Different school systems take different approaches to lesson planning.
In some school systems, teachers must be able to plan their own lessons directly from the curriculum. They know how to research teaching ideas, select those that will work for their students, and arrange them in a useful sequence. It might be helpful if the school has a text-book, but these teachers don't really need them. As much as possible, this is the best approach.
In other school systems, teachers follow a prescribed textbook. Although they don’t need to be as skilful in lesson preparation, they are taught how to use the textbook most effectively. Needless to say, if there’s no textbook, they can’t teach.
If a few schools, teachers are given teachers' guides for each subject and must follow them. Each teachers' guide contains a full set of lesson plans. This approach is very effective for the teaching approach called "direct explicit instruction", but doesn’t allow much creativity, and experienced teachers generally find them very constricting and often frustrating. The skill is in interpreting the lesson plans to make an interesting lesson.
Step-by-step
You now need to plan what you will do in each lesson. Whichever way you teach, each lesson needs a clear purpose and ways to meet that purpose.
For each session, draw up a plan. It must be written down. Here's what to do:
Write out clearly the purpose of the lesson as something that students will be able to do. Be brief and to the point.
Say why it is important. If it isn't important, why should they bother learning it?
Use forward planners. If you tell people what you're going to do, they can see where it's going and make more sense of it. They learn better because they have a clear framework to hang the details on. This applies to the whole course as well as each lesson. You can use your purpose to keep students on track for each lesson.
Select your information. You can't pack everything you know into one lesson, or even a series of lessons. The point is to select carefully what it is that students need to learn.
Students will be confused if you spend too much time riding hobbyhorses around or talking about favourite subjects that don't help them achieve the purpose of the lesson. You usually make more progress by giving less information but have students be able to do what is planned, than giving students so much information that they can't achieve the purpose.
Express each point as a very clear, simple, accurate sentence. Keep it a short as possible so students get the basic message very easily.
Six words is good. If you go over ten words, try again. Make sure your points lead students to achieve the purpose of the lesson. You will find your lessons will go very easily if students get the point the first time you say it. Otherwise, you will waste most of your time clearing up misunderstandings.
Put your lesson points is an order that will make sense and be useful to your students (not just to you). The sequencing principles are those for planning the series. (See separate e-book.)
Choose the delivery methods and learning activities. (More on that later)
For every lesson point, give an example, illustration or demonstration that clearly matches the point. If it's a practical subject, you demonstrate it to students. If it's information and ideas, give an example or illustration.
Constantly give students opportunities to participate. In fact, you should explain requirements for effective participation early in the course. Then ask questions. Get opinions. Request examples. (Of course, you need to avoid embarrassing them.)
If it's ideas and information that you're teaching, let them discuss a point or give examples.
If it's a practical subject, let students show you whether they can do the each step. Ensure that students get enough practice so they can perform the skill themselves, even if it uses a substantial proportion of your session time.
Allocate time for each part of the lesson. Planning time usage in lessons is difficult and comes with experience as you learn to anticipate how learners will respond in class.
If you're brand new, you probably just need to ask advice about how long lesson parts will take. Without advice, don't be surprised if your "long" lesson takes no time at all, or you only get halfway through a lesson that didn't appear long. Later on, you'll be able to guess fairly accurately how long your plans will take to teach, and how to deal with digressions.
At the end of the lesson, recap the main points or steps to refresh in students' minds what they learnt. They need to be reminded. You can also reinforce previous learning by:
Referring to lessons from previous weeks.
Answering questions arising from previous weeks.
Discussion in preparation for assessment.
Incorporating previously learnt ideas or skills into new lessons, so that old skills are kept in practice.
Also at the end of your lesson, check whether students can do what you wanted them to be able to do. Even if you're not formally assessing them at this stage, you need at least to know whether your lesson achieved its purpose. (That is, it is formative assessment, and feedback of the effectiveness of your teaching.)
After the lesson, review how it went. What worked? What didn't? Could you use time more efficiently? What would you change?
Then go though and add any of the following that is necessary to each part of the program:
practice opportunities
assessment points to measure student progress
duration of each activity or exercise
references to textbooks or other resources
resources (e.g. whiteboard, overhead projector)
assessment points to measure students' progress
If you do all this, you will have a good set of plans. They have to be workable, but they don't have to be perfect.
