PLANNING AHEAD

Teaching a person was difficult. Planning for it was a whole new ballgame for me.

Last session, I had a chance to structure my own instructional design for my clients in CAMP. The class was guided by our mentors as to how the plans should be structured to be able to create an effective teaching strategy. I never imagined how tedious it was to make such a thing.

Based on my experience in creating the design, I’ve learned more about the objectives, content and strategies, and the evaluation. The objectives were really the backbone of your design as they will be the basis for the things that you would be discussing. During our previous discussion, I always have this tendency to space out and skip the objectives part because I considered them as less important than the main message of the lecture. I realized how wrong I was because every discussion has its purpose and every lesson has the goals that needed to be accomplished/learned. If only I have read my objectives, I would not be over-studying things. And this should not happen to my future students, as my objectives should always be CLEAR AND MEASURABLE. I cannot target something I cannot measure because I might end up wasting my client’s time. I should not target lessons that my clients do not need in their life.

The content and strategies should also be planned carefully to make my teaching effective. Actually, I should know already what I will teach before even creating my plan. Learning more about the characteristics of the learners and their occupation or goals would really help in identifying what to include in the content.

The last thing I have learned was planning an effective evaluation. I should really test my students if they learned something or not. I should be reasonable enough by testing them based on the objectives and not asking more from them. I should also consider the time for the session and the applicability of the evaluation strategy to be used. Understanding the application of my lessons to someone’s life would help in identifying how I will evaluate my students during or after the session.

The next time I will have my class, I should plan my objectives carefully and stick to it during discussion. I should be careful in considering the needs of my clients and being reasonable in testing them for what they know. Hopefully, I could planned ahead all the time.