Imagine if you went to school, sat down, got out your Chromebook, notebook, pencil and looked up at the board, then the teacher said that they had no clue what to do.

Teachers have important responsibilities in teaching students. One thing that is essential for quality education is for teachers to effectively plan lessons.

According to the Lesson Planning, “planning helps to make your lessons clear and well-timed, meaning that students can be active and interested.”

Most of the teachers have an end-goal approach. Kyle Shack, a social studies teacher at Loy Norrix thinks it’s good to look at the bigger picture.

“We have to start with where our end goal is where we want to get to by the end of the unit,” said Shack.

Oftentimes work in class can become boring and repetitive causing students to lose interest.

“It’s important to allow students to ‘take control of the work.’ The more you use your senses, the more liable you are to remember something.” said social studies teacher Micheal Wright, social studies teacher.

According to The Thinking Kid, an online teaching tool, hands-on learning “improves their cognitive understanding of the subject material and social skills.”

A teacher’s plan can also revolve around what is going on in the world at the time. Shack says he will try to incorporate current events into his teaching.

“When the Western District Attorney of Michigan announced they were going to be elevating certain gun crimes to federal jurisdiction from state jurisdiction in an attempt to address gun violence in southwest Michigan,” Shack continued, “so we used that to talk about differences between federal and state jurisdiction.”

But even when teachers make plans, sometimes they have to adjust based on students’ understanding, ability or events going on in their lives.

“Sometimes you need to adjust because the kids don’t get what you wanted them to get, so you have to redo it, or especially nowadays there are a lot of abscesses,” said math teacher Adam Hosler.

Planning also makes it easy for students to learn and stay productive. Alexander Ligman is a junior in Hosler’s AP calculus class and he believes that the organization of Hosler’s class helps him.

“He always has his lesson planned out and it helps me learn because I always know we’re going to be doing something productive,” said Ligman.

Teachers also have to work around disruptions such as testing or drills. Hosler wants administration to tell teachers when things such as fire drills are scheduled to occur.
“It’s easy to just cut out a few [math problems] examples, so long as teachers are informed ahead of time.” said Hosler.

Testing, however, can be a much bigger disruption.

“The supreme irony of testing is we’re testing you on the thing you’re learning in the classroom, so in order to test you on that, we’re taking you out of the classroom.” said Wright.

Teachers have tough jobs, but effective planning helps to make it easier so they can keep students engaged and learning in class.