As you teach, you'll notice what works well and what doesn't, and you'll probably revise your plans every time you teach. And you might adapt them depending on changes in content, different groups, etc. They should never be static documents.
Note: Many sequencing principles you learnt when planning a series of lesson also apply to individual lessons.
Lesson plan forms
You need good lesson plans, although there are not many hard and fast rules about layout:
They should always start with a purpose statement. It is good practice for the purpose to be what the student must be able to do at the end of the lesson. It can also be a question to focus attention on the goal.
Each lesson must have only one purpose.
Put notes in point form in fairly large print, so that you can easily glance down and see what to say. (If you write full prose, you will almost certainly have to read it laboriously and lose eye contact with your students.)
The sequencing needs to work.
They need to conclude with some way of knowing whether or not the students achieved the purpose of the lesson.
Lesson plan templates
To get you started, here are three different kinds of lesson plan forms. You can alter them to fit your particular situation and style:
It works better to have as few pieces of paper as possible. If you can, it works better to see your whole lesson plan at one glance. (Besides, not many things are worse than shuffling bits of paper while teaching, especially if you have misplaced one.)
Many instructors like the landscape format so that notes can take the full width of the page. Besides, if you have a lesson book and you have two pages together, you can easily have a full A3 lesson plan in sight.
You might like to scribble your first lot of rough notes on paper. But it's a good idea to develop your notes with a word processor:
You can edit them easily without re-writing the whole thing, e.g. putting in things you forgot, improving the sequencing, changing layout.
They are easy to save.
A computer print-out is usually easier to read than handwriting.
Print them out on paper. You will probably want to scribble extra notes on the page quickly, such as good ideas and changes you'd like to make for next time.
Collate your notes into a lesson book. It will make it easy to teach next time.
Teaching school
In many K-12 classess, lesson plans tend to follow a rather consistent outline.
Lesson plans each have one (and only one) learning goal, and lessons are clearly sequenced so that each lesson builds on the previous lesson.
First half of the lesson
Give the aim of the lesson
Say why it is important
Go though the steps (often "how to do ...").
Work an example
Work an example (with student participation)
Any questions?
Give students a learning activity
Second half of the lesson
Walk around the class observing what students do, answering questions, and helping any student in difficulty.
Plan use of time
As the teacher, it’s your job to get the most effective use of your classroom time and move the pace along.
A very good guide to teacher effectiveness is simply the percentage of lesson time that all students are fully engaged in effective learning activities. Admittedly, it's based on process rather than results, but it is fairly easy to observe. You are being effective if:
you limit your "stand and explain" teaching to sessions of no more than ten minutes,
you keep your "dead time" to an absolute minimum (time spent in simply managing the classroom and student behavior),
nearly all your students spend nearly all lesson time interacting in effective learning activities, and
you don't give "busywork" activities. These are time-wasting activities that keep students busy without actually learning the lesson. (If you are new to teaching, you might find it difficult to differentiate good learning activities from busywork.)
We've seen that good learning tends to be active: students participate or do things that indicate learning. Good learning may be also be passive, especially for some learning styles: Students can be listening, thinking and forming their own understandings (that is, fully engaged) with little outward sign of activity. And usually the best way to know that students are passively learning is to stop fairly often and interact with them. (The trap is to think that telling is teaching.)
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that you must rush through the lesson at top speed. In fact, you should go slowly through complex topics so that students actually learn them.
Choose learning activities
A significant aspect of lessons is to “engage” students. That means students maintain their interest, concentration, and attention because they are learning. Student normally enjoy learning. Being engaged is quite different from being entertained, which distracts students from actually learning anything.
Students learn more if they actively do something. In a learning activity, students try out a new skill that they are learning or to explore it in some way.
Traps:
Many teachers simply "stand and tell." There is usually little evidence that students are learning anything. (In fact, the department has a professional development session called "Telling ain't teaching and listening ain't learning"
Busywork, that is, activities that don't achieve a clear learning purpose
Find what learning activities you can from existing materials and select what you will use if you can. If there is nothing that you can use, you will need to make up your own activities.
