Are lesson plans actually worth it? When is it better to just let go and do what you feel like doing?
My thoughts on the issue of the importance of lesson planning. I’m not saying that lesson plans are unnecessary but that we might have to reconsider our attachment to them both from the teacher’s and the observer’s side. This post appeared on the IH Budapest Teacher Training blog in 2o14.
Are you one of those teachers who feel the need to spend half their lives planning lessons and then feel compelled to follow them through to the last letter? Do you feel frustrated about letting go for a minute and then being unable to find your way back to the plan? Have you ever felt upset about leaving the classroom with tasks that you couldn’t cover?
I, quite frankly, have never been the meticulous planner type. Not now when I teach more than 25 hours a week and not back when I was still new to the world of TEFL. And here’s why.
I remember having a conversation with a recent CELTA graduate this year, while I was doing my extensive DELTA course, about how they could build a better rapport with a group they were teaching. They had also fallen a little behind the course plan, so on one occasion they tried to deliver a snappy, fast-paced lesson with lots to cover. But in the middle of the lesson one of their students started telling an anecdote and everybody seemed to be interested.
The teacher started to panic that if they didn’t stop the student they would lose precious time that should be used for an activity they had spent hours planning.
I remembered a similar situation in my career and could recall all the questions that were racing in my mind at the time: What if I can’t do this activity in this lesson? Should I let my students completely take over and become a serious obstacle to the course? Which is worse: abandoning my lesson plan or putting an end to the anecdote?
In the end this is what I did: I let the student continue his anecdote. What was the outcome? Although I did sacrifice one of my crucial activities, I could witness my students communicate genuinely in English. I’m not doing CELTA lessons anymore which have to stand on their own and represent a perfect whole. Since now I have continuity, I also have the freedom to decide whether or not I want to postpone an activity to another lesson because my students seem to be having a nice conversation.
In order to have a warm atmosphere in the classroom and good rapport with our students,
we should worry less about the plans we had crafted for hours during the weekend and should start focusing more on our students and their stories.
Having said that, some planning is still crucial for a successful lesson. But I tend to think of it as coming up with a set of objectives. So here is the planning I do like to do for each lesson:
Where do I want to go with this lesson? What will my students have practiced and gained by the end of the lesson?What kind of activities do I want to use to support my objectives? In what other ways can I use the general topic of the lesson to support those objectives?
All in all, if I have a rough itinerary from point A to point B, I have done enough planning to avoid getting caught up in a never ending conversation about a completely unrelated topic, but I haven’t done too much, which enables me to go with the flow, let alternative routes emerge and guide me in a different, however still related direction. If I see that a topic lights up my students’ imagination, I will try to alter my plans and incorporate the new topic in a way that my objectives are still achieved.
So, in the end this is what I suggested to that CELTA graduate. Because essentially what do we consider our main goal when we teach a lesson: is it to carry out the perfect plan? Or do we want to get our students motivated, engaged and interested in the language they are learning, and to encourage them to communicate freely?
Sometimes we need to put the plans aside for a minute and just go with the flow.
Link to the original post: http://teacher-training.hu/conundrums-stick-with-the-plan-or-go-with-the-flow/#more-1422
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