the unit worked as a whole. The first thing that I noticed was that no matter how prepared I was, I always had new ideas when I was teaching the lessons. Although I had written detailed lessons and thought about how I would teach the student, when I actually began to teach ideas flew into my head.
The lessons I designed did not have a time limit per lesson but I was only able to meet with the student three times. I found that I would have liked to split my three lessons into six or so lessons. I over estimated the ability of the student. I felt that if I had more time and taught her slower, she would have better learned the material.
I think as I grow as a teacher I will be able to better estimate time and judge the ability of the students in my classroom. It is also important to understand that when teaching, ideas are always floating around in the mind. Then the question is what to do with the ideas. As a beginning teacher, I do not always have to change the lesson plan in the moment (to the ideas), but jot them down as I teach from the lesson plan and add them in later (or the next time I teach).
This has been so much fun reading about all of your experiences. The best part about being a teacher is that you always have more room for improvement and more things to learn.
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