We’ve been managing Jana Uddhar for about 17 months, and yet we’ve only just introduced formal lesson planning to our teachers. In most teacher training programmes, this is one of the first thing trainees will learn.

Why has it taken so long?

Because we’ve been very wary of introducing something which simply becomes a paper exercise and then peters out after a short time.

However, one of the real problems with our teaching is a lack of planning. To give one small example, one of our class 1 teachers this week read a Nepali story to her class, but she wandered into the library to pick the book she wanted read after the bell had gone for the start of the lesson. Just a tiny bit of forward planning would have meant she could have started the lesson on time, and chosen a book that was perfectly suited to the class.

So what we have done is started a limited lesson planning trial – teachers will write just one lesson plan per day for a period of 3 weeks, and then we will review the experiment.

Here’s how the lesson planning training went. First I shared the lesson plan structure (which is based on our 4As model). I have designed the lesson plan to be very simple – much of it just requires ticking a box: The Jana Uddhar Lesson Plan_Translated

The basic structure is:

• Aim
• Activity – Teacher
• Activity – Student
• Teaching for Different Abilities
• Assessment

Then we went through each section of the lesson plan, illustrating what it might look like in the classroom. We’ve found that using video is a good way to make this concrete for teachers. So here’s a video we used to show teachers the different activities you can do with students for the ‘Student Activity’ part of the lesson plan:

Password for all videos is: janauddhar

Here’s a video to prompt discussion on the best way to ask students questions. The teacher is asking the same question (What is the meaning of constitution?) in four different ways (clue, it’s NOT Option 1!).

And here’s a video of an entire lesson plan put into practice in a lesson: