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

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.