Yes, We Need to Lesson Plan

“It is a futile exercise to try to prepare teachers in advance to tackle so many unpredictable needs, wants, and situations,” Kumar writes (286).  I sympathize with this quote because I have spent hours strategically planning lessons and then have had to change these plans 2 minutes into class in order to meet student needs.  Instances like these sometimes make teachers wonder, “Why even bother planning and predicting?”  However, this week’s readings informed me about how to strategically design curriculums and lessons.  I already have a great deal of background knowledge on this topic from both my other curriculum and instruction classes and my own teaching experience.  However, the TESOL perspective gives me an opportunity to adapt my existing lesson planning schema. 

              Although the previous Kumar quote was very extreme, it emphasizes the importance of a teacher’s sense of plausibility.  Teachers must be able to make sense of both teaching and learning in particular moments in particular contexts.  They must be able to adapt when things do not go to plan, and they will need the competence to make many important decisions in a moment’s notice.  Many of these decisions will result in mistakes.  This demonstrates the importance of teachers observing their own pedagogy and making an effort to improve as teachers.  A great way to improve is for teachers to try and imagine their teaching from 3 perspectives: their own, their students, and a 3^rd party observer (291).  Kumar thinks observers play an important role in the classroom because they “analyze and interpret teaching acts, not judge and evaluate the teacher” (304).  However, as a young teacher, I completely disagree.  I feel that young teachers need extensive evaluations and strategic coaching.  If I am doing something wrong, I want my colleagues to explicitly correct me so that we can address the problem.  Older teachers have more experiences that can result in better reflections than simply independent ones. 

            The 3 Brown chapters connected curriculum to lesson plans to specific instructional techniques.  Brown begins the topic of curriculum design by emphasizing how lessons are all embedded in a larger context (148).  I completely agree and believe that there are very few lessons worth including in the curriculum if they cannot be tied to larger and more meaningful contexts.  Rather than describing what a typical curriculum usually contains, Brown described how a curriculum is determined.  The first step is a situation analysis (150).  This involves examining teachers, students, and the community in order to determine the needs of the educational stakeholders.  Brown describes what factors to consider when determining needs, but he doesn’t describe who actually gets to determine the curricular needs of students.  Is it the school board?  Parents?  Do students at the college level get to determine their own curriculum or is this left to the university and professors?  In my opinion, the views of all stakeholders should be taken into account before curriculum decisions are made.   

            All good lesson plans include certain essential elements such as objectives, a list of materials, an activity outline, and accommodations for students with special needs.  Brown includes all of these things in his sample lesson plans, but I disagree with the process he outlines for creating lesson plans.  I advocate for the lesson planning technique known as backwards design.  Rather than planning my activities and then my assessment, I believe that I should know exactly what I want students to learn before planning my activities.  I am flexible and adaptable to other methods, but I have had success with this method thus far.  Page 185 provides an awesome list of techniques that teachers can use in the language classroom.  I favor the communicative and task-based activities, but this list will be extremely helpful and will give me ideas for activities that accommodate other learning styles.  In my point of view, a teacher’s ability to use a wide variety of techniques to accommodate all students is one of the most important aspects of teaching.  Regardless of how much success a teacher has, can a teacher really afford to use only one approach in this age of diversity?  Regardless of the techniques or approaches used, all activities must reflect the goals of the overall lesson plans.  Furthermore, all lesson plans should help teachers and students reach curricular goals.