As teachers, we live to be creative and find new and better ways to help children learn.
But equally, as teachers, we have an immense workload and it can be really difficult to make all the hours add up in the day.
Many of us turn to premade TES lesson plans as a way of squaring the circle.
But using somebody else’s lesson plan and being creative don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Here are 5 fun ideas for personalising a pre-made plan.
Develop the Lesson
Just because the plan has been made in advance, it doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. This is particularly important when looking at differentiation. What similar challenges would be suitable for less able, or your gifted, students? How can you develop on the theme of the original?
Make it Relevant
Depending on where your lesson plan came from, some can be quite old and generic. How can you really make it relevant by adding in things in the news or that come from the students’ experience. Instead of measuring the angles on a sheet of paper could they measure the angles your buildings around the school?
Personalise with Your Favourite Tasks
Every teacher, and every class has their favourite tasks – how can you incorporate them into your lesson plan to make it extra engaging? If your MFL group likes doing wordsearches could you add a wordsearch task as a starter to a premade plan covering a new topic?
Change the Delivery Method
You could cover the same topic but in a different way to adapt a plan to the needs of your students or what your school offers. The opportunities are endless – a suitable video from Youtube, acting out the content or even getting the students to prepare the lesson themselves and teach it to each other. Adding some interesting delivery methods can easily give a premade plan more pizzazz.
Go Cross Curricular
Just because you’re a science teacher, doesn’t mean you have to pick science lesson plans. How would an RE teacher address the question of reproductive ethics, or a drama teacher, or an English teacher? Why not take lesson plans from other subjects and try personalising those instead?
If you have other ideas, I’d love to hear them. Either respond in the comments or tweet me @creativeedu
During teachers education here in India, (B. Ed for schools upto class XII) – we are asked to make lesson plans. But what most do is collect copies from earlier students and just copy them – thus learning just the vague idea of how to create/make a realistic and relevant plan that would satisfy the needs of the subject and class-room needs (i.e. what students want).
I’ll have to ask my colleagues to read your post.
Cheers
Thanks for your comment. Always interesting to hear how teaching happens in other countries.
Yes, you are right – lessons need to be fresh and in context. It is not always easy for teachers who have a heavy workload. At loonyliterature we are striving for the same thing whether in the classroom or at home. Thank you for the article.
Personally, making each lesson ‘relevant’, whether that be with the news, with what’s happening in the school, on TV, or in the local area has always been a great way to increase engagement with students. Getting to that place where the kids are all debating, and becoming so passionate is the point when I know, almost for sure, that my teachings will be sinking in.
I think that as interesting a lesson is for kids the better the results, so I agree with Rob, that is a lesson gets them talking they will learn it easier, and in the end make the teacher’s job a pleasure.
Thank you so much for this article! I teach at an American Elementary school in Budapest, Hungary, and it’s always a challenge to keep the lessons intriguing to vast array of multicultural students. Implementing out of the subject lesson plans is an awesome idea.
Helping students to apply what they have learn-linking it to life is essential.I think it is essential that the teacher should be very clear on the learning outcomes -what she expects in terms of maybe knowledge and skills- and the needs of her learners.Personalizing the lesson plan is then a natural progression !
lesson plans kill the originality and creativity . You are tempted to drumbeat the same in other divisions. What you require is innate creativity to design it in short time according to the needs of the situation . But the teacher must be an artist. I believe in my intution and innate quick designing of the class. So i dont prepare a lesson plan before.
Though I am not a teacher myself, I remember back in school (a long long time ago) that lessons that struck a chord with me were those that were really creative. Whether it was actually acting something out in a History lesson, or actually drawing something in Science to understand it.
Also, I always found discussions to be brilliant, especially when the teacher took a step back and just let us go for it! Rather than just making us copy from a certain textbook.
I’m still sort of involved with education today, many teachers use the software that I have helped develop to create bespoke on the fly tests for their students. Though, truth be told, I always regret not giving teaching a try.
Tom