Lesson plans were crucial for me when I was doing my teacher training. It was a requirement of the course to have every lesson plan printed off and submitted in a folder, but it became very useful to me, as I had been away from Physical Education for a few years and it was a great way for me to get back into it.
I remember my course mates saying that once they have finished, they are looking forward to not doing any more lesson plans. This is something that I observed when I was a teaching assistant. Lesson plans were only done when observations were taking place.
However, now I have just finished my second year of teaching, I am still doing lesson plans, like I used to when I was training as a teacher. Although it is extra work than what is required, I find myself to be creative when I am sat down and planning my lesson. As I'm writing my plan, ideas pop into my head and off I go on google or other websites looking to develop my ideas. Most of the time, I plan on the lesson plan provided by the school but when life becomes busy (start/end of the term), I usually just plan it on a scrap piece of paper and then just catch up when I can. It's really important for me to keep a soft copy, so I can refer to it next year. I have to stress that it is important to not get complacent by just doing what you did last year because group dynamics, resources, facilities etc. change and therefore lessons need to change.
As the head of department for PYP PE, I am responsible for developing units with my team and as we have 4 schools across Malaysia, this becomes difficult. I also have to check and upload lesson plans from each campus to the cloud and this is when I came across some really bad lesson plans. I know that a bad lesson plan does not mean it will be a bad lesson but I feel activities should have notes of the breakdown of the rules/techniques with progressions and differentiation highlighted. When I do my lesson plans, I always write them in a way that any teacher should be able to be read and understand what to do from reading my plan.
This led me to requesting to conduct a CPD session on lesson planning to the PYP department and I was surprised on the different ideas people had about what should go into a lesson plan. Although there were lots of ideas, we eventually agreed the content of a lesson plan and I provided a breakdown of some important things to consider when planning a lesson. Although this table does not include lesson objectives/outcomes, they were mentioned in the CPD and I will discuss this further in a future blog
This year, my team have focused on refining and producing good lesson plans, so that it will make their life easier in the future, but also for the new teachers who come into this new environment. I know that when I arrived, I desperately needed lesson plans just to get me started, but there were not any that were useful. Lesson plans can be easily neglected and this is something I have had to deal with as the head of department. As I'm working in an International school, the staff turnover is high and almost every semester, my team is changed and I am faced with new teachers, who have little background in teaching. I have to spend a lot of time training these teachers, so they can understand the IB philosophy, and this can be time consuming.
I am intrigued to find out what other practitioners are doing in regards to lesson planning. Do you plan lesson like you always did? Or have you changed it over the years? Either way, it would be interesting to see how other educators view lesson planning in their daily practice.
Attached below is the powerpoint and lesson plan I used to do the CPD. Please use it as you wish: