The question is: how many of you new teachers (1-5 years of teaching experience) over-plan your lessons? As a new teacher 12 years ago, I was constantly over-planning my lessons to make sure ALL students participated, even if it meant restructuring the lesson.
In general, over-planning is a good habit to develop, especially when used as back-up plans to back up parts or even an entire lesson.
However, the problem with over-planning becomes even more tricky and tricky during those unexpected moments. How do you know exactly which activity to use? And for how long? How many activities? This is where the experience and knowledge of the students and their abilities can play an important role in deciding which activities are appropriate to use. Sometimes you may be surprised by your own spontaneity and discover that you know more than you really thought.
Overplanning is part of the “ups and downs” of the new teacher. When faced with difficult classes, I would constantly overplan because eventually I wanted to start “reaching” the right level, motivation, and interest of my students. When I failed, I started pushing into the panic zone which led to more over-planning and general overload.
But just for argument’s sake, let’s take the following classroom situation:
Let’s say you’ve planned a twenty-minute independent reading session for your high school students, but for some inexplicable reason, they’re not focused. You later learn (indirectly) that they don’t have some of the most important reading skills to cope with the story you’ve asked them to read. More specifically, there are too many unfamiliar words and the theme of the story is quite sophisticated for his high school years. And that?
So before you start deleting those backup plans, make sure you have the following in order:
1. Be sure to plan for strong transitions. Look at the transitions as “glue” that hold the pre-middle and post parts together. Weak transitions are a sure sign that you may lose a few students along the way. You’ll also want to make sure that the transition really serves its purpose and helps connect the introduction to the main part of a lesson. Transitions do not necessarily have to be an additional activity; it is enough to say a few sentences as “clues” to hint to the students what awaits them.
A new teacher might say to their class after they have predicted some of the story content and taught new vocabulary, “Okay, now let’s check some of your predictions and see how many new words there are in context.”
2. Don’t stretch too many of your originally planned activities beyond the originally set time. This is where experience will make you a pro and you will eventually be able to tell the difference between real trial and error time or “money”. How much time do students really need to do the task effectively?
To ensure you have enough time for each part, vary the time sequences. The bulk of the lesson should be no longer than 25 minutes, while the plan activities should only be 5 minutes or so. Plan multiple lessons on the same topic if necessary so you’re not short on time.
3. Take careful note when students start to lose focus and get distracted. Ask a colleague or mentor teacher to give you solid, honest feedback aimed at improving your teaching. Here is a checklist of general troubleshooting areas.
4. Do you plan your lessons too much to include any differentiated instruction? For each level and skill, make sure you have at least 1 activity that you can pull out of a hat as needed. Write down that activity and take note of its success. Save the experience for a later date.
If you need a workshop on how to be successful with mixed ability classes, click here for more registration details and how you can take control in the classroom. Spaces are filling up fast.
Consider the fact that perhaps the students were not focused, which is another classroom problem and requires a different set of actions.
So the question again is: how many of you new teachers (1-5 years of teaching experience) over-plan your lessons? In what classroom situations do they help? Why do you do it? Is there any other advice you could give to new teachers?
