Planning and preparation are some of the most important principles of good teaching. Planning makes any lesson organized, effective and efficient. The instructor must design a topic according to the learner’s level whether its knowledge or language capacity especially when you have a group of diverse learners. While designing a good lesson some important components must be covered as follow:

  • The objective must be clearly explained and shared with the learners in the beginning.
  • The starting phase is most important as at this point the learners will either gain or lose interest for the rest of the session. To catch their attention instructor can introduce the topic creatively for instance sharing a visual, playing a video, or even asking a question that leads them toward the topic.
  • There must be a logical structure and flow to keep learners engaged.
  • In the middle part, there is a detailed demonstration of the topic, and it is vital as all learners are looking forward to this part.
  • The lesson should be student-centered where learners can have an opportunity to interact, demonstrate, perform hands-on, and get involved during the lesson.
  • The instructor must challenge the strong learners and support the weak learners to implement diversity in the lesson planning.
  • It is important to assess the learning for example set a quiz, guided activity, individual task, group activity, research project or scenario-based learning, etc.
  • Then finally end the lesson in such a way that learners can be able to understand and review the whole learning process and ask any queries related to the topic.

Some extra tip that helps me during my teaching experience is to prepare for the unpredictable situation. Sometimes we have trainees who finished their task earlier so instead of kept them waiting for other trainees then move on to the next phase, I always prepare some extra work for them to keep them engage like vocabulary exercise related to the unit, online quiz using a website like www.quizlet.com or even ask them to help their team members.

Let’s watch a small video illustrated ‘‘Structured Lesson Planning’’

After reading this week’s topic and various instructional design models, I want to share the prior experiences that I had while conducting the observation for my department. I witnessed that some lessons went excellent that follow the instructional design ADDIE model. The highlights in these lessons were as follow:

  • The instructor has designed and implemented student-centered learning strategies.
  • The trainees kept engaged during the whole session.
  • Effective usage of educational technology during the lesson for instance; Padlet and Nearpod.
  • Cooperative learning helped students to do a task in groups and learned from each other experiences.
  • Activate Inquiry-based instruction. That helped students to become an agent of their learning whereas a teacher doesn’t provide the answer instead trained learners to find the answer by themselves.

On the other hand, the classroom observations that did not go well and have negative learning experience occurs, the key findings are described below:

  • There was a lack of interaction and engagement opportunities for the learners.
  • It was a teacher-centered classroom rather than a student-led learning environment.
  • The classroom delivery was not supporting the different learning styles.

Below is an image of the performance indicator that I used according to policy and procedure of teaching and learning observation.

References:

Christopher Fosdick (2018, July 22). ADDIE Model of Instructional Design [Video] YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxShaB4R0d8

Jennifer Stewart. (2013, August 18). Structured Lesson Planning [Video] YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gjuAdTurkQ