Welcome to the profession of teaching! Whether you are just considering the field of education at this point or have been formally admitted to the School of Education, it is likely that you have considered the field of education because you enjoy working with children or adolescents or you had an inspirational teacher who made a difference in your own life whose work you wish to replicate. You may love the content you are studying and wish to share that with others. You may also feel you can make a difference in the lives of others through teaching. For any of these reasons you feel called to teach, the act of teaching itself begins with planning.
Planning involves a great deal of decision-making (Hunter, 1994; Danielson, 2007). You will be making decisions about content, instructional activities, and of course assessments. Your planning is for the specific purpose of helping students with whom you work, learn. Research has shown that there is a positive relationship between the quality of lesson planning and the quality of lesson delivery (Dorovolomo, J., Phan, H.P. & Maebuta, J., 2017).
When you first begin planning, it seems the focus will be on you—the teacher. You may think about what you will be doing, what materials you will need, and how much time you will need to teach a lesson. This is often the focus for education students who are in introductory courses. However, with more experience in planning and in the delivery of lessons, the focus will increasingly be on your students and their learning. In your methods courses and student teaching experiences, the focus will be on student learning, though your plans still involve decisions about materials, activities, and time.
As you can see, the audience of this lesson planning handbook is students in introductory courses, students in methods courses, and students completing their student teaching experiences. All will be using similar lesson plan templates and making decisions about similar lesson components. However, course instructors of students at these various levels may choose to have students focus on particular segments of the lesson planning process. For example, you may be asked to complete specific sections of the plan or to focus your attention on the details of a particular section of the lesson planning document.