In education, a well-worked out course or lesson plan will act as the core of teaching-learning process. It answers all the necessary questions and provides sufficient support to the teacher for seamless teaching. It may be the state/university/institution that decides what the students should learn but it falls on the teacher how the curriculum is taught, structured and how the students learn.
Instructional planning happens when a teacher is able to visualise and forecast the future of what, why, and how of the teaching-learning process. Planning is a roadmap to the instructor’s success. Whenever you make a plan, you know what you want to achieve. At the same time, it becomes clear what the future might hold and what your goals are. Your goals, which has been decided by planning, makes your decision making more efficient and more ‘to the point’.
How to plan for classrooms?
A successful lesson plan addresses and integrates these three key components:
- Objectives for student learning
- Teaching/learning activities
- Strategies to check student understanding.
The 3 Stages of lesson planning
*Outlining stage *Decision stage *Mapping stage
A few steps to walk you through the process…
Step 1. Create an outline of the curriculum you want to cover
Step 2. Create a list of desired outcomes
Step 3. Make another outline of the time — year/semester.
Step 4. Break curriculum down into small manageable pieces
Step 5. Take time to decide which takes what time
Step 6. Spread them across the timeline
Step 7. Gather teaching materials and supporting data
Step 8. Decide on how you are going to share course materials with students
Step 9. Decide how you are going to assess students, exams, assignments, projects, tasks etc.
Nobody gets it right for the first time, or the second time. So have techniques and measurement metrics to assess your plan. Here are some of the proven techniques and metrics to keep in close watch if you want to know the effectiveness of your plan.
- Student results
- See whether it provides any insights.
- Contributions into the teaching learning process
- Check for productivity
- How this plan helps the students
- Gathering feedback
Improvising plans on the way
The mark of a great teacher is the ability to infer what their students need. The education should ultimately be student centric. Along the curriculum, a teacher must consistently take feedback and perform course-correction in their plan. No matter how good your plan is, there can always be room for unexpected twists and turns in your way.
Be that if the result of your pupils are way lower than you expected, or if the time allocated for a module was cut short by some extracurricular activities; all kinds of things can go wrong. The more aware you are of your mission and purpose in teaching an area of content, the more you will be able to inspire your students to learn it. Your ability to articulate goals conveys to learners your sense of purpose, from which they can make a commitment to learn. This is why goals are important—they energize and motivate students to become actively engaged in and committed to the learning process. Goals help teachers articulate “Why am I teaching this?
By-Ms. Sahibjeet Kaur
TGT Social Science
Department- Humanities