Reasons for TEFL Lesson Planning
Is it essential to do a lesson plan before a class? The answer is "YES." So why is it so important? And how can it help us with our English teaching? Outlined below is my analysis of why TEFL lesson planning is so important.
This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Qi Q. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.
Primary Purposes
In the first instance, TEFL lesson planning can help us set up the subject to be taught and the aim of each class, allowing us to follow our instructions. We teach the students about a grammar point, new vocabulary, or other parts of speech in each class. What you expect the students to achieve by the end of the lesson, and how you intend to make that possible, a teacher needs to have a solid lesson plan.
Key Points of a Lesson Plan
There are some main conditions that we need to follow when we are doing lesson planning: Try to make it simple because you might need to refer to it during the class. In my experience, I would write the main points to remind me what to teach and explain them to the students—some simple notes about what materials or realia I would need to use.
Do not teach the class reading from a copy of the lesson plan. A lesson plan is just there to remind you what to do if you forget or miss something. When the teacher is taking their class, they can read their lesson plan, like reading the play's script and do activities like robots.
Make a right, structured plan and try to anticipate the time for each activity. In unit 9 of this course, there is an excellent example of phase, timing, and Interaction that new teachers can use to affect planning lessons significantly. Anticipating the timing is also essential for the TEFL lesson planning stage because it will help you control the time you spend on each part of the study. Before you do the class, you can practice first to try to run the schedule and see if your timing is ok or not. There are many other basic principles of lesson planning that I will talk about in this next section. A lesson plan can help us to keep a lesson on target and give us something to refer back to during the class.
TEFL lesson planning is critical, especially for new English teachers. New English teachers don't have enough experience in teaching English, and also they don't have enough confidence in front of the students even if it's just a small class. Because of this, they might forget some teaching points during the lesson. This could affect the teacher's confidence and the student's confidence in the teacher. But if you can make a simple to follow a lesson plan and follow it during the whole class, it will help you finish the lesson smoothly. What will you include in your lesson planning? The main items include the subject or the aim of the lesson, the grammar points, the vocabulary you need to teach in this lesson, and the problems you might have with the students or yourself. Each topic has a scheduled time slot that you should try to keep to.
Methodology
Other things that factor into a lesson that we can't always plan for are class size, students' level, etc. Here I want to say that the ESA method of teaching a lesson is extremely useful in helping us to teach a class. When we write a lesson plan, we can use either a "Straight Arrow "lesson, "Boomerang" lesson, or "Patchwork" lesson structure or, indeed, a mix of all of them together as long as it will help you achieve your lesson planning goal. It depends on how you do your lesson planning and how you want to teach. TEFL lesson planning is crucial not only for new English teachers but also for experienced teachers. The difference between them is maybe the teachers who have experienced a need to make some notes about the lesson only as a reminder to focus on the important points or difficulties.
Planning for Self-Study
Another reason why writing a lesson plan is essential is the lesson plan will be a good record of your lesson. When you finish an exciting and informative lesson as you planned, you can summarize the teaching experience quickly after the class has ended. We can also record information about the students, understand your teaching methods, and, more importantly, learn from your teaching methods. Having this record also enables you to track any problems or errors that you, as the teacher, may have made during the class. We can track the language points and any issues that occurred to prepare more exercises and language points for the next lesson. Also, probably one of the most important aspects of a good lesson plan is that if you're ill or can't take the class for some reason, another teacher should, with the same experience, pick up your lesson plan and give the class with relative ease.
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In conclusion, we could write so much more about the benefits of a well-structured lesson plan and the positive effect on both students and teachers. From this brief overview, we can see that having a lesson plan is very important when giving an ESA lesson.
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