I haven't had much experience with writing lesson plans, except for the ones that I have needed to hand in for my classes. But my fiance is a teacher and I see the time and effort she puts in for her lesson plans and I find it funny that all that time goes into something to really just please the administration. I agree with the fact that every teacher must be following a plan with an objective and the NJ standards. But my fiances school is being assessed by some organization (QSAC i think she said) so she and the other teachers have to change their lesson format to include many different items. She must include the standard, objective, essential question, activities, and assessment..................all in one of those little lesson plan boxes! I find it funny because we all know that most teachers do not teach with their lesson plan book on their lap, so why must we write step by step instructions? It's almost a waste of time. I think that something needs to be done to lessen up on the lesson plans. It does not have to be bare bones, but i think its nuts spending more time on writing the lesson plans than the actual lesson? I know it wont probably always be like this, and still its my fiances second year, but I truly know what she means now when she says " Just because teachers have the summers off, doesn't mean they work any less." Writing lesson plans is proof of this.
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Chris I can not believe that I am actually going to write what I am about to hehehe! I used to think the very same way as you do in your post. Ever since I started to take the graduate courses not just in education but in administration & supervision, I started to see the point of view from the other side of the coin. Since there is a set of benchmarks that the state expect us to reach with the students in order for them to leave high school and be able to succeed in College they give us the Core Standards as a guideline, so when we are getting ready to cover a material in class we use them as a guide to make sure that what we are doing in the classroom gives our students the opportunity to use prior knowledge and skills. Otherwise we might as well pick a topic everyday and just talk about it, and every teacher would be doing their own thing and the students will get to 12th grade knowing a lot about nothing!. One of the great benefits in lesson planning is that it gives us the opportunity as a teacher to research the subjects and to find ways to make it interesting and fun. Take for example the California website with all their resources for lesson plans , we can benefit from lessons that worked very well for others. Another big one is when a lesson does not work as we planned it, we keep it in our books and make adjustments and learn from our mistakes so we improve the next year. We don't have to discard our hard worked lesson plans , we should save them and as years goes by we need to spend less time in writing them just adjusting accordingly. Trust me, once you get the hang of it, you will not try a class without a lesson plan in place.
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