The Other Perspective of Lesson Planning

I’ve been in the teaching arena for almost four years. Not for anything else, but it is rewarding to myself to have a compilation of Lesson Plans (LPs) at the end of the school year. In my first two years of teaching, I’ve prepared my LPs handwritten but in my third year I’ve exerted effort encoding and printing each LPs and book binded it at the end of the School Year. The advantage of preparing your LPs encoded is for editing purposes. Unlike handwritten LPs, encoded LPs were easy to edit and revise. I have compiled an average of 150 Lesson Plans every School Year.

A lesson plan is a teacher’s detailed description of the course of instruction for an individual lesson. A daily lesson plan is developed by a teacher to guide class instruction. Planning the material is much more difficult than delivering the lessons. Planning is when you look at the curriculum standards and develop the content that match those standards you also have to take into consideration the needs of the children you are planning for (Wikipedia). Luckily, textbooks that are adopted for subject areas are typically written with this in mind. Aside from that, DepEd also prepared a prototype LPs for each learning areas. However, it is different inside the classroom and it is a no-no to rely on prototype LPs. The teacher should always be creative considering the level of student’s comprehension, available materials, and number of students, classroom environment and the level of difficulty of the lesson.

My LPs were originally developed for daily classroom instruction. It was produced after 3 years of persistent revising and updating my older LPs to align with the standards of the prescribed curriculum. It has been said that the extent of the detail of a lesson plan varies depending on the number of years of experience that the teacher has and the number of times he has taught the lesson. So still, some revisions have to be made with my LPs, considering my young age in the field.

My LPs also reflects our collaborative work within the Physics Group and also our constant sharing of useful and updated materials for classroom instruction. On the other side, these LPs also serve as a diary, an account of daily classroom teaching-learning process which reminds me of some experiences that made me angry, made me smile, made me laugh or even challenged me to the extent of increasing my blood pressure and raising my voice. Thank God, I’ve survived and I’m still alive!

I would like to acknowledge the people who helped me to come up with my daily LPs.

I would like to thank our Department Head for her constructive criticism during our ‘post conference’ every time she renders classroom observation which made us persevere to improve our teaching practices and in one way or another made us better mentors. For her patience and guidance, I wish to thank Ma’am Norie.

I would like to thank our MT’s for patiently rendering classroom observation with our department head. We are grateful for your follow up observations and your valuable inputs for us to improve more our craft. Thank you Ma’am Weng and Ma’am Cora.

Also, I would like to thank my co-teachers [especially to Physics Group] for their support, my students for their naughtiness, and my family for their understanding.

Thanks to my inspiration, who often believes in me more than I do myself.

Mostly, I express my gratitude to HIM above, for none of these would be possible without HIM.

J. Freigh