Lesson planning...who needs it, or needs to know how to do it?

Lesson planning...who needs it, or needs to know how to do it? Well, maybe you do! Lesson planning is a special skill that is learned in much the same way as other skills. It is one thing to surf the Net to retrieve lesson plans from other sites and adapt them to your needs. It is quite another thing to have the skill to develop your own lesson plans. When you are able to create your own lesson plans, it means you have taken a giant step toward "owning" the content you teach and the methods you use, and that is a good thing. Acquiring this skill is far more valuable than being able to use lesson plans developed by others. It takes thinking and practice to hone this skill, and it won't happen overnight, but it is a skill that will help to define you as a teacher. Knowing "how to" is far more important than knowing "about" when it comes to lesson plans, and is one of the important markers along the way to becoming a professional teacher. It is also in keeping with a central theme of this site that you should learn to plan lessons in more than one way. The corollary is, of course, that there is no one "best way" to plan lessons. Regardless of the form or template, there are fundamental components of all lesson plans that you should learn to write, revise, and improve. The old adage, "Practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect" is at the core of learning this skill. Trust me on this.