Lesson Planning

We had an interesting lesson today. 2 HODs came to share their experience and expertise in using ICT to conduct lessons in their respective schools. The sharing was genuine, sincere and meaningful. I can see the pride and joy they exhibit in the outcome of their experimentation. Most of all, they are so magnanimous to offer their advice and expertise to us should we need help. You rock, Darryl and Ms Wang!

Planning for Effective Lessons. That is something I look forward to in coming to NIE. And it is also the bane of trainee teachers on practicum. They complained how they had to submit well-written, typed out lesson plans to their CT for every lesson. Don't they practise doing this during their training? I always wondered.

I was given a brief format to prepare my lessons during the TPP by the trainer, dear old Ms Dorothy Tay. There was no elaboration, explanation or enlightenment on what goals, objectives are. Chapter 6 gave a clear, concise definition of each. Instructional Goal is like the one-liner that summarises the lesson focus. Objectives, on the other hand, are specific, with regard to materials, teaching and learning activities,content, etc. And action verbs are used, for evaluation purposes.

So how did I fare in writing my Lesson Plans the past 7 months?

Well, I have an objective for each lesson but no goal. And the objectives are conveniently copied from the teacher's guide book. (How else am I supposed to know?) I have an Introduction where I try to pique the students' interest, like an appetiser. The Development section would be the detailed flow of the lesson, such as worked examples, solving some questions from textbook, etc. Very simple and ... passable?

The book also provided some templates. However, I notice that there is no mention of time allocation. Do we guessitmate how much time to allocate? Or is this not important?