Ms. Ting's Lesson Preparation and its Importance

Though we didn't get to see any lesson planning take place; we were very certain that Ms. Ting and the Year 6 teachers would have done it before teaching their respective classes. Just like what she mentioned, there are no last-minute decisions as everything should be accoring to their meeting to achieve the students' Learning Objectives every term.

Based on the one-week experience in TISKL, I must admit that it was not quite similar to the ones in Nexus, however, it did not disappoint me as everything gives you an experience, we will further remember if we managed to reflect the experience upon ourselves regularly so that we will not repeat the same mistakes we or the teachers' did.

From one of the tabs I mentioned before, I wasn't a fond of working on lesson plans as I thought it was nothing more than a hasty fuss for the teachers to put on more effort in planning rather than the execution of a plan. After joining two meetings from both international schools, I am now starting to believe that planning is benefical for us in the long run.

Lesson planning ensures that our topics, activities and teaching resources do not cause repetition especially if we are teaching the same students as the year goes or when we are giving them additional work. This will prevent certain lesson or activties to overlap, unless we are required to reuse or recycle our resources. Ms. Ting would usually refer from the Google Drive and online "report" she and her colleagues shared to ensure there are no mistakes as well as any activities overlapping in the past, current and future week. Secondly, having to prepare for a lesson allows us to be able to hypothesis the outcome or scenarios when we teach. Before teaching, we must know what type of students we are teaching and how we are going to teach them (how do they respond to the lessons). And from this we can also gain feedbacks either based on the students' performance or directly from them. This also ensures us teachers to learn from our mistakes and from then on we will be able to know what type of activities, teaching methods suit the type of students as a class. Most of the time, we can tell that 6O enjoys contributing to decorating their classroom. From time to time when Ms. Ting requests for volunteers to decorate, almost everyone in the class would be seen raising their hands voluntarily. From this, it also gives the students a sense of classroom ownership; this also teaches the students to take on responsibility as they grow up.

Not only that, lesson preparation can be useful as a guide and reference for our next lesson. This can be equipped by substitute teachers when we are not around and it gives those who will be teaching an idea of how the flow of the leasson should be like. This also improves our timing when teaching or carrying out activities.

Because of these, after a considerable amount of reflection, I believe that making preparations before a lesson will be very useful to me as it is solid foundation of how teachers organize themselves.