Importance of Lesson Planning

"The more you plan your lesson the more you and your students will enjoy and benefit from the lesson"

On Saturdays I teach a class of Matayom 1 students. (in Thailand M1 is the first year of Secondary School). As the class is on the weekend the students generally are a bit jaded and tend to drift off task very easily, so having a thorough lesson plan is crucial, especially as I teach them for 3 hours in a row!
There is no doubt that lesson planning takes a lot of time. You really need to think about the students and how you can make the lesson interesting enough for them so that they can stay on task as much as possible. Its always a bit tough at first when you are getting to know the students. Plan patiently and as you come to understand their needs and learning strengths the efficiency and effectiveness of your lesson planning and will improve.
Its so important to bring compassion to the classroom. This is particularly true of students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and from a culture that is different from your own. A good teacher must always care for all their students but will know how to balance discipline with empathy. Some students need the "tough love" approach and discipline must be metered out fairly and appropriately as required in order for learning to take place. Students are all different however and that's where combining compassion with discipline is so important in creating a happy, warm and friendly classroom rather than a sterile, top-down, disciplinarian approach.
Most of all don't forget to have plenty of compassion for yourself. If you have the students' interests at heart then you will always come out on top. Give yourself the time to develop your ability to interpret student body language and to develop a skin thick enough to repel the occasional student barbs that strike you.
So lesson planning is great armour to take into the classroom. A well thought out lesson plan keeps you focussed and you can keep the lesson flowing to the students who are focussed. For my group I plan a dual structured lesson plan. One plan is based on games and student to student learning while the other plan is based on a series of worksheets that I can give to students at anytime when they need to settle down and reduce noise from getting too excited during a game activity. Worksheets are great for getting students to focus on their work when they begin class and can be distributed to late comers thus avoiding disruptions.
As I have learnt about the different skill levels of my students I prepare extension worksheets for stronger students who finish tasks quickly. This keeps them occupied and gives me more time to give attention to students who need personal assistance.
It is my preference to get the class active and enjoying the games in my lesson plan and once they are working as a group I can introduce the rules of the new game and prepare them to play the game. They also know that if their behaviour gets out of control then they will have to do worksheets again.

So plan lessons as much as possible, the more prepared material you have in class means that you have more options to deal with the ebb and flow of student mood and behaviour. If all is going well and you have a lot of games up your sleeve then you can keep rewarding good behaviour with more and more games. If some students are not suited by the games then have your worksheets ready to keep them occupied and to prevent them from interfering with students who are enjoying using English in games. If your advanced students are flying along then have activity after activity ready for them to keep them in the zone for as long as possible.
My three hour lesson is quite long (yes I do let them take breaks) so I try to keep in mind that the fun should increase and the academic demands of concentration can be reduced into the last hour. Listening to a popular song, completing a lyric gap-fill and then having class groups sing the song is a fun way to finish. A recap of the day's vocabulary with Pictionary where everybody gets a chance to draw is always enjoyed by the students. Word bingo is also great as the students have to read short phrases and do their own classroom discipline by keeping each other quiet as they listen to the words being read out in order to mark their cards correctly.