Significant aspects of your Lesson plan: pay attention to these

In this day and age, finding a template lesson plan isn't really difficult. You can google "lesson plan template and you would find thousands of them". So I'm not going to go into the whole list of what a lesson plan should be, rather I'm going to highlight some key parts that you should pay attention to.

A lesson plan is a guide that helps you prepare for a class and teach a lesson effectively. Whether it's complex with ten pages or simple with one page, whether you're teaching kids who have no teeth or teaching old people with grey hair, it is laid out to achieve the same thing, Keep in mind that a lesson plan isn't a preparation for your lesson, it's the guide that tells you how to prepare for your lesson.

And a good lesson plan should help you do these three things really well

1. Set clear goals for your lesson so that you can prepare for it and teach in an organized manner
2. It should help you improve as a teacher as you continue to learn for a lesson and from the outcome of a lesson
3. Also, it should let you know if your lesson was effective based on what you set out to do

Based on these three things let's look at a simple lesson plan and highlight the parts that I think you should pay close attention to.

1. Lesson goals and objectives: Be sure to set clear and precise goals and objective. This is the one significant key performance indicator or KPI for your lesson and at the end of the lesson, this is what you should achieve.  This should be as clear as possible.

Some clear goals would be: By the end of the lesson, kids should be able to sing the happy birthday song and do the TPR. Or by the end of lesson kids should know and say clearly these three new verbs, walk, jump and run, as well as do simple action for these verbs.

These are clear goals which tell you exactly what you've set out to achieve. Setting a goal such as "teach a TPR song" or "teach three words" is not really effective. You can't even make a good reference to this in the future.

2. Materials and activities: you have to write down the materials you need to teach.

You need to list the materials you're going to use for your lesson. If it's a song, if it's flashcards, worksheets, a big teddy bear or whatever materials you need for your lesson. Remember that you're going to prepare for your lesson based on this plan. So you need to know what you're taking along to your class.

You as well have to list the activities to perform. If you're teaching multiple words, how are you going to teach each word. If you're playing games, what games? If you have a separate list of activities with titles, you can write it down. For example, "play the fishing game" or "do the catch and throw activity for this word"

3. Assessment: this is in two forms. Before the lesson and after the lesson. Before the class, you have to anticipate possible problems and write down how you're going to deal with those problems. For example, "kids might have problems saying the ending vowel sound for fish and I will solve it by stressing and extending the duration of this phonic sound. This states the problem and the solution.

After the class, you should take a moment to look at your lesson plan and see if you achieved your KPIs. Were you able to achieve your goal? Were there any particular issues that you didn't expect? Was there something you were unable to deal with or encountered and resolved? What is your take away from this lesson.

Now let me leave you with certain truths. Sometimes you won't feel like making a lesson plan, although you should always make a lesson plan for your class. Sometimes lesson plans are reusable because you've probably taught the same lesson over and over again. Sometimes a lesson plan can be totally useless based on the age of your audience. Sometimes you have so many lessons it's impossible to prepare for all of them. Maybe there's something you can do about these, maybe there's nothing you can do about these. Leave your comments down below. Thank you.