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Earlier today, the award-winning blog English with a Twist shared this picture on Facebook and it got me pondering, once again, on an issue I have often reflected on throughout my teaching career. 

Only heaven knows how often I have been tormented for not being able to stick to my painstakingly laid out lesson plan. Only heaven knows how many times the importance of a detailed lesson plan gets hammered into teacher trainees during CELTA/DELTA preparation courses and, consequently, how much sweat goes into producing these lesson plans in order, let's be honest here, to please Cambridge English Language Assessment and have the much sought-after teaching qualification.

I am just not sure, though, which is more bound to make inexperienced teachers break into a cold sweat: is it a) having to face students without a proper lesson plan and thus be made to deliver a lesson more or less ad-lib? or rather b) trying to remember and stick to the lesson plan they have so meticulously concocted according to the standard CELTA/DELTA approach?

It can only be said that my lessons look more like the graph on the right than the one on the left. And here I have to agree with Shanthi and Marek: lessons that go with the flow tend to be more interesting and enjoyable, both for the teacher and for the learners.

Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting the lesson planning section of the CELTA/DELTA syllabus should be scrapped. A lesson plan, even when loosely drafted, can be used as helpful scaffolding when a teacher is not particularly inspired or when the teacher does not feel like going totally unplugged. Yet, with a few years' teaching experience under my belt, I doubt I will ever feel guilty again if my lessons don not resemble the diagram on the left!