PLANNING LESSONS

1 Lesson plans

2 Getting organized

3 Follow – up

1 Lesson plans

The writing of lesson plans has a number of important functions:

 An aid to planning:

Writing down what you expect the students to be able to do be the end of the lesson, and
what you intend to do to make that possible, helps you to think logically through the
stages in relation to the time you have available.

 A working document

Having something to refer to in the lesson helps keep you on target, although it should
never prevent you from responding to the needs of the moment, if necessary.

 A record

Suitably amended after the lesson, a lesson plan acts as a record of what the class has
done and might from the basis for a future lesson plan with a similar class.

In addition, in the Teaching Practice situation the lesson plan can form the basis of
discussion of the lesson with your supervisor. He or she may wish to look at the plan
during the planning stage and/or before the lesson and will usually refer to it during
feedback on the lesson.

What should be included in a lesson plan?

Information to be included in a lesson plan can be considered under the following

 Aims

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Questions you need to ask (and answer) are not only What do I, the teacher, aim to do?
but also What do I expect the student to do and/or to have achieved by the end of the
lesson? What specific language will they understand and use? or What specific skills will
they have developed?

Often in a lesson you will have a main aim and perhaps a number of subsidiary aims.
This is particularly true, for example, in a lesson in which skills are integrated or when a
listening or reading text is used to introduce a language item. It is important that you (and
the student) recognize the main aim of the lesson and of each stage.

 Procedure

This is the part of the lesson plan which lays out the steps – the stages – in the lesson to
ensure that the aim(s) is achieved.

You should indicate on your plan what will be done at each stage and why (the stage
aim), the approximate time, the materials you will use, and the perhaps details of any
complex instructions you are going to give or questions you plan to ask.

In order to do this you have to consider how you will order the stages and the
approach(es), activities, and materials you will use at each stage. You will have to answer
these questions:

How much time do I have?

Approximately how will I divide up the lesson into stages?

How much time will each stage take?

You also need to ask yourself:

What will be the aim of each stage?

How will the stage be linked?

Example: For the presentation and practice of Why don’t you…? a lesson of 35
minutes might be made up of the following stages:

Stage 1 (5min)

Introduce the structures. Context: giving advice to someone who has a headache, and the
replies to the advice.

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Stage 2 (5min)

Check students’ understanding and practice saying the model sentences.

Stage 3 (10min)

Guided practice, using cue cards – in open then close pairs.

Stage 4 (10min)

Freer practice using a new context, giving advice about preparing for a test.

Stage 5 (5min)

Students make a record of the form and use of the structure in their notebook.

 Approach(es) and activities

For each stage you will have to think what approach you are going to use and what
activities the students will do to achieve your aims. Questions to ask yourself may
include:

If my aim is to present or revise a language item am I going to do it through a text,

For skills development what do my students need before they can listen, read,
write or speak? How will I follow up the skills work?

What type of practice activities shall I set up: speaking, pairwork, writing?

Have I planned for a balance and a variety of activities and materials –

Are the activities ordered logically – from more controlled to freer?

For each stage what sort of feedback is appropriate?

The approaches and activities you decide upon should be indicated in the Procedure part
of your lesson plan. Sometimes it is worth making a note of your intended seating
arrangement as well. Throughout the plan, perhaps in the margin, you can include a note

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of the groupings and the interaction at each stage: teacher/student, student/student,
mingle, etc.

 Materials, aids and equipment

The question you need to ask is: At each stage which materials, aid and equipment do I
need to achieve my aims? You should make a note on your lesson plan of when you will
use these materials and aids and also include a plan of your blackboard or whiteboard at
each stage of the lesson.

 Information about the students and the classroom circumstances

It is worth noting at the top of every plan the level of the class, the course book they are
using, the size of the class and its composition, especially if it is multinational. You may
be required to give more detailed student profiles. You should also note how this lesson
fits into the students’ course programme (the timetable fit) and what knowledge you
assume the students will bring to the lesson.

 Anticipated problems

Although you need to learn to be flexible in class, to be able to think on your feet and
adapt your lesson plan according to circumstances, you are less likely to be thrown if you
give some thought to some of the things that can go wrong. It is a good idea to make a
note on your plan of any anticipated problems – in terms of language or classroom
management – that could occur during any of the activities and any strategies you have
considered for dealing with these problems. It is particularly useful to include this on the
plan you give to your supervisor. In this way you will be given credit for anticipating
difficulties, whereas if you mention such problems after the lesson it sounds as if you are
making excuses!

You can anticipate what students will find difficult in a particular language item by
throughly researching the language you are planning to teach. Investigate, if possible, the
ways in which their language is different from English.

Example: will your students have difficulty with the sound /ǝ/ because it doesn’t
exist in their language? This is obviously easier to do with a monolingual group. You can
also anticipate difficulties by finding out as much as you can about what the students
have done in previous classes – their individual strengths and weaknesses in skills work,
for example.

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There are a number of ways in which the timing and organization of your lesson can be
affected. For example, it is a good idea to think about what you would do if:

 The students take a longer or shorter time to do the activities than you have
planned;

 They find an activity easier or more difficult than you thought they would;

 Some students finish before the others;

 There are some students who need extra support;

 There are uneven numbers for a pairwork activity;

 Some or all of the students have already met the material you have based your
lesson round: for example, they have already seen the video you were going to
show.

