Integrating COVID 19 pandemic into your lesson can help students better understand the realistic strands of the global health crisis. Hence, it should be included in your lesson plan. As a result, good plans are emerging despite the hard times the world is traversing. It’s a perfect opportunity for me to answer your question: “What is a pandemic lesson plan?”
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A pandemic lesson plan can as well prepare your students for the challenges as they return to school. As students are all excited to re-enter their classrooms, teachers together with the parents, anticipate difficulties. The transition can be overwhelming.
However, your exceptional planning strategies can help you mitigate anxiety and fears. Also, your lesson plan is one of the best teaching tools to provide children with the best education during the pandemic.
What is a pandemic lesson plan?
A pandemic lesson plan is our way of providing students with equitable access to meaningful learning, be it in-person or in virtual classrooms.
It entails a supportive plan for student learning during the pandemic.
Practically, it’s a lesson plan that incorporates COVID 19 information and dissemination of health standards into the curriculum and lesson content so students gain a full understanding of the disease.
The safety of children in schools is one critical concern of administrators and teachers. Hence, to keep students updated about COVID 19 and its safety measures, teachers should integrate the real world into their lesson plans.
Moreover, to manage safety health protocols effectively, as teachers, we should spend time reiterating them to our students. Through comprehensive planning, we are given the best guidance to implement school operations like regular hand washing, social distancing, and wearing masks to lessen the prospectives of viral risks.
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What to include in your pandemic lesson plan? Make a perfect plan and list down items using a teacher planner. Check out our list of the best planners for teachers to help you get well organized.
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What are its major characteristics?
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1. Content oriented
To provide systematic and meaningful inputs to students about COVID 19, we need to consider its relevance to the content. As a language teacher, I really love content-based instruction. It gives me the best approach to integrate language across the curriculum.
Have you tried content-based instructions? What about teaching across curriculum content?
To provide students with fundamental support in terms of facts and information about the COVID 19 virus, you can make use of significant articles, news, updates, and statistics as your relevant content. And begin from there.
Furthermore, using content-based instruction as your approach to student learning offers you the best opportunity to integrate the current global health crisis with grammar and communication exercises.
Highlighting the relevance of content to the language and communicative expertise of learners makes students feel the real connection of the recent happenings to education. Also, it heightens students’ awareness about the global pandemic. Cognizance is extremely necessary.
2. Fact-based
Since the global health crisis has taken its toll on our lives and on education, as teachers, we should do our part in making education still a good experience for our students.
To establish the connection of real events to the language content, we should pick up sound and factual articles and issues. Utilizing factual content helps students connect the dots of real perspectives. Thus, it brings total understanding or consciousness.
Although the content of our instruction can be anything under the sun for as long as it reinforces the learning objectives, we should consider the present situation especially now that schools are about to embrace in-person learning during the pandemic.
Therefore, integrating into our lesson plans facts about COVID 19 is a great step to keep students informed and up-to-date about the disease.
In other words, integrating evidence-based content with language instruction is an appropriate approach to keep students informed and engaged.
What to include in a pandemic lesson plan?
When schools return to in-person learning amidst the pandemic, teachers face another set of challenges in keeping students safe and in making teaching and learning even more productive. However, whether learning takes place at a distance or in person, lesson planning plays an important role. We acknowledge the pandemic lesson plan. It’s our way of stepping up to help our students get through and enjoy learning despite the crisis.
3. Preventive Health Measures
That said, the overall planning of school operations should incorporate in everyday lessons the prevention measures. It can help students get reminded of how to avoid viral spread. Indeed, it’s sensible to teach them proper hand washing and what to do to maintain social distancing.
It’s prudent. Moreover, considering the students’ safety is one of the best practices of committed and dedicated teachers.
4. Interactive Learning Activities
Aside from making education accessible during the pandemic, for the most part, you exert deliberate efforts in providing students with positive reinforcements and strong enlightenment so they can somehow reduce anxiety and fear.
When planning your lesson, tap your creativity and innovation to create learning activities that establish a community in the physical or virtual classroom.
On the surface, your lesson plan offers the best chance to integrate interactive activities that promote collaborative learning so students can feel the presence of everyone.
5. Integrate content across learning areas
For the students to investigate the characteristics in the surrounding environment that aid in the transmission of disease, you should find creative ways of integrating facts and measures regarding the COVID-19 pandemic into your content.
If for example, you are handling Mathematics, you can possibly develop and utilize models that allow students to analyze and interpret data using computational thinking.
Simply put, enriching the curriculum can be the best thing to do.
6. Individualized and differentiated instruction
To achieve consistent student engagement despite the challenges brought by the present situation, you should take advantage of individualized and differentiated instructions.
Individualized instruction lets students work at their own speed under your guidance. They’re still pursuing hard and difficult learning objectives, but they have a number of options for showing what they’ve learned.
<<< To understand better the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in education, watch the video below
How to apply it in online learning?
The current situation in education calls for blended learning where teachers might perfectly combine face-to-face interaction and online learning. Being so, still you can make the most of your pandemic lesson plan.
If you are implementing it in your online class, you can practically group your students accordingly and create breakout rooms where they can freely express themselves. As you know, there are students who are reluctant to share their views with a big group and prefer to be in a small group. Ultimately, this requires effective planning.
Making a good pandemic lesson amplifies meaningful student learning.
Productive learning unfolds when you make a good plan. Think of relevant activities that complement learning objectives and content. Your lesson plan should manifest opportunities for students to interact, reflect, express, and process information so they can protect themselves from the COVID 19 virus while learning at the same time.
Conclusion
While the pandemic continues to throw its massive effects around the globe with the discovery of COVID vaccines, some schools around the globe are now returning to in-person learning.
Nevertheless, schools should be made ready and we teachers should equip ourselves with appropriate teaching tools to continue providing students with meaningful learning experiences. Our lesson plans should be made effective.
It should be made clear in our lesson plans that we are aiming for information dissemination other than skills development.
With all our intent to make in-person learning productive once again, let’s rewire our strategy in planning our lessons and accommodate the pandemic lesson plan. I see several meaningful learning opportunities when a plan is being made and is executed effectively.
So, how do you decide to carry out your learning objectives during the pandemic? How do you attempt to carry on with your teaching and learning goals? Lesson planning really matters a lot, doesn’t it?
