Planning Individual Lessons – How Much, How Little?
Following an observation of a lesson I taught, the benefits of having more written planning of individual lessons, including clear steps and questions was discussed. This may reduce the need for teacher intervention in ‘trivial’ management issues and be useful for teacher reflection.
During my observed math lesson I spent a lot of time answering questions regarding what students needed to do, which indicated students weren’t 100% sure of their learning intentions/tasks. The feedback suggested that under more pressured circumstances planning that is too brief could lead to unnecessary management issues.
I feel that the difficulty is finding the appropriate balance between detailed written planning for single lessons and working from a detailed unit plan. Maybe I was concentrating, during this practicum, on aspects of executing lessons without the need to ‘read’ so much from a lesson plan as I had done on previous practicum. Having less planning though may contribute to a greater need for behaviour management during lesson execution? Also, as the ‘observer’ suggested, things may run ok for a time, but under more stressed circumstances I may need more to fall back on. Also, through our education assessment paper, much has been said about setting clear learning intentions and communicating with students how we will know when these have been achieved. Maybe this is part of the solution?
Maybe I can work on a simplified plan for individual lessons that takes from the unit plan and details concisely but clearly the intent and steps for the lesson as well as some focussed questions that may be used as part of the lesson? This may be more so the case for me as a beginning teacher, I’m not sure?
But in any case, having a clear idea of the purpose of each and every lesson (and communicating this clearly with students) is a key aspect of maximising purposeful learning.
