Top Strategies for Effective Lesson Planning

Let’s talk about lesson planning. For many teachers, the hardest part of their job is not writing or delivering lessons. It’s planning them. You may have an idea for a new unit, but how do you make sure it’s effective? You could try to wing it and hope for the best, but that leads to many wasted hours and wasted resources—not to mention frustrated students and disappointed parents. Instead of taking this approach, consider these five strategies for planning effective lessons:

Establish a Purpose

Establishing a purpose for your lesson plan is the first step in the process. The purpose of a lesson plan is to help you achieve your goals, so it’s important that you clearly and specifically state what those goals are.

The best way to do this is by stating your purpose in terms of what students will learn during the lesson. For example: “The purpose of this lesson is for students ____ , so they will be able to ____ .”

Develop a Plan

• Make a plan. The best way to ensure that your lessons are effective and engaging is to develop a lesson plan that includes all of the details of what you will teach and how you will teach it, as well as information on how students should prepare for the lesson, what assessments they need to complete at various points during or after the lesson, and so on.
• Share your plan with others who work closely with you (i.e., colleagues or mentors). This can help ensure that everyone is on board with what’s being taught in class–and if there are any potential problems with what’s being covered or how it’s being covered, those issues can be addressed before they become problems for students!

Refine the Focus for Each Lesson

The first step in effective lesson planning is to refine your focus for each lesson. You want to make sure you’re covering the right material and not trying to do too much at once. For instance, if you have a math class and want them learning about fractions, don’t try covering decimals as well–that’s too much information for one lesson! Your students won’t be able to remember all those concepts at once. Instead, focus on just one topic and go into depth with it: focus on the most important concepts first before moving onto other parts of their learning process (e.g., making sure everyone understands how fractions work).

Delegate Timely Tasks to Others for Effective Lesson Planning

• Use a team approach to planning. Even if you’re the only teacher in your classroom, you can still take advantage of the benefits of having a co-planner by delegating certain tasks with another teacher or administrator. For example, if one person is better at creating lesson plans than the other, let them handle that part while you focus on lesson evaluations and grading.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help from others (and don’t be afraid not know everything). Teachers are often hesitant about asking for help because they think it will make them look incompetent or like they don’t know what they’re doing; however, this isn’t true at all! If anything else, asking questions shows students that teachers aren’t perfect and are willing to learn new things too–which can lead into great conversations later down the line when students start learning more advanced concepts in their subjects.”

Your students will benefit from lesson planning that is well thought out and properly implemented.

• Lesson planning is a process, not an event. If you think of your lesson plan as one event, you’ll be disappointed when it ends. Instead, think of your lesson plan as a series of events that are designed to help guide both yourself and your students through the learning process.
• Plan before you teach so that when things go wrong (and they will), you have a backup plan in place. Even if everything goes according to plan, having this extra layer of organization will make it easier for everyone involved when it comes time for assessment or evaluation later on down the road!
• It’s important to think about future lessons as well–if there was anything missing from this week’s presentation? What did last week’s discussion accomplish? How could next semester’s syllabus improve upon what we’ve already done here at Such-And-Such High School?

Lesson Planning – The Conclusion

You can be a great teacher without having the most elaborate lesson plans in the world. But if you want to do more than just get through your lessons and make sure that your students don’t fall asleep, then it’s important that you take time to plan and prepare for each class session. By putting some thought into what you’re going to teach and how you’re going to teach it, as well as delegating other tasks like grading assignments or collecting homework assignments from absent students so they don’t get behind on their work while still keeping up with their own workloads.

 

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