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The topic of lesson planning is one that attracts a lot of different opinions in the teaching spheres. Most people swear by lesson planning and they use it for all their lessons without fail. However, there is a select group of non-believers who are against this method of organizing lessons. They believe that creating and following lesson plans will take away some of the flexibility of a lesson that a teacher in normally allowed. For example, if at a part in the lesson plan you had planned to do a certain activity and then during the lesson something happens or one of the students is misbehaving it will be hard for the teacher with the lesson plan to change the activity and put one that allows for the class to settle down. Having said all this let me start by saying exactly what a lesson plan is from what I learnt in the course and from my own personal experience as an amateur teacher. A lesson plan is a document made in order to plan exactly how the lesson is going to go. It writes activities to be down in order and also has timing on each activity. Some side notes can also be added for the teachers use. It is effectively a working document that serves as a record for the teacher to review in later stages of the course. It will really help in order to see what has been covered and what has not yet been covered and might need more attention in the future. In each of the lessons the teacher will conducts the lesson using this ‘schedule’. Now that I have given a little bit of background on what exactly a lesson plan is I will now go into some of the benefits and disadvantages of lesson planning as a teacher. Lessons plans help with organization, record keeping, neatness, makes the lesson run a bit smoother, they also allow inexperienced teachers the opportunity to be able to learn while on the job by taking the stress out of teaching for them, they can just follow the plan and be gaining experience every time. Some disadvantages include the before mentioned rigidity of lesson plans, it also takes the surprise out of lessons for the teacher and lesson scan become too mechanical and monotonous. Personally, I feel that. The advantages I get from lesson planning outweigh the disadvantages and I will always use lesson plans in all my lessons. With experience however, I have learnt to leave a little space for movement in my plans and so have areas where I don’t specify the exact activity but I will decide it during the lesson after seeing how the students are responding to previous activities. This may not be conventional but I decided to make a small tweak to my plans using all the experience I have gained so far in my teaching career am sure as I gain more experience I will find new tweaks and methods to add to my lesson plans that will enable me to get the best out of my lessons.
