Question:
There have been some posts mentioning being up till 11 pm or later
writing lesson plans. I e-mailed someone once who said her first two
months of teaching she spent 4+ hours an evening writing lesson plans.
I am curious what others do when they write lesson plans. Are you
writing them to turn in to someone else, and if so, what kind of
criteria do they have to meet? Do you turn in several pages a week, or
just a few paragraphs?
When you sit down for a few hours to write lesson plans, what exactly do
you do? Is much of that time spent researching ideas, on the Internet or
in books? Do you spend a lot of time just thinking?
Also, how far in advance do you write your plans? I never actually write
them more than a week before.
Answer:
I don't do much in the way of detailed lesson plans. I write short
descriptions so that I know what I'm doing, but no one could really teach
using them. No one at my school wants to look at lesson plans, although
they tell us we need to do them and have them available in case anyone asks
to see them....
At my last school we had to turn them in but they didn't have to be
detailed. I pretty much wrote the same thing I do now. We turned them into
a folder in the office, supposedly once a week, but I don't think anyone
ever really read them. Some teachers I knew copied weeks and months at a
time and turned them all in at once (late, not early).
I generally sit down on Wednesday and Thursday to decide what to do the
following week. I have lots of standing Monday/Tuesday assignments (block
scheduling) so that's easy to fill in. Once I decide what I'm going to do,
I usually spend time thinking about how exactly to do it. I might do some
research at home or wade thru my files and see what activities I can do. I
teach honors and regular 7th grade English, so I have to decide how to
adjust my lessons for the different levels. After I've done that, I make my
copies on Friday and unless I change things up or add assignments because
they finished something earlier than I expected, I'm ready for the
following week. It's nice because there are only 2 copiers for 70 teachers,
so I'm not desperately waiting in a huge line 5 minutes before class!
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