Remember:
The skill to be learned
must match
The way it is taught, The way it is practiced, and The way it is assessed
How to teach it: Explain each step of using the reference book and get each student to do the same as you go.
How to practice it: Practice using the reference book
How to assess it: Tasks using the reference book
Example 2
Skill: Ride a bicycle
How to teach it: Coaching with a bicycle
How to practice it: Practice with a bicycle
How to assess it: Watch the student ride a bicycle.
In teaching school, most teachers naturally think of pencil-and-paper tasks that students can do at their desks. and at least much of the time, that's a good way to go. Other than that, it's time to get creative. Generate a range of activities that will work for your students, considering student characteristics, visual aids (pictures, diagrams, objects, etc), available resources and materials and your ability to produce new materials. In some cases, noise levels and student behavior will be important.
Consider these activities:
demonstration
simulation
role plays
written tasks
slides and/or video presentations
case studies
collaborative projects
individual projects
scenario analysis
question and answer
library research
online research
self-paced materials
practice as a group
Plan how you will use your classroom space
As the teacher, it’s your job to get the best use of your classroom space.
First, include a room setup in your lesson plan if you want students to do anything other than sit is regular places at their desks.
Second, set the room up to be suitable for any interactions you have planned:
All students should easily be able to see you and all your visual aids
You should be able to see and hear everyone else. This usually means that they need to sit close enough together.
Everyone needs to be in the right places for any activity you have planned; this will prevent any unnecessary moving around during class.
Nobody is left out.
Minimize distractions.
Eliminate any background noise (e.g. traffic), usually by closing some windows.
For teaching computing, make sure that students can see you without being distracted by what’s on their computer screens.
If it’s a big space, some people might take an amount of space a long way from the teacher so that they are not near anybody else. This tends to make them less willing to interact and participate, and makes the class harder for you to teach. (Remember, learning is partly a communal exercise.)
The simplest way to minimize the problem is for you to set up the furniture beforehand so that you control the classroom environment. This may be:
Small groups around tables: best for small group activities that require writing
Small groups without tables: best for small group activities that require little or no writing
One large circle
Half-circle
Concentric half-circles
Desks in rows
Give clear instructions if you want people to move around.
Show leadership by giving clear instructions before students have to do anything. In a few cases, you won’t be able to set the room up beforehand for everything you want to do. For example, you might want to start by speaking to a large group together, then split into small groups for an activity, and then come back together.
The main thing that can go wrong is a kind of chaos that wastes time and delays you from starting the next activity. You should be able to anticipate when this would happen and prevent it. Here's what you can do:
Plan exactly what they must do beforehand.
Take control—students will appreciate the leadership. Give students clear, simple instructions at the time. Explain yourself, but don’t talk so much that students become confused.
Take initiative to start the next activity as soon as possible. As the teacher, the pace of the lesson is your responsibility.
If you divide students into groups, use a simple system of assigning people to groups. You can speed the process along:
Provide seating in groups.
Have a predetermined way of putting people in groups.
Appoint leaders.
Appointing group scribes if they need to make notes.
Free-form activities
You can allow students do drift from group to group according to what interests them, but this only works well for some kinds of creative activities when people need to explore their own interests. You will find a few people will want to go around and watch, but are reluctant to try anything. A few will tend to socialize more than learn.
The Law of Unintended Outcomes
Anything you do can have a result that you didn't expect. In fact, you will probably always have results that you don't expect. You won't know everything about how students will react, whether negative or positive.
If it's because you didn't plan your lessons well, there could be more negative unintended outcomes than you hoped. For example, if most students missed the point of the lesson, the negative outcome is that you will have to make a better plan and teach it again. It will be more difficult because students are confused, and you will need to unconfuse them.
There's a positive side to this too.
Discussions can bring up excellent insights that you hadn't foreseen.
Students might apply what they learn in very different contexts.
Your students might pick up on other kinds of skills that they need to learn as part of a task.
Students are sometimes inspired by a casual remark, then spend a lot of time reading and thinking about it. So lots of the learning might be excellent, but not what you intended.
You might find out that your intended outcomes are not the best ones, so make in-course adjustments.
