School Lesson Plans

How do Teachers Make Lesson Plans?

For making a lesson plan

- teachers should do the following

- Read the chapter thoroughly and create clear learning outcomes.

- Understand the class context and also the different learning level of students

- Prepare material - for activities, discussions, worksheets, videos - which will facilitate each period.

The challenge is that very few teachers have the time - with 30-35 periods every week and other administrative duties. There is also an issue of motivation and skills. As such, lesson planning gets seen as an admin activity - rather than preparation for the class. Increasingly there are online resources available to - to take the load off the teachers - and help teachers to make lesson plans for their class.

These provide  worksheets, activities, videos, assessment and clear learning outcomes - aligned to grade and curriculum. Teachers can use them to reduce their class preparation time and still run an effective classroom. One such open source tool is tickLinks.com.

A lesson plan is an important tool with the teacher which puts the structure and flow of the entire class. Watch Chhalaang on Amazon Prime, it's an entertaining movie about a Month the PT teacher who has on lesson plans for his session. As the story unfolds, then there was an impetus of a motivation to have lesson plans and Montu, the PT teacher comes out victorious. To drive the points, you need to have a structure in place, before you a teacher starts the session.

We at ticklinks.com have been crowd-sourcing the lesson plans to aid the teachers with multiple approaches make the class interesting, engaging and most importantly achieve the objective of the lesson plan.

There are various methods in a structured lesson plans - Heberian, Evaluation, Morison, Indian, Project, 5-E and in a teachers training program - all of us study them.

The best way forward to make a lesson plan is first to write the objective of the lesson, how one can explain the concept, can they be done

• Storytelling
• Case-study
• Example based
• Situation based
• Analogical
• Video-based
• Documentary
• Sharing of an own experience
• Demonstration
• Hands-on learning

Evaluate the objective has the student understood through assessments, tests, assignments, and even online classes.

How does lesson planning help teachers?

The first session of Katherine Ann Watson, played by Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile as a teacher has had a bad experience, where the students were complete know it all. The teacher goes prepared with the idea that she will be taking a chapter from the designated book and a bunch of proactive students have already finished the entire book. She was a free-thinking art teacher who teaches in a conservative university. She does not follow the college's rule book but ends creating her style of lesson plans. her lesson plans were inpidualistic, personal and thought-provoking.

An art teacher's learning outcome for the students is creativity, from the student's point of view the creativity can be put down on a piece of paper, she needs to inspire the students to think creatively, her learning outcome. Through Lesson Plans, she was able to give direction to the class and created the ambience for free-thinking and creativity. The teacher understood the learning outcome was not going to be theoretical knowledge, it needs to be more intellectually stimulating. She should start evaluating the students based on the discussion and their point of view, and when she is satisfied with the answers she should proceed with her next lesson.

From her first session where the students took over the class; with her new set of Lesson Plans, she gained the confidence and was able to project to the students.  Does the school give the teacher a lesson plan for the curriculum each school year?   The education board gives broad guidelines to schools. The school needs to give direction to the teachers. The teachers would make the lesson plans for the students. The new education policy (NEP) gives a broad outline of the medium of instruction to be in English or mother tongue. There has been a lot of debate on this topic. Here is my point of view, I believe it is the school's prerogative to choose the medium of instruction.

Similarly, for each subject school needs to give the direction to the teacher of what are the learning outcomes for each subject. The teachers should create their own strategy, methodology in achieving those learning outcomes for the students.    Knowledge sharing between teachers - teachers sharing their Lesson Plans, their learning, their approach, their understanding of using technology, their research and their consideration of students learning experience. This would work better to learn from each other and experiment with new approaches and teaching style. This acts as a peer learning experience should be given dedicated time in schools for teachers.

What might you recommend for a CMS or other existing tool that we can adapt for teacher lesson planning?

Lesson planning is a creative process. It includes many elements like worksheets, activities, videos, assessment etc.. These plans can be compiled in a word document. There are also many tools that are available that help in the providing format to the lesson plans. A list of such tools are provided on this weblink.

https://edtechreview.in/trends-insights/insights/2904-most-used-lesson-planning-tools-by-teachers

If you are looking at ready made lesson plans - which will help you to reference and improvise your lesson plans based on your class context - then i suggest you visit tickLinks.com. It has worksheets, activities, videos, assessment and clear learning outcomes - aligned to grade and curriculum.

As a substitute teacher, what do you do when you are left with no lesson plans?

As a school teacher, when I was called in as a substitute teacher, I created activities in class through worksheets and I even did a Bollywood quiz of the students' favourite actors. Another time, I had created a session on sharing experiences on courage and strength. Each student shared a story which happened in real life or it was sharing a story from a cartoon that they had watched. Students love talking and when you ask them and push a little to tell their story, they kind of open to amazing storytelling with the mix of English-Hindi-mother tongue vocabulary.

At a macro-level, They have standard protocols for such situations in SCERT, NCERT and Bal Bharati, was not able to find them online.

A dedicated and experienced teacher will never have a dearth of Lesson Plans, I asked a cross-section of teachers, professors in my circle. They were happy to answer, these are the findings in the dipstick study. Treat this as a list of things one can do if you are called in to be a substitute teacher -

• Group work
• Storytelling
• Art and craft
• Music and movement
• Projects
• Worksheet
• Presentation
• Talk about real-life experiences
• Go extempore
• Case studies
• Revision of concepts
• Check how much is completed Syllabus
• Personality development exercise like SWOT
• Debate on current issues
• Practical discussion
• Soft skills
• Etiquettes
• Motivational talks
• PE sessions
• You can talk about GK
• Conduct any game 
• Ready with Quiz
• Show any youtube video
• Do reflection activity
• Give some topic they can write or speak
• Conduct some yoga postures in the morning time
• Conduct some craft activity
• Write on a blog
• Create a podcast
• Compile links form YouTube videos