Events with intelligence

By: Celine Gonzales

Planning and hosting an event is a lot of work, and it may not seem worth the effort. You have enough going on with your blog, your social media, and all of the various content marketing efforts that help build your audience. Events, though, are one of the few ways you actually get personal with your audience. This does two things: Your audience sees you as a person. Events are a good way for you to connect to your readers in a human way and your audience gets to meet others like them. Events can almost be a reward for a great audience, providing an event or venue where they can meet others with the same interests as them. You can travel without a list of course but you will avoid a few problems if you spend a bit of time planning – not a whole week though. That would be silly. A few minutes should be enough. Pre-empting problems will bring peace of mind and when it comes to teaching, this is a major defense against burnout and work stress.

As a future educator, holding a big event helps me to develop skills that will greatly help me when I am in my workplace already. I learned how to be patient. And as an educator, I should take with me a long patience to my students. Once I enter a room, I should see to it that all throughout the class, my patience is with me. Next is dealing and meeting with different people. It is a very important skill that I should develop. Communicating effectively with the people that I will encounter in my work. My future co-teachers, my students, the staffs and even the parents of my students. I should be an excellent communicator to them and be very careful in every words that I will utter to them. Next I learned and realized the importance of careful planning. New teachers who have had training will have been evaluated and assessed on their lesson plans. They will spend hours preparing a 45-minute lesson. Plans include things like class, time, materials and aims as well as notes about each stage of the lesson and lots of extras. These teachers understand that a substitute teacher should be able to pick up their lesson plan, walk into the classroom and teach the lesson without any problems. More experienced teachers tend to spend less time on lesson planning. They know what they have to do in the lesson. And if they ever get it wrong, it doesn’t matter because they are armed for most eventualities and have a mental library of Plan Bs. But what the wise teachers have in common - whether they are new or more experienced - is that they understand the importance of lesson planning but are 100% practical in their approach. A 45-minute lesson should warrant around 5 to 10 minutes planning time. And the plan should be simple and always follow the same format so that it becomes second nature and end up almost writing itself. I know a lot of teachers who managed to reduce their preparation time by around 90% since they started teaching - granted that’s quite a long period of time - but there really is no need to be a slave to lesson planning. Save your energy for the classroom - that’s where you’ll need it most. Think back to the last lesson when you start planning the next. If possible, do the planning immediately after the previous lesson.