Even though you should plan well and foresee what will happen, you should expect that you won't always have the exact results you intended.
Very young children
Very young children are different in some ways. Aligning with developmental ability is essential; students cannot understand something if they are not ready.
Not only do children develop at different rates, one year is a large percentage of the child’s lifetime. A child with a birthday at the beginning of the year can be developmentally quite different from a child with a birthday at the end of the year.
Learning through play
The task is to offer a range of stimulating experiences so that children learn through play. For example, music experiences include singing, musical instruments, chants and rhymes, listening experiences. Movement experiences include using props, space, sounds/music, and body awareness.
As another example, some experiences to foster children's language and communication development include reading or telling stories, rhymes and poetry, pictures, puppetry and felt board, listening experiences, and planned discussion groups.
Experiences to promote children's creative skills and aesthetic development include:
Visual arts: e.g. drawing, painting, modelling, printing, construction, collage
Music and sound experiences: listening to music, singing, participating in music making, listening to sounds of nature
Taste and smell experiences
Performance of dance or drama
Free to move
Students are usually free to move between different kinds of experiences as they wish. The very young should not be made to sit at desks.
Teach your lessons
Now it's beyond planning; you have to present your lessons, using the resources and any equipment you developed in preparation.
Follow the learning sequence as you planned and pace yourself so that students can learn most effectively. If your teaching plans are good, they will keep you on track. Keep your discussion on what it is that students are supposed to be learning. It's easy to go off on irrelevant digressions, but it's not a good use of teaching time. Note that the criteria that applied to the planning lessons also apply to presentation.
Your attitude
When you start with a new group of students, it is your job to establish an initial relationship with them. This is partly attitude and partly what you do. You will find that some approaches work better than others so be flexible.
Build some rapport. Be friendly and polite. Draw people into the group and make them feel valued. Students should feel that you are available and willing to help them if they need it.
Build some respect. In a school, it's not important or not whether or not students like you. What really matters is that they respect you. You don't have to become your student's friend and it's not expected. New teachers make the mistake of trying to be popular rather than trying to teach well.
You can also develop rapport between students. The way to do it is to start with introductions in the first session and later let them work in groups and talk to each other. Let relationships grow naturally.
What you believe about students influences what they believe about themselves.
If you think they can't, then they probably can't. If you think they can, they have a better chance of being able to do it.
You will establish trust if you are consistent and fair, have a positive attitude, and do a good job of teaching. Being honest (as opposed to evasive), tactfully of course, will help them know where they stand. Your self-management will also help establish your credibility, so show up on time and be well-prepared and well organized.
Do you welcome questions? Be open to opinions and ideas and let students have their say. Ask questions and let them give the answers that you don't expect. Follow up their ideas rather than push only your own. If students are unclear in what they say, ask them to try explaining it again in different words.
Be alert to sensitivities in culture and gender and to your own body language. Do you reflect appropriate interest or could it be interpreted in ways you do not like?
Besides communicating clearly and effectively, you will need to be a good listener and show empathy. If students are frustrated in some way, they might drop subtle hints as a way of asking for help, although some might be rude and blunt. If you are empathetic, you will understand their needs better and be more able to offer the right kind of assistance. Adults will know when you pick up what is going on and appreciate it.
Be a critical listener. This doesn't mean that you criticize students. It means that you help develop their thinking by ensuring you understand them well and pointing out weak and strong points in their thinking.
Give all students your attention. It is easy to give too much attention to students whom you like (such as the friendly, talkative ones, or the naturally attractive ones). It is similarly easy to give inadequate attention to quiet, shy, rude, or unattractive students. A mark of your professionalism and ethics is your ability to treat all students equitably, giving help where it is most needed.
On teaching
Before each session, check your planning to confirm what you need to do, and check resources are available.
Your presentation should be engaging and relevant. That comes from being enthusiastic about your topic, using a variety of media, and doing good planning.
Get people enthusiastic about learning. As an instructor, you value learning and are aware of its benefits. Everybody you work with needs to continue their own learning, and part of your role is to encourage it in new and ongoing participation in learning.
When you teach, you will need to point out the importance of what it is you teach. In that way, you can explore the benefits of learning with students and colleagues, and communicate them to foster continued learning.
