Thoughts on Lesson Planning

I find that my introduction to writing lesson plans in EHS 600 will be very useful to me. I am going to use them a lot during my first year of teaching because as a new teacher, I will be nervous and will tend to be disorganized and distracted in front of all my students. I would like to get better at writing lesson plans, especially when it comes to accommodations and assessment. I have struggled to get my objectives, learning activities and assessment to coordinate with one another. I hope that gets better with experience. I plan on making a lesson plan for four of every five days per week in my first year of teaching even if it isn't required. I feel that I can plan for four and not five because I am certain that there will be days where we won't cover as much material as we should have and we fall behind, like most classroom teachers always do.

I also feel that my introduction to the Bloom's Taxonomy Verbs has made writing objectives far easier for me. I feel like I can look at the list of verbs and find a much more specific, measurable way to focus my instruction. One thing I am still finding very difficult is to estimate how long the learning activities will last. I am caught between scheduling far too much than the students can get through in one day, so the class falls behind, or the kids are able to blow through my activities and then have nothing to do. I need practice to make my time estimates accurate, but until then, I would rather not get through everything on a rich list of activities than to have my students waste valuable learning time in class because they have “nothing to do.” These are things I will focus my attention on improving in the future.