Teachers can be the best planners!

Planning is an important skills to have in life. Whether a simple daily activity or a complicated event, you need to plan wisely and accordingly to make sure things go smoothly.

Teachers are lucky because every day in their life, they practise planning. Every day before entering a classroom, a teacher needs to know what to do in the classroom. From the first until the last second that they have in a class, a teacher needs to picture it in their mind and on paper. The planning that teachers do is very structured and objective. They want to achieve certain goals at the end of the teaching and learning or, as they are called, learning objectives. 

The planning sometimes is very detailed and at micro level. For a 40 minutes lesson for example, a teacher can divide the time into a few stages and make sure that every stage caters for certain objectives. Each second is important to use wisely as you know that how fast 40 minutes can go by. The first five minutes to do an introduction, another 15 mintues to teach the main content, the other 15 minutes for exercises and last 5 mintues to summarise and end the lesson.

Some teachers even plan what instructions to use, what keywords to highlight and what teaching materials to be used to make sure the students learn. Teachers do this planning every day and for many times depending on their timetable for a particular day. They have the opportunity to plan and write down the plan everyday. They 'play' with planning everyday, they have plan A, B and C to make sure the objective is achieved. How can we not say teachers are the best planners?

Not just with that micro planning, teachers also plan at a macro level where they plan their class for a quarter year, half year and what to achieve in that particular school year. Not everyone has the opportunity to plan as much as teachers. I believe the skills of planning can definitely be mastered by the teachers as it is part of daily routine. The skills then can be used and applied to other things beyond classroom planning.

Planning is not easy if you have no experience in doing it. You might not be able to see what will happen during the actual time and the impact of what you do if you do not have the skills of planning. Lucky you, teachers!

I think my experience as a teacher helped me a great deal with planning. I am glad that I have exercised planning a lot before and this has helped me in my current position.

Ps: always a teacher inside