Effective Ways of Planning Lessons

Teaching is sharing of experiences that help in better and easy learning. It is not difficult to make someone understand and remember the text for some time, but it needs rigorous practice of planning to enable the learner understand the text for a life time. Here comes the role of planning a lesson.

What is required to plan a lesson? A book? No. It needs understanding of what the National Curriculum Framework is expecting us teachers to do in the classroom. Most of the teachers, and for that matter, the Principal of the school, too isn’t aware of the teaching and learning objectives given in the National Curriculum Framework. Every Textbook that NCRT provides has guidelines at the start of the unit that help the teacher in understanding the objectives laid by the National Curriculum Framework. But do teachers even care to read those guidelines?

Why are these guidelines important?

Sometimes, a teacher may know about the topic more than required for his teaching. Sometimes teachers are not aware of different definitions given by the Education Committee for the same concept. These guidelines help in limiting and delimiting teachers’ teaching and thus help the teacher to focus on particular aspects. It is not that teachers cannot go beyond the given guidelines, but during teaching, these guidelines work as a trail on which a teacher has to walk and come back.

Once the guidelines are studied, a teacher understands the objectives of his teaching. A teacher always divides his objectives on the basis of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The objectives should be divided into remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating. Though these are the main objectives for achieving any teaching goal, these objectives further can be divided into smaller goals and larger goals too. Thus, in a lesson plan, then has to be minimum six objectives.

Once the objectives are derived, a teacher then needs to find out the skills and the knowledge aspects that he would like his students to be acquainted with or possess. It is called as ‘Learning Outcomes’. Learning Outcomes always starts with the phrase ‘At the end of this chapter/unit, the student will be able to …’. Thus learning outcomes is the direct result of the proposed achievements that are planned in the previous stage i.e. writing Teaching objectives.

Now your teaching objectives and learning outcomes are decided, you cannot go to teach in the class. A teacher has to create a plan to evaluate students’ achievement. This is called as planning ‘Formative’ and ‘Summative’ assessment. Formative and summative assessments should be planned keeping in mind the learning outcomes.

Why to plan assessments even before we teach?

It has been a common trend in India and most of the countries in Asia to make question papers to check students’ memorization skills. But memory is not the only skill a teacher wants students to develop. That is why while planning the assessment, one should be really aware of the LEARNING OUTCOMES. Because learning outcomes act as a lighthouse for assessment planning. Our assessment should only assess the skills we are trying to imbibe in the students. Anything other than that would only give a wrong analysis of the students’ performance.

Once the foundation is made (teaching objectives, learning outcomes and Assessments), the actual planning of ‘what to do when we enter the class’ starts.

A great teacher always creates curiosity amongst the students before teaching the topic. Curiosity will lead to making students inquire more, want more, and thus, get more.

How to build the curiosity?

The best way is to tell students stories, share with them the case studies, share with them your experiences related to the topic, asking them questions to make them ask more questions. These all activities come under non-instructional teaching practices, and they are equally important as teaching practices. Imagine telling the story of the need of survey in Delhi for the sudden increase of number of women during last decade. Students will come up with various questions and answers for the same, and it will give teacher an opportunity to tell them what statistics is, and why it is required. A good amount of time should be given for ice-breaking. I always prefer to have an Inquiry Wall in the classroom where students will post their questions regarding the topic to be learnt.

Gone is the era when teacher used to teach with lecture, chalk and board. Though we are 21^st century teachers, we have to outlive our own era, we have to try to be the teacher of 22^nd century. Keeping in mind different types of learners, we have to plan different types of teaching methodology. Some of the best methods to teach students are story-telling, narrating, giving case study, but in each case, students have to proactively involve. A good teacher always has a bundle of different activities prepared in advance to take in the classroom. These activities not only help in engaging the class, but also in going closer to the learning outcomes.

Each day’s teaching is to be assessed. Each day a teacher should check whether he/she is teaching properly and the students are showing the signs of achieving learning outcomes. If not done on a regular basis, teacher may not realize whether students’ are prepared for learning the next part of the text. This stage will also help in understanding the low performers and planning remedial for them.

After learning the concept, a teacher has to plan what student will explore. A teacher has to show what activity students will complete to help them explore the material. Activities such as stations, cooperative learning groups, games, worksheet or other instructional methods, help in the same.

Once the explanation, teaching is done, elaborating starts. Elaborating, in education, is independent practice. Students should be given many activities where they will get opportunities to apply the knowledge and the skills they achieved during the teaching-learning process. These activities should help the children apply the learning in variety of situations. This work has to be done in the classroom and also at home.

Evaluation is the end stage in most of the lesson plans. But according to me, it has to be a stage at the each stage of learning. We have to evaluate students’ prior knowledge, their learning abilities, their skills, etc. Thus evaluation is not something to be taken only at the end. But yes, formative and summative assessment will help in evaluating students’ understanding of the concept and thus, in making a new plan to achieve the teaching objectives. Daily evaluation should be done in the form of an EXIT SLIP where a teacher will make a chit with a question written on it, and the students have to answer it in the end of the session.  

Being a teacher is easy, making people call you a great teacher is challenging. Only great planning will ease the journey from ‘A Teacher’ to an ‘Awesome Teacher’.