My FIRST Lesson Planning Experience

The experience of writing and carrying out my first lesson plan is exciting and terrifying. I have always thought of myself as relatively good at public speaking, and I can prepare for those pretty well.

Lesson planning is not like that at all.

Firstly, I should have spent much more time thinking about what to teach for the first lesson. My colleague and I chose something that neither of us know a whole lot about simply because we were running out of time. Everyone else in class had topics already so we chose one in haste. Because of this mistake, we now need to do extensive research before we are able to construct and practice our lesson. Secondly, the frustration is very real. On top of choosing to teach something we don’t know about, figuring out how to teach is exasperating. After going through and trying to address each type of learner, we realized it is almost impossible. But try we did. And it is almost good, I think.

It was so incredibly rewarding when we finished our second rough draft of our lesson plan. One step closer. Our careers are almost real. With only two more years of college left, we are almost there. It was the light at the end of the tunnel that we needed to see in order to push on. There are still a lot of changes that need to be made in order to have a cohesive and effective lesson plan, but I really think that for our first try, things are going well.

Transitions are something we know we need to work on. It has been so challenging, in fact, that whenever we think of something to say, we have been writing it down on our lesson planning sheet (draft). We already decided that we need to set a few hours aside strictly for practicing. Before now, I had never thought about all the transitions that teachers need to accomplish in order to get through their lesson plan, and have even a stronger admiration than before for my successful teachers in the past.

To write successful lesson plans, I believe it is important to cater to all learning styles, or as many as you possibly can, in one lesson. We have been practicing this in our own lesson plan, especially with adaptations for students with IEPs.

SHOUT OUT: to my special education major friend who saw me and Heather struggling with this part and offered some tips on how to accommodate certain types of students.

Another aspect of teaching that I never thought of was time management. For our first lesson plan, we need to teach a topic on diversity with only THIRTY MINUTES. When we first tried this we thought it would be easy, but after adding up our minutes at the end, we realized we went over, big time. No wonder so many of my college professors don’t get through their lessons; there’s no time! Thankfully, though, I think Heather and I finally managed to fit all we plan on doing within our time restriction.

Overall, I actually really enjoy lesson planning, as wearisome as it is, and I am growing more and more excited about my future in this field of work. Fingers crossed, though, that our lesson plan runs as smoothly as it looks it might…but who knows?