Lesson planning for teachers' professional development (Part 6/6)

Hello, I'm Tyson Seaborn, and in this video, we'll explore how lesson planning is a valuable teacher development tool. The more we create them, the more we learn about what makes an effective lesson plan and what does not. This is a form of teacher development, but they act as tools for teacher development in other ways, too. First, lesson plans can be a collaborative tool. Exchange lesson plans with another teacher. Agree on what type of feedback to give each other. More focused is better. Second, they provide space to reflect about what we've planned to how it happened in an actual classroom with actual learners. Leave a sidebar space to give your future self helpful notes. Regarding activities, tell yourself what worked and what didn't. Write down your theories about why this or that happened. Also, leave comments about mechanics of the lesson. Should you give learners longer to do a worksheet? Did the order of the components make sense? Do you need more authentic productive activities? Comparing our planning to our reality helps us plan better next time. Lesson plans also function as a tool for action research. Action research is an activity teachers do to answer a specific question we have about our practice so we can understand it. Sometimes you notice a pattern emerge about your lessons and you wonder why. You can ask yourself, why is this happening or how can I improve it? More specifically, why do I run out of time during our productive activities or how can I improve the social atmosphere in my classes? So first, we identify a problem to solve or a question to answer about our practice. Use our lesson plans to look for clues. Highlight areas in a series of Sometimes we might color code relevance like pink for directly related or blue for something to think about further. Use these clues to make a change in our methods. We show this change on our next lesson plan. We can highlight it with the same color as in stage two. This makes it easy for us to connect them together. Once we've tried these plans, go back to our highlighted areas and reflect on the results. How did the change affect things? Did this change give us any answers to our questions? Redo this process until we have the answers we want. The lesson plan is an important part of this action research cycle. Lesson plans help us develop our practice because we learn to understand it better. So my tip here is, recognize the value your lesson plan has as a tool for your teacher development.