Lesson planning in evolution

Blogger and English Teacher Cecilia Lemos challenged teachers to share how they do their lesson planning and what their lesson plans look like in her blog post What's Your Plan? My First Challenge last week. After reading her post and some of the other contributions I decided to write my own post, since my theme has been planning for the last couple of weeks.

In fact I haven't been teaching that long and since I am not teaching right now I don't have so much to show. In Sweden they rarely ask you to show them your lesson plans as you study to become a teacher. I was fortunate to visit different sorts of teachers, who had different ideas about planning. I remember I was visiting with a teacher, who didn't seem to do any planning or setting any goals. I realise now as I have done some more teaching myself and after reading the posts from more experienced colleagues, that she probably had done it so many times, that she did a lot of "internal" planning. During my studies I wrote quite detailed lesson plans. Here's an example of one that I did during my 7th semester.
lektionsplan1
It is in Swedish, but the headlines are Literature, Planning sequence's (3 Lessons) main subjects, Introduction to writing task, Start writing. I have included possible questions to discuss in the preparation for writing and also how much time each part should take.

Plan 1 During my first year of teaching after my studies I worked at a middle school with a small group of students with learning disabilities and other difficulties. Here's a part of an overview for a section I did for the students, with dates, the theme of the lesson and homework. Unfortunately I can't find my detailed plans for the lessons.

The following year I taught at a different school and since I can't find any lesson plans, I think I had a minimalistic approach that year. It was an overwhelming teaching experience/situation and I worked and worked and worked and still didn't think I did a good enough job.

During the two years I was teaching at the technical university in Dresden we were required to fill out the lesson plan form on the left and hand in at the end of the semester, I filled it out at the end of the semester and I still don't know if anyone ever looked at it.

My own lesson plans from these years are quite straightforward. It sort of just mention the topics that I want to cover during the lesson. See beneath.

I am right at the beginning of planning my Swedish lessons blog, and I don't seem to know quite where to start. I have for example been doing this right here a few weeks ago and I think mindmapping will work quite well in the beginning but for the single lessons I have to find an effective way to do my planning. I have also realised that I have to do a lot of research and to create some of my own material in a new way. So I guess I am back to the basics, where planning takes a lot of time and has to take time - and as I wrote yesterday: I have to pay attention to details.

Well, that's my planning story so far and I guess that if you ask me in a few years again you'll get a totaly different one. Thanks for challenging us, Cecilia Lemos, I have already learned a lot!

PS Could somebody tell me how to embedd PDF's or DOC's, please? DS