Reflections on lesson planning

These last weeks we have been dealing with lesson planning in all of our units. We have been planning and putting in practice lessons ourselves, and at the same time we learned Penny Ur's guidelines for ordering the components of a lesson plan from her book A course in language teaching: practice and theory:

• Put the harder tasks earlier
• Have quieter activities before lively ones
• Think about transitions
• Pull the class together at the beginning and at the end
• End on a positive note

By all means, Penny Ur's guidelines are essential, and I would say that the easiest ones to tackle as a novice teacher are the ones about ordering the activities (putting harder tasks earlier, having quieter activities before lively ones, so the teacher will not have to make a great effort to calm the group down). On the contrary, I find that managing transitions in such a way that the overall outcome will feel balanced and harmonious, and the lesson will flow naturally, is much harder at the beginning.

Especially in pre-primary, I see a lesson as a unit in time and space, when and where the teacher must create an atmosphere which will resemble a big balloon that holds the whole group inside. It is the teacher's task to blow this balloon up at the beginning of the lesson, with the class together, as Penny Ur suggests. This first blowing up is not that difficult, as children are curious by nature and will be interested at first. It is maintaining the balloon with the right amount of air throughout the lesson what is really hard.

Frequent problems are the balloon going flat because the lesson lost momentum, or bursting it. In my experience, based on what I have seen and done myself during my school placements, losing momentum is mainly due to "losing air" during transitions, but also because the teacher decides to maintain an activity after its peak of interest and excitement for students, thus letting it die slowly. On the contrary, "bursting the balloon" is often due to excess of lively activities, excess of stimuli, or lack of ability to return the class to a calmer situation after lively activities. Teachers must acquire the right skills to manage these situations gracefully, monitoring the class to know when the balloon is deflating, in order to pump in some air, or when it is so tight that calming down is essential for it not to burst.

Certainly, knowing what the teacher should do is one thing, and managing to do so is quite another. Only experience, together with determination, will train the teacher in this sense.