TEFL Lesson planning.

What will get in your mind if somebody will tell you about teaching? Isn?t it lesson planning? Most of the teachers despise this job, why? Well, the hardwork of thinking in creating your own materials. A lot of teachers are struggling in this aspect of the teaching side especially inexperienced.

Lesson planning is a skill that is skill that is learned in much the same way as other skills. This skill aid the teaching learning process easy. Obviously, it takes a lot of thinking and practice to acquire this skill. It needs a lot of organizing your thoughts and for the first time doing this stuff is really hard. One will encounter a lot of mistakes but as the old adage goes, ?Practice doesn?t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.? A teacher should not give up trying even if we commit mistakes, instead learn from them and try to do better the next time around.

Here are common mistakes in lesson planning that we should pay attention to help us in organizing our thoughts when it comes to lesson planning.

? Poorly written objectives lead to faulty inferences. Your aim should be stated clearly as to what should the students do and what to expect in your lesson. Otherwise, you will be stuck somewhere just thinking what to do and what activities you are going to prepare. You will waste your time.

? The lesson assessment is disconnected from the behaviour indicated in the objective. The test that you must prepare should be in accordance with your objective. For instance, your activate is about describing your favourite pet (not Pete) but then your stated objective is about using past continuous.

? The prerequisites or what we call the engage stage, others call this motivation. If this is not specified what is going to happen then you might lose your students in the beginning of your lesson.

? The materials specified in the lesson are extraneous to the actual described learning activities. If you will prepare too many materials and it is not already necessary, why burden yourself? Preparing too many materials and will just defeats its purpose is just like tiring yourself. Don?t stress yourself, think of enough activities that will not kill you and the students unless you want to commit suicide. Fantastic!

? The instruction in which the teacher will engage is not efficient for the level of the level of intended student learning. You better know the level of your learner(s) and think of the appropriate instructions that you are going to use. Imagine what will happen if you use the instruction for the intermediate level with the starter. Its either your students will just open their mouth, nod their head and do nothing or they will start doing something else, then they will not come back for the next lesson. Cute, isn?t it? Then, no more work.

? The students activities described in the lesson do not contribute in a direct and effective way to the lesson objective. You should think of activities that lead to your objective. Your study worksheets should show that they are heading or using the target language.

The six common mistakes will help you in your lesson planning, of course by avoiding them. The lesson that you develop is to guide you in organizing your material and yourself for the purpose of helping the students achieve intended learning outcomes. The plan should at least contain the following:

? Learner objective is what you want the students to be able to do by the end of the lesson. ? Procedure the method by which you will achieve aims. ? Activities and approaches will normally be included in your procedure. ? Teaching aids are materials that you will need in the lesson. ? Anticipated problems of both the teacher and the students. ? Personal aim is your aim as a teacher to achieve. ? Class level is the level of ability of the class has. ? Number of students to give you the idea of the class size and to vary your activities. ? Date and time for record purposes. ? Context is the theme around which your lesson is based. ? Timing is to give you idea how long your activity is expected to take. ? Interaction tells you who will be interacting at each stage of the lesson.

There are various formats in making a lesson plan and you can find them everywhere. You might say this is good or not good but the bottom line is you should learn to write, revise and improve as a teacher.

References: ?www.adprima.com/wlo5 ?Amazon.com ?Faculty.leeu.edu/bestes/resources/whitepaper ?www.humboldt.edu/tha1/hunter-eeil ?www.adultedlessons.org/login.cfm?fuseaction=aboutlp

Author: Evelyn Pacanza

Date of post: 2006-05-12