How much preparation?

I knew this guy.

No, really, I knew this guy. We taught at the same school for a while. We shared an apartment. He claimed to be an experienced teacher. I have my doubts. The problem was that his preparation for lessons was insanely over-the-top. It bordered on OCD.

Let me give you an example. He wanted a map of the world and because he obviously couldn't print one big enough, he decided to get a large poster and draw one. Fair enough, I might well do the same though my first choice solution would be to spend four yuan on buying one. They are easy enough to come by*.

But he wanted to draw one.

And he wanted it accurate!

By accurate I mean that it needed, in his mind, to be at least as good as a store-bought one. He spent weeks and weeks drawing it. But here's the wrinkle. Several times when sections of it failed to meet his standard he threw the whole thing away and started again.

He was the same when it came to writing poster dialogues.

My method is to get a poster of the size I want, rule faint pencil lines on as a guide, get a marker pen and write.

His method was to get a poster of the right size, rule faint lines on as a guide, use a soft pencil to write the words ensuring that all the letters had an exactly uniform size. If the words could not fit properly onto the line rub it all out and start again. When it was done in pencil to his satisfaction he then went over it in marker pen. If he made a mistake he threw the whole thing away and started again.

A poster I would knock up in ten minutes he wouldn't finish in a day.

Were his resources more professional looking than mine? Probably. Were mine good enough to to the job I wanted them for? Certainly.

Anyway, all this is by way of a long introduction to the question of how much time you need to spend preparing lessons. 

I realise that it's an "how long is a piece of string" question. Everybody is different. If you are new to the job it will obviously take longer than if you have been doing it for years. I've been a teacher for a long time now so I can roll out a lesson in a fraction of the time that it will take someone who started yesterday.

There are however some basics.

1. Do it systematically.

    Before you write anything down think of what your lesson is about. Think about what resources you NEED. That isn't the same as thinking about what resources you would like to have in an ideal world. Just consider what you actualy need. If you genuinely need something that is going to take ten hours to prepare for a forty-five minute lesson DON'T DO THAT ACTIVITY. Do something simpler.

2. Plan your lesson before you start to look for resources.  

Then look for the resources. It may be that you come across something that sparks your imagination, something where you go "wow, I know how I can get a great lesson out of this". If that's the case, fine. Do it. Just don't spend hours on creating speculative resources without any idea of how you will actually use them.

3. Your plan doesn't need to be complicated. 

Back when I was teaching in college in the UK planning was a nightmare. There were complicated forms to fill in and all sorts of largely irrelevent stuff to fill in on them. Here what you need is a bullet point outline, an objective and a list of resources. 

4. Don't micromanage yourself.

Don't try to obsessively plan everything to the nanosecond. It's pointless and unproductive and it will, I promise you, go wrong. Leaving your plan as flexible as possible is a good idea.

5. If you are spending more time to plan a lesson than to deliver it you are doing too much planning.

This is quite contentious. I've known lots of teachers who would spend four hours planning a one hour lesson. And more than a few who would spend ten hours doing it. When I started I was probably spending at least double the delivery time in planning and that's natural but it only takes a little practice to get that down to something sensible.

As a rule of thumb I probably spend around the same time planning a lesson as the length of the lesson but that includes finding (or making) the appropriate resources. Lessons that aren't resource heavy I can plan in about fifteen minutes.

And that's it. My advice on how to plan lessons. It boils down to this. DON'T SPEND TOO MUCH TIME PLANNING.

It doesn't make your lessons better and it will eventually drive you nuts with the stress.

Just try to be sensible about it.

(*That's about 40 pence. Of course in China the world maps put Asia on the left and the Americas on the right, but I can live with that.)