Lesson Plans & Grading - Advice For First Time Teachers

You will find that on any given week you will be faced with many different kinds of paperwork. It will pop up here and there and seemingly every piece of it will need your attention. However, you will likely find it unavoidable that two kinds of paperwork will join your daily routine: lesson plans and grading. If you think about it, these two activities really encapsulate your job responsibilities. You first have to plan what you are going to teach the students, and you next have to evaluate whether or not the students have retained what you have taught them. If you want your time to be spent as effectively as possible in the classroom, you need to immerse yourself in the actions of grading and planning. Embrace the paperwork that comes with these activities as a necessary evil of getting things done.

It is not in the scope of this article to instruct you on how to make a lesson plan. If you have looked at even one teacher-training manual, you have no doubt seen the important parts that need to go into any decent lesson plan. Once you get about a year's worth of teaching experience, you will discover your own unique method of what works and what doesn't work when constructing the perfect plan.

What you will want to do is inquire whether your particular school wants you to submit your lesson plans. Some schools mandate that you keep all of your lesson plans in an appropriate file, while other schools only want to see a lesson plan when you have an administrator observing you. Then there are the more laid back schools, that just want you to have some sort of evidence that you plan your classroom, and be able to to provide that evidence if they are requested.

In any case, it doesn't matter what style you use for your lesson plans. Depending on what subject you teach you may find that less is more, or that more is better. For example, a math teacher might not want to get bogged down in too many details, as any good math lesson needs some wiggle room for explaining complicated formulas, and to account for the slower students.

The more and more you teach the less and less you're going to like making lesson plans. You're going to be really tempted to just wing it. This is not a good idea, it doesn't matter how confident you are with the class material. There's nothing like the chill that goes down your back when you find that you've been teaching the incorrect lesson for the whole class period. Also, if you anticipate and prepare for any questions you might receive, you'll look like the brainy teacher you ought to be.

You don't want to slack when it comes to assessing your student's progress, or lack thereof. It's the one thing that your superiors and the parents have to gauge your performance. Don't just make up scores if you don't have enough hard data. Be sure that you have enough test and quiz scores so that you can give each student a meaningful evaluation.