Inadaptable Lesson Plan with Curriculum

In the 8^th meeting of PETA course, my classmates and I did some presentations in groups. Each group had its own topic to be presented. My groups got developing a lesson plan topic. It was about the content and the guidelines in the lesson plan in general.

As we may know, lesson plan is a planning which is written before the course. This plan, like my friend said, is like a strategy to reach something. Of course, when we are going to reach a goal we have to know what the goal itself, how we reach it, how the condition of people who will influence the achievement, where we will do it and when it will be done. All of these aspects are what we need in making strategy or planning. For illustration, if we fight in a war without any information about the war, any preparation and any planning, we perhaps will be defeated easily.

I do believe that planning before do something will make it easier to be done. So does the lesson plan. According to me, it is equally important with the implementation and evaluation.

If the planning is as that important, we need to know how to make a good planning which can help us in implemented something. In this case, we need a good lesson plan which can support our teaching. There are so many aspects which should be listed and described in a lesson plan. There are subject, unit, lesson title, lesson author, grade level, time/ duration, class profile, classroom layout and grouping of students, students’ present level of performance and skill (or we may usually call it as students’ prior knowledge), Instructional objectives, materials, resources, and technology, instructional procedure, follow-up activities, adaptation for special learners, assignment and assessment, student products, teacher reflection.

I am not going to explain it now. You may find the deep explanation about it later on or in other sources. In this reflection, I just want to give my opinion about the making lesson plan itself. When you know that there are a lot of aspects in a lesson plan you probably think the same thought with me that making a lesson plan is not as simple as what is explained in the textbook. What the teachers plan should not be incompatible with many policies and rules. For instance, the lesson plan should be adapted with the curriculum used, the teaching principles, the school condition (e.g. is the school is religion school like madrasah or not?) and so on. Moreover, the challenge which is often faced by most of teachers whom I met is inexpediency between the curriculum and the students’ condition. The curriculum probably is the general plan which has the function as the leveler of learning processes and abilities which have to be possessed by students in a country. The curriculum from Educational Department is usually used as a standard for every area of the country. Thus, in fact the condition (like, school, students’ level, teachers’ capability etc.) between certain area and another is different. If I may compare the level of language skill of some senior high school students whom I taught when I was in holiday in Garut with some students whom I taught when I did school experience in Jakarta, they are “far cry”. For instance, the curriculum stated that first grade senior high school students should be able to create a recount text. Most of students who are from Jakarta could do that because they had already been able to make sentences using past tense. It was easy for them to arrange their words in a text form. Thus, most of students who are from Garut were nothing of the kind. Even, they had not been able to differentiate the using of objective pronoun and subjective pronoun well. So, how can the same curriculum be referable in making a lesson plan in different places?. Actually, I have no idea about the solution for this condition.