Your Lesson Planning Comment ... 

How helpful were the Lesson Planning tips for you? Were the ideas new to you? What did you like, and what will your implement? ​

Some past comments ... 

Rob Sibley
This is something i recently discovered! As a casual teacher I found it impossible to plan for anything so I had to plan for everything to a certain degree. I was having to develop my knowledge of a huge variety of learning areas so I was prepared. Now that I am able to teach the same class I can prepare but have found myself using what I learnt as a casual in my lesson planning. I often leave part of my lesson open to the direction the students wish to travel to understand the content we are covering. Often getting them to decide on instructional videos or worked examples followed up by either group work or independent tasks. I have found that as long as I achieve the learning goals I'm happy to approach it in different ways. I do find what you have mentioned previously about knowing the content incredibly important when planning and teaching my lessons.
Richard​
It's smart to give your students some autonomy.  Vital, in fact. Well done.

Isabella Fawcett
Confidence is key! I feel like I have started developing confidence more in the classroom after I got to know my students and how the school and my classes run. I would like to start indicating to students my intentions and aims more as I agree these need to be communicated to the students so that they can also see where the lesson is going. An aim for this term I would say :)
Richard​
Re your last sentence Isabella, fantastic!

Lachlan Davies
I have definitely seen the difference that confidence makes even in just in the few pracs and the first year of teaching. My planning has gone from 1-2 hours and 1-2 structured A4 Templates to 15-30 minutes and the 5 lines you get in each period space in a teacher planner. I now focus on using time to create interesting activities or fun demonstrates and practising these to make sure they go off without a hitch. I find I am only communicating the lesson intentions when they are clear but would like to focus on doing this for all lessons, even those that are student-centred.
Richard​
Confidence is (possibly) 90% of being a quality teacher

Manfred Yew
I found it helpful to consider communicating my aim/objective to my students and how will I measure this.
Richard​
The more we can explain to students what we are doing, what the plan is, etc, the better of everyone will be!

Lina Ko
I learned that the aim is not to create a thorough lesson plan, but to focus on the actual lesson. In my experience I found creating lesson plans time-consuming and difficult to refer back to during lessons.
Key takeaway: to jot down the main things I aim to teach in the lesson, especially the things I will likely need reminding for.
Richard​
Well said. That's my idea of logical advice. You need to be prepared Lina, fully prepared, but you need a planning system that works for you and that you CAN refer to during a lesson!

Your Lesson Planning comment here ... 

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One more comment ... 

Ed Carrigan
(A journey of turning one's organisation from 'a dog's breakfast' into a concise, usable, efficient system.)
Everything that you and other respondents on this site have said about being prepared and knowing your content has proven true for me. It is one thing to hear and believe it though and another to understand exactly what it means and how to implement it.
When I was at uni we had to develop lesson plans for each lesson of the template type complete with timings. I found that it was very time consuming and tedious. In my first prac I ran into the problem that I was incredibly unorganised in regards to getting things onto the board. My supervisor got me to come to the back of the room after a lesson and take a picture and we both agreed that it looked like a dog's breakfast.
I then added to my lesson planning that I would write onto a A4 piece of paper (I use the grid books which means I can use them sideways to match a whiteboard orientation and divide the book vertically into columns ) exactly what I was going to put onto the white board and I would take this into the lesson and use it to copy from. I now only had the theory notes but also a column with the lesson sequence and the textbook exercises that the students would do in a column on the right. I found this incredibly useful as far as whiteboard management went and it became the way I did my lesson planning all of last year - my first year of full time teaching. We also are expected to use One Note at the school I am at and last year I found I was doubling up by copying theory notes from the textbook into the One Note and then using these to do my hand written theory notes before then putting them on the board.
Somewhere along the way, I got better at organising my board and stopped doing the hand written part and I would just grab a text book and write the notes up. This has become a long post - I was recently taken to task by my head teacher that I didn't have a 'lesson plan' when I was going in and she told me that I needed to be doing one and mentioned that a senior teacher in our faculty had really good ones - on looking at his plan I found that they were succinct theory notes with succinct teacher examples. My head teachers point was summarising the notes from a text book on the fly was not good practice and could look like I didn't know what I was doing or wasn't prepared (which could be true).
I am now writing succinct theory notes summarising the text book and either using the text book worked examples or simplifying them and writing these into a book. I scan these notes into the One Note so the One Note theory page shows exactly what I write on the board - this has been great as now the students can access what goes onto the board from their one note and copy it into their books if they either miss a lesson or are slow at getting it off the board (I can put the scanned notes on the tv). We are adopting the Lyn Sharratt 'Clarity' parameters at school and implementing some of these has seen my teaching getting a lot more effective.
One of these that is really working ties in with one of your main points about having a clear learning intention for both a unit of work and the lesson which has to be clearly written down for the students to see. I used to get the unit of work program from the faculty One Note and plan out a unit sequence but this was not communicated to the students and I didn't really have clear in my head what was new work and what was revision. I am now using the unit plan to see what I am meant to be putting into the unit but am also going to the syllabus and making an A3 laminated poster of all the syllabus 'dot points' as learning intentions.
I look for relevant visuals to add to the poster as well and use it to plan my lesson sequence - each dot point or several dot points then become my lesson learning intention. I have the poster up in the classroom and in their One Note and start each lesson by putting it up on the tv and telling them which one we are doing - I can refer to past and previous dot points (learning intentions) and the students can see exactly what is in the unit and when we will finish it. It is also really clear what is revision at the start of a new unit because these aren't on the poster and why we are revising these skills before starting the new theory. This has really helped me and also seems to have made a huge difference in behaviour management, I think because the students now think "he knows what he is doing" (fake it till you make it).
The other thing that seems to have got my classes on side is that I am now printing out the first Q's and collecting them, marking them and returning them the next lesson - I can now see who knows what on a daily basis and who is doing them - the students are happy that they are being marked and some of my previously 'opposing team' students now seem to be joining my team. All of this has taken a huge amount of time but I can also see the resources I am creating being there for me next year and hopefully arriving at the place where less time is spent creating resources and I can just bring it back to the first question marking (formatives) as the main time component.
Richard​
There's a lot to unpack here, Ed. Loved your 'My board work was a dog's breakfast' reference. I was there!! Loved your 'It is one thing to hear and believe it though and another to understand exactly what it means and how to implement it' comment!
Thanks for sharing your journey. This is helpful.