My Town Tutors is a great resource for parents & teachers. Find qualified tutors in your area today!
- Summer Guest Blogs
- Back to School Guest Blogs
- Education Guest Blogs
- Parent Guest Blogs
- Guest Blogs
- Travel Guest Blogs
November Guest Blogs / Top Guest Blogs / November Jokes / Top November Pages
Lesson planning is one of the parts of being a teacher or educator of any kind that can end up drawing a great deal of your time and attention. Therefore, you need to have a clear plan in place to make it all go as smoothly as you want it to. The following blog post will be about some of the lesson planning hacks that you can put into practice to make your life a little bit easier, ensuring that you can concentrate on the other aspects of being a teacher.
Use existing resources
One of the greatest aspects of being a teacher in the modern world is that there are so many different resources readily available that you can rely upon. For example, you can find just some of them on Studentreasures Publishing. While you don’t want to plan every single lesson with the resources that you already have, it makes sense that you use some of them as and when necessary. After all, creating your own individual set of documents every time is going to cause more than a few issues, which is why it is important to make use of what has gone before. You can also look to give back to the teaching community as a whole by uploading some of these documents back onto the appropriate forums once you are done with them, allowing them to be used and relied upon by others as and when needed.
Create some templates
When you are not relying on the resources that have already come before, it is more than worth creating some templates that you can refer back to and simply put in the necessary information. This is going to save you so much time and effort in comparison to creating a new document each time. Ultimately, there are likely to be some lessons that stay very similar week after week, and it is going to be more than worth ensuring that you can make these ones run as smoothly as possible with as few potential issues along the way.
Rely on other colleagues
As has already been mentioned, teaching is such a community, and you would be crazy to attempt to do everything yourself when there are others that you can rely upon. Often, it is the case that teachers will share resources and entire lesson plans with one another. Once you do this, it is much more likely that you will be able to build up stronger bonds and rely on one another in the future as well. It is also the case that you are likely to pick up tips and tricks along the way based on what other teachers do and the ways that they plan out their lessons.
Refine your lessons from previous years
When you keep on running lessons year after year, it is more than likely that you will have plenty of repeat subjects and plans that you can fall back on as well. Therefore, it is certainly going to be worth relying on these where possible but also making some tweaks to them along the way as well. After all, you cannot expect that they all will have gone off without a hitch. As such, you should think about the improvements that you can make to them, whether they need to be updated based on any changes to the curriculum or using new learning tools.
Work out what works well for each class
At the start of the school year, you may well start in quite a generic mode in terms of your lesson planning. However, as time starts to go on, this is where you will likely begin to notice the differences between the classes and can work out what sort of lessons are best for them. For example, they may not have a high level of focus and will need to have plenty of movement breaks built in along the way to help them regain concentration. As an alternative, you may have a team that is better suited to desk-based tasks. The better that you get to know each class and the students, the more likely it is that you will gradually be able to improve over time.
Work out your best planning time
Not everyone works in the same way. For example, there are plenty of early birds out there who like to be up with the lark and get on with work right from the outset. For others, they would prefer to burn the midnight oil and work late into the night. Part of this comes down to knowing what sort of a person you are and being able to cater to your own needs, as well as thinking about the class. After all, you will do much better this way and not spend hours sitting in front of a computer at a time that doesn’t work well for you.
Learn from your mistakes
Even the most experienced teachers are bound to make mistakes along the way, which means that you need to be fully prepared to learn from them as well. If there is something that seemed like it would be a great idea in theory but did not work out all that well in practice, you need to embrace the fact that sometimes this will happen, and you can make the necessary adjustments in the future to improve all over again.
Lesson planning is certainly a central and important aspect of teaching, but if you are able to make life easier for yourself, it makes sense that you do so. These are just a few of the ways in which you can do this, but it all involves ensuring that you make the most of the resources that are already available to you, as well as drawing on your experience over time. Also, it would be best if you got to know your class as well as possible, as this will put you in a position where you are able to start to tailor your lessons specifically to their needs.