we examine four different ways to organize lessons: activity based, developmental, the
Hunter model, and a streamlined format I developed for overstressed student teachers.What Do You Need to Consider?
·Lesson plans are necessary tools for teaching. They are not works of art. They will never
be perfect.
·Lesson plan formats are suggestions based on other people’s experiences. They are not
etched in stone. What works for one person may not work for someone else or in another
setting. There are a number of different ways to plan effective lessons.
·Successful teachers, even the most experienced, always plan. Some very good veteran
teachers argue that they do not needwrittenplans any more because everything is in
their heads. It may be possible for them to teach this way and it may be possible for you
in the distant future, but it has never worked for me. The effort to involve students in a
lesson is too demanding for me to just rely on my memory during a lesson.
·Lesson plans are experiments. Sometimes they get the expected results and sometimes
they do not. Every teacher has lessons that did not work the way they wanted them to. I
try to include three or four possible activities in each lesson. If something does not seem
to be working, I go on to the next activity.
·One of my students compared a lesson plan to a recipe. She said that when she first
started cooking she needed to follow all of the steps carefully. Later, as she became more
experienced, she felt more comfortable varying the ingredients and experimenting with
her own ideas. Lesson plans are a lot like recipes.
·It is better to overplan than underplan. An important part of teaching is making choices.
You can always leave something out or decide to use it another day or in another way. As
I became a more experienced teacher I overplanned on purpose.
·Lesson plans should change. If something does not work in one class, you can do it differ-
ently the next period, the next day, or the next year. At the end of a class or the day, I jot
down comments on my lesson plans for future reference: what worked, what did not,
what to add, drop, or change.
·Some lesson plan goals require more than one period to achieve. Just because time can
be subdivided into discrete intervals does not mean that human beings think in 40-
minute blocks or that every (or any) idea can be grasped in one class period.
·A structured plan makes it possible to be flexible in class. You can choose from different
built-in lesson alternatives based on student involvement in the lesson. Maybe you can-
not change a horse in “midstream,” but you can change a lesson plan.
·Lesson plans must be adjusted to meet particular circumstances and they need to be dif-
ferent for different students. A lesson that makes sense for a class of 15 may not work
with a class of 34. A lesson planned for a class that meets in the morning probably has to
be modified for a class that tears into the room at 2:30 PM. Lessons planned for heteroge-
neous classes will differ from lessons planned for homogenous classes. Lessons must be
planned with students in mind.
·Lessons planned for middle school students differ from lessons planned for high school
classrooms. Usually middle school teachers have fewer time constraints. This makes it70 CHAPTER 3