Lesson Planning

In preparation for starting my new position on Monday, I have been working on the lesson plans for my three classes for quite a few hours already. The sad thing is, I still probably have a couple more hours to go on it this weekend.

What most people, students and parents especially, don't realize is that lesson planning is a lot of work. Most people think that teachers show up to school, pick stuff to do 5 minutes before class, and go when class starts. Unfortunately, that is not the case. An entire class during my practicum experience at UMF was devoted to writing lesson plans. The ridiculous thing is that even though it was a bunch of work and took about an hour to plan each lesson with material in hand, we actually were only eased into the world that is lesson planning. If the material is already set up for you, to write the plan and make sure you are doing a good job explaining things takes an hour or so. If, like in my position right now, you have to come up with everything from scratch or pretty much near it, it takes at least two hours.

Another pitfall of lesson planning is the element of time. You can have the best lesson in the world planned but if you finish with 20+ minutes left in class, you're doomed. The caveat is that no matter how hard you plan, something will not go as planned. The students could be learning the material so well that you can blow right through it, or they will have no idea what's going on and you have to spend more time on the material. My high school Spanish teacher told me when I was volunteering after graduation that it is always better to overplan. The reason is that you can always cut something out, but if you're not prepared, you can't add an extra meaningful activity.

And that is another problem as well. You may have a great idea for a class activity, but if it doesn't reinforce past learning or introduce something new and meaningful to the class, then you can't really use it in the classroom. When I was student-teaching I went to a bullying/harassment seminar of some sort and the speaker had us do an activity where we used pipe cleaners to create a symbol of how we identified ourselves. I thought it was a great thing to use in the classroom, but my mentor teacher asked me how it was relevant to our unit. I realized that there was no way I could put it in context of the unit and that the activity would then cause more harm than good.

Planning lessons is an endeavor that most teachers hate to do. However, once you have planned lessons for a class, the good news is that rarely will you have to make new plans for that class again. Veteran teachers only need to worry a day or so in advance since the only preparation they need is to make sure that there are enough photocopies of assignments or other things of that nature. However, for someone like me who is new (planning-wise) to the classes I am teaching, I need about a week or two to make sure everything is set up so no foreseen problems arise the day of the lesson.

I personally can't wait until the day comes when I only have to follow my own plans instead of creating them as well.