Reviewing Your Lesson Plans

Lesson Plans are a key document for teachers. They are the road-map through a lesson allowing us to have a clear plan and direction for each lesson we deliver.

As we continue to create and develop our lesson plans, we will ultimately have a collection of them and thus a unit of work ready and prepared. We are equipped to deliver prepared and considered lessons to our students.

However, it is very important to continue to review these documents; lesson plans and units of study are constantly evolving documents because the students we teach will change and so will the different challenges in the classroom. What worked for one class, may not work so well for another so it is important to make adjustments based on need and requirement.

In addition to this, it is important we review and reflect upon the actual lesson itself; did the plan go as you hoped? Were there tasks that were successful and others that were not? It is important to work out why tasks worked and did not work so you can then adapt these to suit.

If a task worked well, how can you develop it further so that students are challenged even more and stretched to the best of their ability? If the task did not work well, ask yourself why it didn’t? Were your instructions clear enough? Was the task too difficult? How can you adjust things?

In addition to this, you could review your role throughout the lesson. How was the opening and ending of the lesson? Was the start of the lesson a bit too noisy and challenging to settle everyone down quickly enough? Perhaps you could introduce a “Do-it-Now” activity that students could immediately get on with while everyone gets settled?

Was the ending more of a quick exit or was there an opportunity to assess the learning and progress that students made? Could you include a closing task such as “Thumbs up, down or in the middle” to illustrate how they felt their learning went?

Have you included timings in your lesson? When we plan it is very important to divide up the sections of the lesson so students don’t get bored, remain focused and it keeps a clear pace flowing throughout the lesson period.

A lot happens in a small space of time in a lesson but it is important that effective learning takes place and that we facilitate that learning. We need to enter a lesson being prepared and equipped with all the resources we will need such as photocopying or other materials.

It is our responsibility to allow our students to be the best that they can be and in doing so we have to be the best we can be.

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