Be honest! Do you always conduct your lessons according to the lesson plans that you have written and submitted to the principal? Do you belong to the side that thinks lesson planning is just a waste of time?
I was attending a webinar this week about lesson planning when the participants are asked those questions. To my surprise, almost most of the responses said that they don't always follow the lesson plan, even some teachers prefer the word 'never'. Well, I am happy, I am not the only one. :)
Lesson planning has always been a pain for most teachers. It takes so much time, but unfortunately not many teachers have the privilege of adequate time for lesson planning. Some will just do it only to 'tick the checklist' by submitting exactly the lesson plans they had years ago to the principal without giving much thought about the current situations in their classroom. "We are not following them anyway, so why bother making a new one each week?"
When you fail to plan, you plan to fail
Teachers, I don't know whether you still believe this saying or not, but think about this: You don't enter a class without having some plan in your mind, do you? Even if the plan is not written, the sequence of learning activities are already in your mind. Today, in this class, I am going to do this, this, and this. You already have your strategies, you just wish that there is a magic pen that can read your mind and write them nicely. I am sorry, but such a pen will be so expensive. :)
Okay, let's say you have all the time to write the detailed lesson plans by giving up your night sleeps or weekends, The fact that learning in the classroom can be unpredictable also make teachers required to make plan B's. And C's. Most of the time, on the spot. In many occasions, students give responses that we haven't prepared for them in our lesson plans. So we need to adjust. We are human, we are communicating, we are not robots.
Yes, the actual main problem is the current lesson plan and system does not fit your needs. It is generally thought that a good lesson plan is the one very detail. No, no, what is the meaning of a detailed lesson plan, if you don't have time to write it, let alone implement it in your classroom?
Simon Lind, the speaker for the webinar about lesson planning that I attended give an alternative called live lesson planning. In live planning, you adjust your plans according to what is going on during the lesson. As he mentioned, "A quality lesson is formative in nature and responsive to learning needs." That's why we cannot write a fixed lesson plan.
Live lesson plan is made in a sequence of lessons rather than a single meeting. Which means you can go slower or faster according to the condition of the learning in the classroom at that moment. Let's say you cannot finish a planned subtopic, then you can shift the plan for the next meeting. Or if your students are high pace, you can shift to next meeting's plan to be done on that day. You can also add live notes and put updates on the sequence, for example when students need more scaffolding. And everything is live, principal can check them real time, so you can also use it as evidence of learning.
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