Job Discussion Forums

[jianzhou65]

hey guys I got a question. do all you teachers out there in china need to have a lesson plan, is it important?? coz I personally find that lesson plan is not really useful coz at times, I have to gauge the students reaction to the lessons I am teaching and most of the time the lesson plan falls thru.. and I have to go by gut feeling... The lady boss always insisted all of us to have a lesson plan which all the teachers and me in our training centre felt that it is not practical at all... soo i would like to hear your comments on this ... thanx...

[Minhang Oz]

In your case, it was just being used as a control mechanism by your boss.
However, such plans are a fact of life for Australian final year B.Ed students and beginning teachers, both of whom I've supervised. Often more time could be spent planning the lesson than actually teaching it. Whilst this seems wasteful and frustrating, you do learn to prepare properly, rather than just "winging it".
I've never been asked for one in four years in China [state schools], but looking at some of my FT colleagues from non-teaching backgrounds, I think they'd be a damn good idea.
The bottom line is that such plans should be practical, re-useable, and designed for YOU, not someone else's filing cabinet. When I taught English Lit. I relied heavily on them. I think EFL teachers should spend a lot of time looking at their students' language needs, and then working out how best to meet these. And yes, this involves planning.

[shenyanggerry]

I always have a 'lesson plan' but it's only useful to me. I write enough keywords to remind me of what I plan in to do. Occasionally I write sentences, I always remind myself of mateials I need.

I don't think I could function effectively without it.

Edited to fix typo.

[Wolf]

I always try to have a lesson plan. If the glass goes "off topic" for a time in a positive way, then that's not a big problem, but I really do try to keep lesson goals in mind and achieve them. In my experience, there's nothing worse than trying to teach a class when you have not prepared a clear goal as to what the students are going to learn about, and you have no plan as to how to go about this.

Also, it might be best to write your lesson plans in English rather than 1337 ("leet" - ie internet speak.)

[noodles]

I find i dont really need a lesson plan as such, although i will always have a few key notes on what i am planning to teach that day and what material is required.
I used to spend a lot of time preparing my plans but as time went on i have found it less useful. Although i certainly know in my mind what i will be doing and in what order and spend a little time mentally preparing.

If you have no idea at all and go in intending to wing it ( which i am sure we have all done at some point, at least for the lessons flung on us at the last moment ) you can certainly get away with it, with a bit of experience, but it makes the whole lesson a lot harder. So why make life difficult for yourself, when with a little thought and preperation lessons can go smoothly for you and hopefully be useful for your students.

[Freaky Deaky]

I never did a lesson plan. In all the places I taught I would have a book; Headway, New Interchange (ugh!) or something. I'd just follow that. Most of the time I found that the students just wanted an oportunity to talk - I gave them that...

[ls650]

O-kay.... Maybe I am just a freak, but being new to teaching I find lesson pages extremely helpful.

I always write them up and would do so even if not required to by my school.

[Minhang Oz]

Keep doing it Is650, preferably in some solid exercise books. The number of great planned lessons [over many years mind you] I've had to re-invent, and usually not as successfully, tells me I should have been more organised. Keep some disks of the worksheets you make up or down load.
You can always throw away bad stuff, but the good ideas take time to work through properly.

[Freaky Deaky]

Hey, there's only one freak around here and that's me!

But why bother making a lesson plan when it's pretty much already been written for you? Being a newbie, maybe a lesson plan is useful. I would spend about five minutes looking at the stuff we would do for that day and start. I had used these same materials so many times it was like falling off a log. As I would do the lesson I would make use of other ideas that I'd used a 1000 times before.

I never made a lesson plan once when I was teaching. I guess the esl world is a better place without me!

[Roger]

I found that a teaching plan is a must do for my preschool classes, but it's more of an option for students in higher levels. Still, I always have at least one month's planning filed somewhere.
It might be useful to get one's hand on our Chinese English teachers' teaching plans for our oral lessons. This way, we know what language parts have been coveed.

[struelle]

[carken]

As an experienced teacher of more years than I like to think about, I would never think of entering a classroom without a lesson plan. At this point, it's very sketchy and probably only I could teach from it; however, it keeps me on track and helps me to focus on the important parts of the lesson.

My Chinese bosses never asked me for lesson plans. Once, I was given a book to write them in, but I was never asked about them after that.

[ls650]

My lesson plans tend to be a brief point-form outline of what basic concepts and what text exercises i plan on doing. Most of the time I stick more or less to the plan.
I find it very useful to make brief notes at the end of the lesson as to what I covered and what I didn't, so I have something to refer back to for the next class.

[whitjohn]

Good teachers have a plan whether it's written or just notes. The suggestion of keeping plans over the years on paper or disk is VERY good and should be useful to all of us.
Here is an idea that I have used with success on my university students...Perhaps you saw the movie "Wall Street"? The young.. up and commer.. quoted from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War". I made this Chinese strategist and historicaly important man a 5 week long study in both written and oral English classes by taking each of the 5 vital points week by week. The students loved talking about this famous Chinese figure and when they understoon how Sun Tzu's ideas could apply to their lives....became engrossed in the work.
Have a look for the name Sun Tzu on google and you will find the English and Chinese text available.

[latefordinner]

I've only been at this for a year and a half, but I have long held to the notion that some form of lesson planning is necessary. Would you want your surgeon to operate without looking at the X-rays? The extent of planning however depends on the material being covered and the class I'm teaching. When I was using New Interchange to teach adults, I did very little planning, except for the non-text materials that I would bring in to break the boredom.
OTOH with the material that I'm using now, I would be lost in about 15 minutes if I didn't do some planning. I have an hour to fill and the typical text comprises 3 to 6 lines of dialogue for the students to model. (The texts BTW were not written by a native speaker, and you know what that means.) Imagine what those classes would be like if I didn't bring in flashcards, photographs and other physical demos, if I didn't plan skits for them to act out. Or if I just blackboarded the new words and didn't even think about the various sentence structures and grammar points in the dialogue.
I believe in recycling. I still have an accordion folder full of lesson plans from the last school I worked at, even though I may not ever teach that syllabus again. I still pull out old favourites and try to incorporate them into new lessons. It does make the planning go faster.
I rely heavily on what I've done before, I've streamlined the process, but I don't think I'll ever stop planning. At the top of my plan is a list of language targets that I want to teach. What comes after that is detail, and that can easily be changed. I can readily improvise _how_ to do things, but if I don't know _what_ I want to teach before I walk in then I have a problem.
I'm probably too structured and inflexible to be offering advice, but I have had a brief look at the LP books that our chinese teachers use and they plan everything they say right down to the word. Then they have to rehearse. Arghhh!