Lesson Plans, how often are they used?

Throughout my years of education, I have learned numerous way to create lesson plans. In addition I have never seen any of my teachers actually use lesson plans. Do you use them? How often? Are they as formal and detailed as the ones created in college? I am wondering what current teachers do to organize their lessons and units.

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Comment by yoram orad on December 9, 2011 at 2:29am: Hi Kayleigh

I'm not teaching any more (after a long career of over 30 years in teaching high school students and college students as well) but I used to prepare lesson plans. Nevertheless, these lesson plans weren't detailed ones. In my work with students I used to write some guidlines and a sequence of the issues I'd like to discuss, but not much more. for example, I didn't use to estimate accurately the time for each issue. In addition, I have allowed myself to turn to another issue raised by students, not nesseratilly connected to what I planned and after disussing it, return to the planned teaching.

Comment by James E. Schwartz on December 13, 2011 at 8:48am: Is it OK for your own professor to comment on your question? While you are learning to teach, you are learning to do lesson plans in order to learn to think like a teacher. The idea is that through practice you will internalize the process. When you become a teacher you will have reached the point of internalizing the lesson planning process. When you observe experienced teachers you often don't see lesson plans, because the lesson planning is going on "inside" them. On the other hand, other teachers (myself included) continue to actually write detailed lesson plans throughout their careers because it helps us stay focused and organized and avoid birdwalking. (Do you know what "birdwalking" is?)