Planning Lessons - Linda Jensen

CRITICAL REVIEW

JENSEN, Linda. Planning Lessons. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a

Second or Foreign Language (pp. 403-409). Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 2001.

Linda Jensen has an MA in English: TESL/TEFL from San Francisco State University. Nowadays she teaches reading and composition courses focusing on identity and language at Berkeley University of California.

The chapter works as a guide to teachers that do not know how to do formalized lesson plans. The most common questions as “why”, “when” and “how” are answered by the author overview.

Not only is the lesson plan an important document that highlights the teacher thoughts and the goals for the students but also functions as a reminder. The lesson plan should be flexible and clear to the others in case of substitution.

… a lesson plan is mutable, not written in stone; it is not meant to keep a teacher from changing the duration of activity or forgoing an activity altogether if the situation warrants. (p.1)

A great lesson plan results of a deep reflection of the methodology, good textbooks, the students' necessities, the syllabus and a sort of other materials. It comes of mixing between micro and macro planning. The macro planning is a philosophy of learning and teaching, whereas micro-planning is the addition of details or fine turning of a lesson. According to the author, in daily life, the micro planning of lessons takes place the night before a class. In addition to this, if both a macro and micro planning are on the novice teacher hands, he/she should ask fellow teachers for guidance.

In the session of “what a lesson plan looks like”, Jensen will say that to create a lesson plan the teacher may keep in mind the students background, the objectives to achieve, the texts, the skills to be taught, the activities, the time to spend with, the materials and the links with the previous and future lessons as well.

The planning needs to contain a description of class name and level; the date of the lesson; the competencies and standards addressed in the lesson; grammatical structure and key vocabulary that will be introduced; what students should already know; goals and objectives of the lesson including materials, texts and devices or resources needed.

It is very important to begin the class with the review activity in the direction of preparing the students to the new content. If something goes different or wrong, do not worry. Take notes about what flows and what not flows well to rethink the reasons why and what could be done to improve this part of the lesson.

Knowing the principles of a second language learning and teaching; recognize the student population seeing the big picture of the course and see the goals and objectives of the entire term before planning are some important abilities of a language teacher.

Jensen provides a sample of a lesson plan in order to enrich the knowledge acquired from the chapter.

As far as I concerned, this chapter is extremely interesting because it clarifies the idea of how lessons may be prepared. Linda Jensen had incredible success in explaining and dismembering the parts of a lesson plan in a simple and understandable