One of the reasons why a lesson can fail is due to classroom management. One way to improve your lesson is to reevaluate your lesson plan.
So much goes on in a classroom in a very short period of time. As part of our own evaluation process as teachers, we need to be aware of how we use our time in the classroom. Many discipline problems occur when students feel that the lesson isn’t organized properly with appropriate activities for the beginning, middle and end parts of a lesson.
Improving lessons entails reevaluating your lesson plan again. What went wrong and why? How could it be improved? Try to pinpoint the specific problems and allocate a time frame for each activity. Write it on the board and check off the activity when the class has finished it. As a post part of your lesson, you can ask the class what you did in the class in order to give a sense of closure. It is also important to have backup activities. Students are smart; they can sense when an activity doesn’t speak to them and therefore, they can behave adversely. New students, teachers to be, practicing and working teachers need to get into the habit of looking at their lesson plan fairly on in their teaching career so that they can learn what does not work for their students.
When practiced routinely, this kind of reflection becomes fairly automatic and does not require any prior preparation. There are many ways of documenting this change. I take an issue that I find problematic and turn it into a question. For example: Did I give the students genuinely enough time to practice the new structure I’ve just taught them? The key is to answer it honestly.
Some teachers I know use line drawings that can go up or down depending on what happened. This is an excellent idea as long as the teacher knows what to improve for the next time. Always think in terms of improvement!
