Section 2: Planning Classes

Chapter 7: Planning Each Class

As your time goes on as a teacher you will find that with teaching English going into each class without preparation or a plan makes classes much harder to get through on a daily basis. As an English teacher you should always go into each lesson knowing what you will do for the duration of the class as well as having back up plans in case one of your lessons or activities ends up being a dud. While people often talk about having a multiple page lesson plan for each lesson with depth to each one, it is not that complex to plan lessons. When many teachers first start teaching English, they often make lesson plans that are multiple pages long and they constantly end up doing hours upon hours of work at home on a daily basis. Many teachers in the field would break each lesson down step by step and make very rigid plans that had little wiggle room, even breaking everything in the lesson down minute by minute. In a real English teaching environment, it is not possible to plan and have a backup for every situation and every single thing that could happen in class. It is important that you go into class with clear goals and objectives every day. If your goal is to teach the students ten new words and phrases and to finish two pages in their books for the lesson you should focus on having games and activities centered around the vocabulary and phrases as well as making sure to put book work in between the activities and games so that the children do not feel burned out doing book work. It is very important to layer your classes with both activities or games as well as book work or worksheets. This can take your class to another level and save you a lot of trouble by giving your students constant stimulation and keeps their interest on English by not giving them a chance to be bored or a chance to get frustrated. With all of this being said it is very important to have a general lesson plan, but for every teacher they have their own style and you should look to build your own lesson plan templates that work for you in each class.