Spend LESS time on lesson planning (advice for student teachers)

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One of the most difficult jobs in teaching is being a student teacher. It’s demanding, busy and stressful — a nightmare combination. Where you can you find some respite?

My suggestion: spend less time planning your lessons. 

This is one my favourite suggestion for prac teachers. It’s also the suggestion that’s most often rejected by people. 

To an extent, I get it. You might want to prove yourself by creating high-quality lessons, chock-full of relevant content and a range of engaging activities. You might want to incorporate different forms of technology and experiment with things. You might also want to create a range of worksheets from scratch, uniquely tailored to your class.

I say all of this because I’ve been there. I remember being on prac and staying up really late cutting out paragraphs and pasting them to ice cream sticks. The funniest part: I cannot remember why I was even doing this. 

Prac is a real marathon. You don’t want to burn out. Here’s a way to ease your efforts.

Spend less time on your lesson plans

My main suggestion: spend the same time as your lesson to plan your lesson.

(So: for a one hour lesson, take around an hour to plan it.)

Let’s say you’ve got a one hour lesson. Here’s how I’d plan it:

  • Spend 20ish minutes organising the content you’re going to teach. Create a brief PowerPoint to outline how you’ll present this in class.

  • Take 25ish minutes to select and organise an activity. This could be used to create a worksheet. Here I’d strongly suggest adapting an existing worksheet, or just straight up use pre-existing resources (either from your supervising teacher or colleague).

  • Spend around 10 minutes working out how you’ll wrap up the lesson and list some ideas for what you’d do in the next class.

Y’all can disagree here. But I reflect on my prac experience where I spent hours planning single lessons and, to be honest, didn’t always feel that was time well spent.  Check out the video below for more info.

How to give an effective teaching demo lesson

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When you’re going for a teaching job you may be asked to perform a demonstration lesson. This can be a tricky task.

You’re being asked to turn up in an unfamiliar classroom at an unknown school and teach. And not just teach! You want to turn up and shine and put yourself in the best position possible to get the job.

I’ve participated in demo lessons and I’ve observed demo lessons. I’ve seen successful and unsuccessful approaches. I thought about all this and distilled three keys to delivering a successful demo lesson.

1. Be super clear on the content you’re delivering

You want to know exactly what content you should be teaching in the demo lessons. You don’t want an approximate idea or a rough indication; you want the precise syllabus dot point, text book pages or concept.

During the recruitment process, I recommend you try and speak directly to the classroom teacher, whose class you’ll be teaching, to be really clear about what you should be teaching. This could be via email, or indirectly through the HR person running the recruitment process.

Once you’re “super clear”, don’t engage in major tangents. Once a class is yours, you can spend some time exploring related issues that link to the syllabus points. But, in a demo class, stay very constrained and focused on the correct content area.

2. Hook your audience with the intro

Spark interest with your intro. Try and avoid starting with, “Today, we’re going to be looking at [insert content area here].” Do something unexpected, to spark a sense of mystery and engagement among the students.

Some ideas for engaging intros include:

  • quirky headlines taken from news articles

  • interesting photos or videos whose meaning are not immediately obvious

  • a short quote.

Unfamiliar items can lead to student engagement. Student engagement is a crucial factor in student learning. By creating this kind of intro, you’re demonstrating your skills in involving students in your lessons from the very start.

Check out my video below for how I’ve used a sneaker-related intro.

3. Use a mix of teacher- and student-led activities 

In your demo lesson, you want to demonstrate you can teach a specific concept AND have students independently work on tasks. This is tough balance to strike.

Here’s my suggestion. Use part of the lesson to clearly and concisely teach the content in question. Use some slides to help with this process. Incorporate definitions, formulas, some perspectives — that kind of thing. But keep it small and tightly focused.

Then make sure you include a student-led activity. This could be individual or pair work where you set a task and allow the students to work through it, using the content from the first part of the lesson as a basis.

Please: avoid group work. Pairs, and then combining two pairs would be the max. The problem with group work is that you don’t know the class dynamics and you could create groups that undermine your lesson.