 Achieving a balance

It is important to be critical of your lesson plans – especially in checking your aims

However, as in all things, you need to strike a realistic balance in the amount of
preparation you do. If you overprepare this usually means getting stuck in your plan and
not responding flexibly to the class; getting obsessed by your ‘performance’ – by your
own ideas and techniques; or not being sensitive to the students, what they are doing and
not doing. If you underprepare, this usually results in long silences while you decide what
to do next (demoralizing for you and the students!), unclear aims and underexploited
activities.

Also, remember that although you influence what happens in the class it is often more a
case of ‘managing learning’ than teaching; it is the pace the students work at that needs to
be measured, not the pace you work at. You can exhaust yourself with a dazzling array of
new ideas you are determined to try out and then realize the students are doing hardly
anything. In fact, with some well-planned and well set-up activities you might need to do
very little in the classroom.

 Personal aims

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For any particular lesson, in addition to the learning aims for your students, you may also
wish to set yourself a ‘personal aim’, perhaps in consultation with your supervisor. This
‘personal aim’ focuses on an aspect of your teaching which you want to pay particular
attention to this lesson. For example: To talk less myself and involve the students more, or
To make my instruction clearer, etc. If you are being observed by other trainees you
could ask them to give you feedback on how well you achieved your aim.

 How should a lesson plan be written down/ laid out?

You may have to use a set or prescribed lesson plan form for assessment purposes.
However, the way you put your lesson plan down on paper for use in the class is up to
you, since you are the one who is going to interpret it both during the lesson and later on
when you refer back. The format you choose will also depend on the type of lesson you
are giving.

Try to keep lesson plans simple. Cut out prose descriptions, number sections clearly and
underline or use colored or highlighter pens to draw attention to important elements.
There is no need to script the lesson – that can’t be done and shouldn’t be attempted.
However, there may be times when you want to write down precisely what you are going
to say: a model sentence, or a set of complicated instructions, or some questions to check
that the students have understood a language point, for example.

Obviously a lesson plan should be legible and there are two kinds of legibility required.
The first is for just before the lesson begins, when you’ll probably want quickly to run
over the aims and the stages of the lesson again. Normal-size writing is appropriate for
this. However, there will be other things that you will need to check ‘in the heat of the
lesson’ to remind you of the stages of the lesson. If you don’t want to appear to be
reading from a script you will probably want to just glance down at your lesson plan on
the desk. This means that you’ll need to be able to read these items from about a metre or
more away. They need to be bigger, possibly with sections written with different
coloured felt-tipped pens or marked with highlighter pens.

Instead of using a sheet of paper as your working document you may prefer to set out the
main points of the lesson on cards which can be held in the hand – each card being put to
the back of the ‘pack’ as the stage is completed.

You may want to write out a lesson in more detail if you want to keep it for use again.
This can be done after feedback when you can incorporate any suggested changes.

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If you are basing your lesson on a course book, the lesson plans/notes in the Teacher’s
book will be invaluable: make good use of them while writing your plan.

 How can lesson plans be stored?

Some teachers prefer to keep their lessons in a book, with one book for each class they
teach. In this way the plans are always kept in sequence and form an easy-to-refer-to neat
record of the classes. If you do this you may like to leave alternate pages blank when you
are writing your plans so that after the lesson you can write in comments on the success
or otherwise of each part of the lesson. This could form the basis of a very useful
teaching diary.

Another common way of storing lessons is within plastic pockets, kept in a ring binder.
With this system aids such as cards and pictures can be kept together with the plan.

Instead of filing lessons together by class you can arrange them under such headings as:
grammar points, topics, skills areas, course book, etc. Alternatively, you can file lesson
plans and accompanying aids in cardboard folders and use different coloured folders for
different sections. They can be stored in a filing cabinet, a plastic or even a cardboard
box. If you adopt this system it is also useful to number each folder and keep a small card
index with heading arranged in alphabetical order. In this way you can find plans easily
and quickly. You will be surprised how quickly your materials accumulate and it’s very
frustrating not to able to find something when you need it.

2 Getting organized

Before you start your lesson there are a number of practical things you can do to make
sure that everything runs smoothly:

 Check that you have your lesson plan

 Run through your lesson plan and make sure you have all the necessary aids and
equipment listed in the plan.

 Check any equipment you are going to use: for example, that the cassette recorded
or video works, etc.

 Make sure the seating is arranged the way you want it.

 Check that the board is clean.

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  If there is anything you can put on the board (the date, notices, a plan of work, etc)
do so in advance if possible, so you don’t waste at the beginning of the lesson.

 At the same time, be ready to chat to the students as they come into class!

3 Follow – up

After teaching the lesson you have planned and getting feedback on it you can consider
doing all or some of the following:

 Note any changes you made when teaching the lesson from what you had put in
your lesson plan.

 Make a note of the students’ reactions to the lesson as a whole and to the various
parts: did they find some parts more useful than others, easier or more difficult
than you expected? Occasionally it may be appropriate to ask them for their
opinions and feelings.

 Note how you felt about the lesson and its stages: did you feel comfortable or were
there times when you felt a bit unsure of what to do next?

 Make a note of any oral and/or written feedback you receive from your supervisor
and any useful comments and suggestions you may receive from fellow trainees.

After evaluating the feedback from these different sources you can add pertinent points to
your lesson plan or you may even like to write it out again incorporating suggested
changes. In this way you should have an improved lesson plan if ever you want to use it
as a basic for a lesson with a future class.

You may want to include what you have learned from planning and teaching the lesson in
a teaching practice diary and you can base your ‘personal aim’ for your next lesson on the
lesson and the feedback received.