Lesson Planning

This semester I am assigned to supervise some students from the eight semester doing pratice teaching. They learned approaches in ELT, lesson planning, and teaching techniques last semester. They are 9 students participating in this program. Before they teach the real class, they are trained to do peer teaching. With this experience, they should be ready to teach the real class with real students.Then, I asked every student to prepare a lesson plan. Knowing that they already got the knowledge of preparing the lesson plan in the previous semester, I directly told them to choose a topic which is suitable for teaching children class.

Yesterday, we started the fisrt peer teaching. There were three students presenting their lesson plans. The first student was teaching some language expressions used in speaking activities. It ran well. I could see that this student learned a lot. However, I was dissapointed when the second and the third students did their micro teaching. The second student was supposed to teach a pre school class. The topic was writing a letter A. The presentation was done well but the practice stage was too unrealistic. He asked the student to discuss in group. The students were given a task to find things which starts with A. Then he asked the students to guess what things another group found. How could students aged 3 - 5 years old do this ? It shows that he didn't utilize the principle of teaching children, therefore, he couldn't demonstrate the appropriate instructional stategies for students.

Before the next student took his turn, I decided to explain the principle of lesson planning once again. I emphasized that the lesson plan should be visible or doable. If someone else is replacing them, she/he would know what to do. A good lesson plan ensures thet several things happen in your lesson :
1. A lesson plan should be based around one language point.
2. If you are going to use games and activities, they should be age/level appropriate.
3. A Lesson should keep building. The students will be lost if the lesson plan jumps from here to there as they won't be able to follow where you are going.
4. A lesson plan can help you overcome the problem the students usually encounter when learning a new language points.

I hope that next students' presentation will be a lot better.