100 Ideas for Lesson Planning

by Anthony Haynes

Lesson planning and preparation is one of the most important aspects of teaching. It is also one of the hardest aspects to learn. Student teachers, for example, often find it difficult to gauge how to pitch or pace a lesson. This book provides solutions. It not only provides easily understood practical ideas but also sets them in a coherent overall framework based on the ideas that planning and preparation are part of a total cyclical process involving pedagogy, curriculum, learning and assessment.

Planning and preparation are personal matters related to an individual teacher but this does not mean that teachers cannot learn from each other or that thinking about planning and preparation is arbitrary. Coverage includes often neglected areas such as the affective curriculum, language across the curriculum, and homework.

Genres: Teaching

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2007

Reviews

[Rory Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Around the time of the Millennium Education as a profession began to move away from anecdotal experiences to research driven evidence. To be fair, educationalists and academics have always carried out research in classrooms, but when teachers wrote about teaching, they often wrote about their experiences, rather than citing explicit research to justify claims. In the last twenty years, this has changed, and the mark of a ‘good’ Educational book has now become the extent to which what it reports is grounded on properly generated research evidence.

This particular book was published in 2007 and it is part of the pre-millennium approach. Arguably a good book within that style, it is less-good when judged against the new approach. For example, it talks about ‘learning styles’ and planning lessons around students learning styles (p.29). But we now know that there is no evidence to support the idea that learning styles has any impact in a classroom. Teachers are (now) generally advised to ignore them, not plan for them in their lessons, as this book suggests.

In other places the book made some pertinent comments but they were a bit vague. For example, the author tells us that the Learning Objective for a lesson need to be detailed, specifying the context and the level of knowledge to be conveyed in the lesson (p.13). Perhaps that is so in an ideal world, but the quest for precision often comes at the cost of complexity, especially if the Learning objectives are to be communicated to a class of children. There is a fine line between too simple and too complicated, and between spending too little and too much of the lesson time explaining the Learning Objective. Some examples of how to find that ‘fine line’ would have been very welcome.

The book does contain some good, practical examples and suggestions for classroom practice, and a teacher who reads the book carefully, will get some good ideas. However, overall, the book’s approach to education is ‘out-dated’ and teachers would be better advised to look for modern books which more explicitly link their advice to classroom practices which have been properly tested and evaluated.

[Laura]

This book was very interesting from the perspective of a person studying education studies, I was expecting this to be more directing into teaching certain things however it was more about developing your ideas as a planner to accommodate different scenarios in a classroom.

However, it was hard to get past the fact that the authors name was spelt wrong on the front cover...