Your speech and body language should reflect that you are serious about what you are doing and really want them to learn. Stand straight, speak clearly and loudly without mumbling, and look your students in the eye. Use the right tone of voice and gestures that illustrate or support what you say, not nervous jerks that distract or confuse people. Dress neatly, and conservatively. Your clothes should not be a distraction.
Being flexible is good. You'll probably need to modify your approach because every group is different. Some groups are quiet. Some are restless. Some are quick to learn, and others struggle. Some adjustments are necessary to maintain effective relationships. You'll also face situations that you didn't anticipate, such as students with physical, social or emotional difficulties, or organizational problems such as sudden changes of venue or equipment.
Sometimes you will instinctively adjust to a new context. For example, you might adjust your verbal and written language to suit the language and literacy abilities of your students. But you will learn other things only with experience.
If you're new to teaching, too much flexibility will blow your lesson off track and you might lose so much time that it affects subsequent lessons too. But it's not hard to notice students who need extra support or information and provide it.
Introduce and explain your activities. Give clear instructions and be open to others' opinions.
Encourage and reinforce the development of generic skills. These include skills in how to learn, how to take initiative and be innovative, and how to work in a team, how to communicate ideas and information, how to collect and organize information, how to plan and organize activities, etc.
Use the diversity of their backgrounds as a resource. Your lessons will be more interesting and students will learn better. Adult learners have considerable experience, and they need to be able to relate it to what they learn.
Make sure each student has the opportunity to participate when you lead discussions. Address quiet students by name when you ask them questions. They might have a good contribution and be quite willing to give it, but need be addressed specifically to overcome their fears. Ask questions to generate further discussion. If you have done well stimulating discussion with leading questions, the students will respond spontaneously to each other on the topic with only occasional guiding questions from you to steer the discussion into all topics that need to be covered.
Use appropriate language to reflect the audience. Often that means speaking plain English and only using jargon when you need to. Use the terminology and language of the industry or workplace. If you face cultural or linguistic differences, you may need to consider adjusting your language and concepts.
Observe your class closely. How is the group interacting? Are there conflicts or behavioral problems? Is there behaviour that puts other at risk of any kind? Observing behavior and interpreting it isn't always easy. If you're new to teaching, you won't always realize what is going on at first.
Monitor student progress to ensure they achieve outcomes and that their individual needs are being met. Watch for students' clues that they are having problems. Some will look bored or start to miss classes, or ask questions that indicate they misunderstood important parts of the course. Formative assessments will let you know how well they are doing and when they are ready for assessment.
Encourage students to evaluate their progress. They may need to develop intentional strategies, such as journals or log books in which they might reflect on their learning.
Give students feedback on how well they are doing. This may be formal progress reports, but you should also give informal verbal feedback. Acknowledge success—a little bit of encouragement goes a long way. Feedback can also include informal group or individual discussions.
Give individual student support. As you observe how your students are progressing, you might find that some need individualized help, such as:
giving students extra help with particular areas of learning
listening to problems and helping within your limits
referring students to external services when you can't help
thinking through the training delivery
.
As you teach, review your lessons. How will you improve them for the next time you teach this course? Even experienced teachers improve their notes each time, and some use their notes as a basis to write a textbook.
Recognize achievement and promote rewards. This is especially so if your organization has awards or other kinds of recognition for achievement in learning.
Give practice
Students must also have opportunities to practice the skill that is to be assessed. Build opportunities for practice into the delivery. Even in more conceptual subjects, you need to give practice; discussion can give students experience in using particular ideas. It is unfair to assess a skill when the student does it for the first time in a formal assessment. It might be unfair even the student has had some practice but knows they will not pass an assessment.
At the practice stage, inform students of the expected standard so that they can prepare for assessment. Then give practice opportunities that suit what they are learning, the context, and, the specific goals of the session. If your students need to build confidence and feel successful, this is a good place to start, then build on it in formative assessment.
If you're teaching as well as assessing, you should discuss with students the process, rationale and benefits of practice. Depending on their progress, you might need to give reinforcement through further training or practice. Monitor students' progress and discuss with them whether they are ready to be assessed.