Lesson plan and teaching effectiveness: a case study in an international school / Nur Amalina Mohd Sharif

The fourth goal in Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) spells out Quality Education that demands teachers across all disciplines to teach effectively. The available literature suggests that teaching effectiveness starts from a good planning, which should be evident in the documentation of lesson plans. However, when it comes to English teachers, their demanding roles that are attributed to the value-laden content, the grading of essays, the performance pressure of high-stake testing, and the requirement of culturally appropriate pedagogies (Loh & Liew, 2016) have caused the practice of writing lesson plans to be challenged, causing the effectiveness of the teaching to be jeopardised. English teachers in international schools are not exempted from facing this problem, yet little studies have been done on the teachers in this context. Viewing learning from the Constructivist perspective, this research anticipated the Constructivist principles to be evident in the lesson plans and its implementation whereby knowledge should be co-constructed by both teacher and learners. To achieve the purpose, this research adopts a case study design using i) document analysis, ii) observation and iii) semi-structured interview to collect the data. The data from i) and ii) were analysed quantitatively using a lesson plan rubric by Student Teacher Assessment Instrument (STAI) (MACTE, 1999) and Formative Observation Form by Womack et al. (2015), respectively. The scores were interpreted based on the five-level school’s KPI (unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good, very good and excellent) to determine the level of lesson plans and level of teaching effectiveness of the English teachers. Additionally, the data from iii) was analysed qualitatively using thematic analysis. The study unveils that the teachers had a moderate level of lesson plan, suggesting a need for further support in lesson planning. However, their level of teaching effectiveness was found to be high. Apart from that, the interview data reveal that other sociocultural factors, including student readiness, time constraint, class size and teacher’s variables, might influence the lesson implementation, causing the incongruency between the lesson plan and the actual course of teaching. The findings of this study will be helpful for English teachers to understand the importance of writing an effective lesson plan as it helps in their teaching effectiveness. School administration and policy makers could also benefit from this study whereby necessary actions can be taken to upskill the teachers on lesson planning, resulting in effective teaching.