Lesson Planning Tips

Lesson planning will help you teach with confidence. 

The longer your class session, the more important it is to have a good lesson plan. Here are some tips to consider.

• Plan Alternative Activities
  Always have one or two alternative activities in case the material you've selected doesn't take all the time you thought it would. How will you fill an extra 10 minutes? 20 minutes?
  
  
• Build on Previous Material
  Try to continuously practice material that you've covered recently. It's often possible to teach the same theme several sessions in a row which can help ingrain vocabulary and concepts.
  
  
• Balance the Challenge of Content and Activity Type
  If your content is challenging, choose activities that are relatively easy to do like fill-in-the-blank exercises or guided discussion questions. If your content is fairly simple, try more challenging activities like role plays or problem-solving.
  
  
• Create Your Own Materials
  Build your own library of materials to support your lessons. You can find several ideas in the Lesson Preparation section of this guide. Be creative. If you invest some time into developing and collecting materials, you'll cut down on your preparation time when you are actually planning lessons.
  
  
• Center Lessons Around the Student
  Keep the focus on the learners and minimize the time you spend talking as a teacher. In other words, make the lesson as interactive as possible. Focus on communication.
  
  
• Assess Needs 
  Periodically take time to think through your particular learners' needs. Think about cultural factors as well as language deficiencies. This can help you prioritize what you choose to study. Are any of your students dealing with culture shock? What kind of language skills might help alleviate it? Try asking the students themselves what they would like to learn.
  
  
• Keep a Log 
  After each class, write a brief log of what you did. Include notes about what worked or didn't with ideas for improvement. Write down specific page numbers you covered in a textbook. You could also keep your lesson plans collected together, making sure to write notes on them about the success of various activities and whether you modified the lesson during class.

(*) http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/esl/lessontips.cfm

In my opinion:

All these tips above are related to the idea of become a good teacher. It’s important to understand your students and know what they think about the activity that you are doing in class. Some of these activities might be bored for your students and some of them might be effective, so it’s important to take notes after each class of what do you think you can improve or maybe what do you think you can leave just like that because its a perfect activity where everybody learns. 

Sometimes teachers don’t have a total control over the class and the student finish the task sooner than what you expect so, that’s when you need to have a card under the sleeve and come up with other activity so you can cover that time and don’t loose the focus of the class.

All these tips, in my opinion, are considered very important for any lesson plan that you will create.