Becoming a teacher is not an easy task; the responsibility pushes you to be the best every day. An effective lesson plan helps you to achieve this expectation while delivering the lecture or taking the session. An effective lesson plan encompasses planning for every activity you will do in the classroom. You can prepare the lesson according to your students’ understanding, available resources, schedule, topic, and context. Planning a practical lesson is an art that sets you apart from other teachers and helps you cater for your students in your way.
Wondering how to make an effective plan and sharpen this skill?
In this blog, we have crafted a step-by-step guide to create an effective plan for your upcoming lectures or classroom sessions. But first, let’s briefly understand an effective lesson plan and its components.
What is an Effective Lesson Plan?
A lesson plan is a roadmap for a teacher, instructor or educator that guides them to effectively teach the student a particular topic and subject in the classroom. The effective lesson plan resonates with the curriculum design, pedagogical approach, and student-centred learning. It is the base of any session the teacher takes in the classroom. It comprises different essential components such as objectives, activities, assessments, and more that make the session interactive, engaging and fruitful for both the student and teacher.
Key Components of an Effective Lesson Plan
A good lesson plan integrates and addresses some basic but essential components. Some key elements are:
Learning Objectives
One of the crucial components of an effective plan is the goal of that lesson; what you want to achieve after that session is vital. The lesson’s objectives can be creating the foundation of a certain topic and helping students achieve excellence in that.
Resources and Activities
The resources available at your school and the activities you’re comfortable with also play a major role in planning the lessons. Classroom electronic devices such as interactive panels, digital projectors, and classroom management software offer an edge to plan your lesson with technologically advanced features.
Strategy to Check Outcomes
Another major component of an effective lesson plan is your strategy to evaluate your students’ learning outcomes, which includes assessments, quizzes, and questionnaire rounds.
Using the suitable components, you can plan the lesson effectively for your students. Here is a step-by-step comprehensive guide to planning lessons.
5 Steps of Effective Lesson Planning
Step 1: Identify the Lesson Plan Objectives
Identifying what you want your students to learn or accomplish by the end of the lesson. It helps you understand the students better and deliver content that is more aligned with the students’ learning process. You can describe the goal based on:
- School curriculum standard
- Prior knowledge of students
These objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
For example, if you teach maths multiplication to students of class one. Your objective can be for students to start multiplying instead of using simple digits.
Step 2: Check Alloted Time and Content to be Delivered
As a teacher, you must finish the syllabus in a year or 9 months, meaning you have limited time. First, you must identify how much time you want to invest in making a student learn a certain lesson. This time allocation will assist you in incorporating activities and differentiated instructions into the lesson plan.
Moreover, this also identifies the content you need to deliver to the student. You check the curriculum, syllabus, and textbook to understand the kind of content and the amount you need to teach in the classroom.
Step 3: Plan the Activities
Now that you understand the timeline, length, and type of content, start planning your activities accordingly. You can:
Plan how you will Introduce the topic.
The chapter’s introduction plays a pivotal role in creating interest among the students in the topic or session. You will need to craft an introduction that captures the students’ attention. It may include fear of missing out, interesting facts and figures, surprising incidents related to the topics, etc.
Embed activities throughout the session
Now, when you have introduced the topic so well that students are paying attention, the challenge is to hold it. You will need to incorporate several activities in the lesson plan so the students learn the concepts effectively. Here, you can decide the activities students can do, such as creating a PowerPoint on the topic before the lesson, crafting their questions after the lesson, letting them play any game to understand the concepts, etc. You can also plan some engaging activities that you can perform in class, especially in science or mathematics. Activities cater to the student’s learning capacity and make them learn more efficiently. Activities bring heart, hand, and head work together, making the learning interesting and effective.
Leverage Different Learning Styles
While planning the lesson, you can include different learning styles to make it interesting for your students. You can embed in your lesson plans:
- Education videos
- Research papers
- Documentaries
- PDFs
- Books
- Podcast
- Images
- 3-D
- GIFs
- Simulation
- & more
Including differentiated instruction mediums will help you make every student understand the concept. Different human beings follow and learn in different ways. For example, some learn efficiently through visualisation, some through only listening, some through reading and some through writing.
Step 4: Incorporate Assessment
When you’re done with the lesson planning, it’s time to plan how to evaluate the learning outcomes. You can incorporate assessments, quizzes, questionnaire rounds, and other activities. Assessment methods will help you understand whether your lesson plan meets the objectives. The assessment outcome will also help you review and improve the plan for upcoming sessions.
Step 5: Plan Homework & Revision
Learning objectives aren’t accomplished only through classroom activities. You’ll also be required to plan the revision and homework for your students. You can decide on the kinds of homework, whether objective or subjective, per the student’s schedule and the subject’s requirements.
How Senses Can Help You Plan the Lessons Effectively?
Senses is an AI-equipped intelligent interactive panel that facilitates several features to plan lessons on various subjects and classrooms. Senses encompasses:
- In-built subject-wise icon
- Chapter wise content
- Multi-language support
- Multi canvas features
- Auto text and shape recognition
- Features to Insert files, video, and ppts on board
- Direct access to global content
- Auto note creation
- & more
You can leverage these features of Senses electronic panel while teaching and incorporate them while planning the lesson and improve your instructional strategies. This panel will assist you teach your students through your preferred teaching method or your students’ learning approach. The senses panel with Sense board, sense connect, and sense capture equip you to enhance the teaching and learning experience in the classroom.
Want to know how sense can help you? Schedule a demo with us now!
Alternatively, you can also watch the video demonstrating the senses panel virtually.