Providing students with all the necessary instruction, state-adopted academic content standards, thorough instruction, and fun and engaging activities can be a very tedious and overwhelming task. Thus, organized academic instructional planning will "make or break" a great teacher. Through personal experience, I have learned that proper planning leads to effective instruction. However, instructors need to keep in mind that although much planning can create a wonderful and meaningful lesson, she should always be prepared for unexpected and often time-consuming events to throw off the best-laid plans.
While writing instructional plans, yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals need to be considered and addressed when appropriate. Using a yearly plan book helps organize lesson ideas into a clean and easily readable format. While student teaching, I found it necessary to write my daily and weekly goals in pencil since unexpected events quite frequently came up that postponed certain lessons. Also, my master teacher, after teaching for many years, kept the lesson plan books from previous years as guides for future planning. Using previous year’s books is a great idea that can help teachers plan lesson more effectively, especially if extra added notes are inserted after a lesson completion that tells if the lesson was or was not successful. Lastly, I observed my master teacher create weekly notes that he sent home to parents that discussed the week’s events. I found these notes to be very informative for both student and parents, while also providing parents a guide of the curricula that was being covered in the class.
