Lesson Planning

What Teacher's really do  #lessonplanning

When I think about lesson planning, I think about a long process that starts with figuring out your objectives, aligning it with the curriculum, narrowing the objectives into activities. When ever I hear the words "lesson planning" I think about a process that takes a lot of thought and time to do well. The more experience you get at doing it the better you become, but it is the most important part of Teaching. It outlines how you do your job as a teacher.

After interviewing two forign language teachers about their apporoaches to lesson planning and there were some similarities and some differences between what the teachers said and what our readings have shown us.

How long before a specific lesson do you prepare it?

Our readings show how to approach lesson planning with organizing thematic units that are derived from the unit divisions in the text books. One of the teachers said that she planned a month a head. She has about 1 month planned out before school starts and gauges her schedule based on how the daily objectives go. The other teacher said she gets an idea of the curriculum and objectives about one month ahead of time as well, but actually writes down her lesson plans at one week in advance increments.  So gathering from that, I would say it is good planning, if you have one month planned ahead.

How do you decide to do on any given day?

Our readings from Shrum & Glisan tell us that one of the most important aspects of daily lesson planning is to identify the objective(s) that you want to achieve by the end of the class period. From my interviews, I gathered that both teachers follow the curriculum for the daily objectives, also incorporating different activities (3-5) each week, to differentiate instruction based on the students of each class. These sound like great answers, but I wasn't given an specific examples of objectives. My thoughts are that the teachers are using just the textbook objectives to guide lesson planning and not reaching from the students personal goals(objectives) that they could integrate into the planning process. I agree that aligning the objectives to the curriculum is needed, but for my future classroom I would like to incorporate my students personal language objectives as well, and try to accomplish their goals over time.

Do you write down your objectives? How do you determine your lesson objectives?

The biggest factor that stood out to me in the answers to these questions was that neither teacher said they took their standards from ACTFL. They both stated that they get their objectives from the book, but one teacher did say that she does try to align her lessons with the five C's, standards for foreign language learning. Some of their answers do not line up with our readings, for instance, niether of the teachers talked about any kind of anticipatory set in there lessons, something to get the students excited about the objectives that are to be reached in that specific lesson.

Do you write down lesson notes to guide you? 

Both teaches stated that they do take notes on their lessons. One teachers jots down notes, circles a concept that works, highlights or crosses activities out that weren't successful. The other teacher writes notes down in bullet form, more like an outline that she can later organize for adaptions for future lessons. Srum & Glisan talk about the reevaluation and reorganization aspect of lesson planning where the teacher checks for flow and transsitions, controlled versus open ended communicative applications. The comments about note taking from my two teachers seemed to be focused on the moments during instruction more than a reflection after. Either way, taking notes to guide you for the future lesson is a great way to continiuously assess and reevaluate your instruction.

These interviews were helpful in the sense that it made me reflect on the research behind lesson planning and how intricate it can become, depending on how much time and effort you put into it. For me, it seems like the over all take away that I got from my interviewees,  was that since they are experienced 20+ year veteran teachers, they seem to be able to just familiarize  themselves with the curriculum, plan ahead, integrate authentic activities, and plan their lessons. My goal is to strive to write lesson plans that integrate the goals of my students as well as tie my objectives into the curriculum ( not the book objectives, but the national ACTFL standards), and really take time my first few years of teaching to create lessons plans that are interesting and engaging to my students. The more I observe teachers, the more they tell me that you (as a teacher) don't have to write detailed lesson plans and objectives, but I don't see how that is possible because that is what strives the car! If you don't have  a hold of the wheel, you might take your students to places they either won't remember, shouldn't have went simply because you don't know where you're taking them! I want to create lesson plans that take my students to places they never thought they'd be able to go to before and ones that they'll never forget!

-Srta. Myers