New Teachers: Should You Overplan Your Lessons?

The question is: how many of you new teachers (1-5 years of teaching experience) over-plan your lessons? As a new teacher 12 years ago, I constantly over-planned my lessons to make sure ALL students participated, even if it meant restructuring the lesson.

In general, over-planning is a good habit to develop, especially when used as backup plans to support parts or even an entire lesson.

However, the problem with over-planning becomes even more complicated and tricky during those unexpected times. How do you know exactly which activity to use? And for how long? How many activities? This is where the experience and knowledge of the students and their abilities can play an important role in deciding which activities are appropriate to use. Sometimes you may be surprised by your own spontaneity and discover that you know more than you really thought.

Overplanning is part of the “ups and downs” of the new teacher. When faced with difficult classes, I constantly overplanned because eventually I wanted to start “catching up” with the right level, motivation, and interest of my students. When I failed, I started to push the panic zone which led to more over-planning and general overload.

But just for the sake of argument, let’s take the following classroom situation:

Let’s say you’ve planned a twenty-minute independent reading session for your high school students, but for some unexplained reason, they’re not focused. You later find out (in a roundabout way) that they don’t have some of the most important reading skills to cope with the story you’ve asked them to read. More specifically, there are too many unknown words and the theme of the story is quite sophisticated for his high school years. And that?

So before you start removing those backup plans, make sure you have the following in order:

1. Make sure you plan strong transitions. Look at the transitions as “glue” that hold the pre-middle and post parts together. Weak transitions are a sure sign that you may lose some students along the way. You’ll also want to make sure that the transition really serves its purpose and helps connect the introduction to the main part of a lesson. Transitions do not necessarily have to be an additional activity; it is enough to say a few sentences as “cues” to hint to the students what awaits them.

A new teacher might say to her class after they have predicted some of the story content and taught new vocabulary, “OK, now let’s confirm some of your predictions and see how many new words there are in context.”

2. Don’t extend too many of your originally planned activities beyond the originally set time. This is where experience will make you a pro and you will eventually be able to tell the difference between real trial and error time or “money”. How much time do students really need to complete the task effectively?

To make sure you have enough time for each part, vary the timing sequences. Most of the lesson should be no longer than 25 minutes, while the activities in the plan should be only 5 minutes or so. Plan multiple lessons on the same topic if necessary so you’re not short on time.

3. Take careful note when students begin to lose focus and become distracted. Ask a colleague or mentor teacher to give you solid, honest feedback aimed at improving your teaching. Here is a checklist of general troubleshooting areas.

4. Do you overplan your lessons to include any differentiated instruction? For each level and skill, make sure you have at least 1 activity that you can pull out of a hat as needed. Write down that activity and make a note of its success. Save the experience for a later date.

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Consider the fact that perhaps the students were not focused, which is another classroom problem and requires a different set of actions.

So the question again is how many of you new teachers (1-5 years of teaching experience) over-plan your lessons? In what classroom situations do they help? Why do you do it? Is there any other advice you could give to new teachers?