Hello everyone🙋💗 hope this latest installment finds you in good health. I felt i should for this blog post share with you an interesting issue on challenges of lesson planning faced by teachers and in particular elementary teachers in Botswana schools which might needlessly be relative to other contexts. It is something i previously did for my post graduate work pursuing my MEd. in Social Studies education. Feel free to read through and engage below.🙆🙆
The first problem that
concerns lesson planning is that supervisors seem to have different
understandings of what to include and omit in preparation books. The problem
emanates from the fact that members of the school management team as
supervisors are traditionally from various schools, clusters, inspectorates and
regions promoted on transfer as such they bring with them varied expectations
on lesson planning. It is an unfortunate scenario because one would expect them
to be oriented on school culture and practices congruent to policy
requirements. As an example, some supervisors would append their signatures on
lesson plans that may show activities in listed form like “group work” whereas
another supervisor within the same institution would not do such dismissing the
plan as vague and skeletal demanding an extension to say “group work on finding
the causes of…” Needless to say teachers tend to like the former in the sense
that it is short and hate the latter because it creates more writing.
Unlike the old method
of daily planning and evaluation, the status quo is such that teachers plan for
the entire week and get to evaluate their teaching at the end of the week, a
time where most of what transpired during the lessons may have been forgotten
rendering such evaluation as guess work
and less meaningful in offering insight. This arrangement defeats the purpose
of lesson evaluation more so that teachers have to rely on memory when trying
to make connections between lessons. If this evaluation was done daily and
recorded it would be easier for teachers and learners to make connections between
the previous lesson and the current one.
Changes in attitudes and feelings are valuable and legitimate educational aims
yet these are very difficult to state and measure in behavioral terms pointing
the challenge that teachers face when planning for lessons with objectives that
require change in attitudes and behavior. This challenge is witnessed in
subjects which advocate for concepts like civic education and multiculturalism
which in the case of primary education are social studies, cultural studies,
religious and moral education and Setswana. The challenge does not end here, it
even extends to testing whether such objectives have been met because criterion
referenced testing adopted for assessment by the education system is not
suitable to measure these intended learning outcomes. For example, learners may
be expected to show appreciation of their culture by a specific objective and
it will be near impossible to check if they indeed appreciate their culture
using multiple choice questions which are the alpha and omega of testing at
elementary levels of education in Botswana.
It is unfortunate to
state here that among the challenges that engulf lesson planning in schools,
lower primary teachers happen to be the root cause of the problem even though
there are other elements to the challenge. It is the view of this paper that
lower primary school learners graduate into upper classes with a rather shaky
foundation in terms of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The expectation
is that they should leave lower primary classes with a mastery of these skills,
however the situation on the ground is the exact opposite. Upper primary class
teachers therefore find it difficult to plan challenging activities for their
learners and instead revert to teacher dominated teaching with little input
from learners. Lesson plans are consequently a prerogative of the teacher
meaning that learners do not take responsibility for their learning. Teachers
thus have a challenge of using higher cognitive methods of teaching and find
solace in low cognitive approaches because the former advocates for learner
engagement using the previously mentioned skills whereas the latter reinforces
rote learning which is against pragmatic and democratic education found within
our education policies. It is dismaying that the section of activities in
preparation books is filled with low cognitive tasks that are not in tandem
with what the syllabus recommends under the methods of teaching.
Although teachers have
been blamed for being the root cause of the use of lower thinking skills above,
part of the problem rests with the syllabus itself. A careful analysis of the
objectives listed therein reveals that our educational ends are mainly within
the cohort of low level thinking thus forcing teachers to use low level
thinking approaches and activities when developing lesson plans. The Blooms
Taxonomy which is a guide to behavioral objectives reveals that low level
instructional objectives and teaching techniques require learners to merely
recall, remember and memorize facts which is an antithesis of educational aims
and objectives.
Lastly, teachers are
faced with an examination oriented syllabus which is to be finished within a
stipulated time to test whether learners have grasped the taught concepts.
School managers are being reprimanded with letters regarding low achievement by
their superiors and they in turn place pressure on teachers to finish the
syllabus quickly so that they do revision for tests. Consequently teachers are
forced to rush over the instructional objectives and sometimes combining two or
three separate leaning objectives in a single lesson. For example, a standard
seven social studies lesson may incorporate an objective on continents of the
world, lines of latitudes and longitudes, major continental physical features,
world climatic regions and calculating time using longitudes. This fabrication
is done merely to finish the syllabus and create more time for revision
forgetting that it leads to confusing learners precipitating failure. Thanks for reading through🙏
Boikhutso,
K. (2010). The theory into practice dilemma: Lesson planning challenges facing Botswana student teachers. Improving Schools, 13 (3), 205-220. doi:
10.1177/1365480210385668
