Over the past week I have been planning the first of my five lessons. In this blog post, I will discuss some of the challenges I faced, successes I had, and the things I learnt that will help me plan my other four lessons.
Challenges
The biggest challenge I faced in planning this lesson was making sure that the wording I used was appropriate to my target audience, of S1 and S2 students. I found myself having to go back and re-word sections of text, to make them more accessible. I also decided to include a list of keywords, to refresh students’ memories of key ecological terms such as ‘habitat’, and ‘ecosystem’. This should make it easier for them to complete the activities in the lesson and will hopefully support students who have difficulties such as processing or dyslexia. In addition to wording, I also found it hard to limit the amount of text I had on my PowerPoint slides. I wanted to keep a large font size, of at least 28, so that the text could be easily read from the back of the classroom. To do so, I had to cut some of the information. This was particularly hard in the part of the lesson where I wanted to explain what an insect is. I had originally planned to have some text on the board to discuss with the students. However, I realised that a large block of text, and me talking at the same time as they would be reading, would not be very engaging and I want to avoid students ‘switching off’ because they are overloaded with information. Instead, I decided to make a video with diagrams and a voiceover, which I think will be more visual and more effective in maintaining the students’ interest.
Successes
Something I found that would work to break up sections of text, was using animation to reveal short chunks of text at a time on the PowerPoint slides, this way I can gradually reveal the information when it is appropriate to do so. I also found it useful to look at examples of presentations teachers have openly shared on websites such as the TES, and look back at my notes from the lesson I observed at Liberton High School. I noticed that many lessons start with a brief overview of what is planned for the lesson, then the learning objectives are discussed, and students were told how they will know that they had achieved these objectives. Then, the main body of the lesson is taught, and a plenary activity conducted at the end. I used this structure for my first lesson plan, and will replicate it in my other four lessons. I think this structure will work well, as it will help the students to have a clearer understanding of whether they have met the learning objectives that I would like them to achieve.
Lessons learnt
By planning this lesson early on, I realised just how much time needs to be dedicated to organising the resources that will be used, making the resources, and creating clear and concise PowerPoint slides. I now have a much better idea of the amount of time I need to dedicate to planning the other four lessons in my project. Now have a basic template of a lesson plan, with learning objectives, keywords and a plenary section, I can use this for the subsequent lessons. This will enable me to be more efficient in my lesson planning. Additionally, by looking at examples of lessons made by teachers on resource sharing sites, I have a better understanding of the level of language that I should be using during my lessons.
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