Drafting My First Lesson Plan!

For my second blog post, I wanted to reflect on my experiences with drafting my very first lesson plan. You might be thinking, "A lesson plan in your first education course?!" Yes, it sounds crazy, but I did it and it has been so beneficial!

Using the standard we unpacked last week, we were told to draft a lesson plan teaching that standard to our class. I wondered why we would be writing a lesson plan the third week in our first education course, but I soon made the connections that this first lesson plan we drafted will look sort of rough. It will have holes in it that will need to be filled before we actually stood in front of a class to teach it. Starting this process this early will allow us to get plenty of feedback from our professors throughout the rest of the years in our time in the school of education so that way when we get to our own classroom in the near future we can be fully confident in the lesson plan we have prepared for our students that it will send them away having new information in their little heads.

The thing I loved about the six-point lesson plan was that it had each point and what needs to be accomplished for each point to make the lesson successful. Also, it's not as crucial to go in that particular order. Every lesson taught will be different and the different aspects of each lesson may be delivered at different times depending on the material being taught.

Learning how to complete a successful lesson plan is so important to the NCTCS because it is required of us to show that we can collect ideas and data to form a successful instructional plan. Learning how to plan a successful lesson plan already will build confidence in our ability to perform when we are evaluated.

I researched other teachers who have used the six-point lesson plan and the majority of what I read was restating what we learned from class discussion and from the podcast. When forming this lesson, all the points don't need to be met for every lesson we teach. The main goal is to make sure that the students are engaged and learning and having the students provide us with feedback that assures us that they have taken something away from the lesson.

In conclusion, for my future classroom, I can feel confident that I will be fully prepared to teach material to my students while learning right beside them. I don't have to sweat it when I don't get to every activity I planned for. It's important to keep the students engaged and if they need to spend a few extra minutes on an activity that I planned to only last 5 minutes then that's okay. The whole goal in this is that the students can recall the information taught to them and they had fun doing so.