Not every lesson will go according to plan but you as a new teacher, can ensure your lessons will go as smoothly as you can using this simple to use checklist.
Print out the checklist below and examine it in light of your lesson. Did your lesson plan includes these items? Can you add any more items to the list?
- Objectives for the lesson plan are written. The objectives plain and simple, are your goals or where you want to take your students - let's say from point X to point Y. Objectives can [and should] be broken down. An example illustrating this point is: Teaching a Reading Comprehension on Endangered Animals with the specifics being skimming, scanning and making inferences.
- Topic of the lesson
- Textbook and class are mentioned
- Classroom materials: Will you be needing to xerox or order pre-planned classroom materials?
- Warm up activity and closure
- Timing for each activity: Timing should be thought out beforehand but flexibility should be exercised for time extensions. In time this will become much more natural but for now, keep to writing it down.
- Strategies and ways for dealing with weak or strong students: Heterogeneous class makeup necessitates further thinking on how to address the needs of a weaker or stronger group of students.
- There is a mini-project or performance task (for the unit)
- Enabling skills that are need for the project or performance task
Projects of a varying nature requires different enabling skills. For example, you should not make attempts to conduct a research project in class if your students still need practice with summarizing lengthy research articles.
Other Elements for Consideration
- Different teaching techniques (groups, pairs, frontal)
- feedback for students' work
- Assessment for which activities and tasks and what kind of assessment
- Sequencing and transitions between different activities.
- Homework: What and how to check?
- Backup plan or extra activity - this is very important; otherwise known as a SOS kit!
For every listed element, try to reflect on its degree of variety. Experiment with a week's lesson for a given class. Did you vary your methods and techniques?
Lesson planning is almost always a trial and error based process. This implies that students might cause discipline problems if they are simply expected to do a worksheet without any prior introduction to the subject or topic. They might also loose attention when a teacher tends to lean towards the lecturing side by spilling out all of the lesson plan objectives all at once without any contextualization.
In short, a new teacher should try and aim for less teacher dominated talk and be open to using varied teaching techniques that would allow for a variety of student interaction.
Further Reading: Lesson Plans: Some Tips
