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A teachers plan for a lesson shouldn’t be taken lightly, because a proper lesson plan can ensure absolute fluency of the entire lesson. From as simple as teaching the content to the more complicated management of the lesson. The distinct difference between these two creates the importance of being able to merge them together. In my opinion a teacher who masters this will always have an effective lesson with the students. My first ever experience as a part time teacher came a few months ago. I was inexperienced and also didn’t possess the knowledge learnt from the TEFL course. I arrived in class to teach students 6-7 years old without any lesson plan and thought it would be easy to plan with my head as I progress with the class. Although my supervisor stated that it wasn’t bad for a first timer, I knew I made plenty of mistakes and had a long way to go to be a good effective teacher. The students weren’t engaging much and often lost concentration at crucial moments, which led to disruption within the classroom. This goes to show the importance of having a lesson plan that will ensure the proper procedure, thus resulting in being able to properly enforce engagement in the classroom and minimize lack of concentration through certain preplanned activities. I further noticed that without a proper lesson plan, I couldn’t help the students that needed individual attention with word pronunciation because I kept on drilling the whole class together. This was bad because their confidence in attempting to read sentences decreased. Lesson planning would have made me be able to allocate appropriate time in individual monitoring of students during drilling sessions as well as individual exercises. Effective lesson planning would’ve certainly allowed me to have a personal aim, which would have led to better understanding of my students as individuals and as a group, thus being able to bring out the best in them and produce an effective lesson. The last problem I had in my experience that could’ve been avoided if I planned my lesson, was that I didn’t have enough pictures for practice and also didn’t prepare exercises for the students. A lesson plan would’ve ensured that I note all the teaching aids needed to effectively teach the students, whilst also making sure that I prepare fun activities for the active phase of the lesson. That being said, the cause of this problem was the fact that there was no language point in my lesson. The vocabulary I taught was not in sync with one another and this led to the students getting confused when it came to sentence construction and grammar. Ultimately, the experience I had in my first ever lesson as a teacher created the ability of growing and do better. It provided the opportunity to ensure there is an effective lesson plan in place, as well as the importance of having the plan in place. Since then my classes have been better, more fluent and fun for the students. This is why I think it is critical to have an effective lesson plan, so that these mistakes are completely avoided.
