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How to Make a Lesson Plan

Why Should I?

The first questions is probably, "Why should you plan a lesson?" Especially if you have a textbook it may seem unnecessary to do any planning. Just open the book to page 22 and go. However, there are a couple of reasons why it's a good idea. First of all, you should spend some time anticipating problems and questions. For one thing, you should know which words, expressions, idioms and slang are going to be hard for the students-- and this goes for readings, grammar exercises, listening, any kind of lesson. You probably want to be prepared to explain or translate them to your students or you're going to look dumb and waste time thinking in front of your students. You also want to go over the book exercises and make sure you understand how the exercise works and what students are going to have to do. You also need to know the answers obviously. Or the exercises may be inadequate or present confusing examples.

Besides being ready to help students, at least some planning can ensure you get everything done you want to in the lesson. You should have some idea of the timing of the lesson so you can get to all the activities. Of course, it's true that estimates of time can be very wrong. But you should have some idea. You also need to make sure the lesson or activity is complete. That is, if you students are going to read a text and do some vocabulary exercises, you need to allot some time to make sure students understood the text, to have them ask questions. If the text is about football, it might be fun or interesting to ask students which teams they like, how much they watch football, what other sports they play. So a lesson plan will make sure you get all the key points of a lesson done and that you have time to do it all. It also obviously helps you fit all the lessons together into a whole semester or year.

Finally, students can tell if you planned or not. If throughout the lesson, you keep saying, 'Ah, uhm' or you have no idea what the lesson worksheet says, it shows. And students will feel you don't value them or their time. It can ruin class morale and it can give a bad example--if you're lazy to do your homework, why should they do theirs?

That being said, a good teacher is always ready to depart from the lesson plan if necessary. If students are having a problem that needs to be addressed, if they just don't respond to your lesson, you have to be flexible. And a lesson plan doesn't have to be very elaborate. But a good plan keeps you on track and is a record of what you wanted to get done. If things do go off course, your plan can help you bring it back to where it should be.

What Does a Good Lesson Look Like?

Modern educational theory suggests that a lesson should have three elements: Engage, Study and Activate. Students need to be engaged, which is to say, some part of the lesson should be interesting and exciting for the students. They should want to do the task before them, want to learn more. This can be as hard as it sounds of course, especially in a large class. But games, jokes, discussions, relating lessons to students' lives, puzzles, riddles, or topics kids like such as sport or music can help to engage the students and gain their enthusiasm.

It may go without saying that students must study during a lesson. They should think or reason, discover something new, gain understanding, or learn. This may range from doing standard fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises to deducing grammar rules from examples to matching words with definitions to drilling pronunciation.

More than just studying, language should also be activated.. That is, students should use language by speaking or writing or doing a role play. The language they studied should be put to use. This stage may also be designed to be fun and interesting, thus engaging the students--for example roleplay a teacher talking to a student or writing an advertisement for a made-up concert.

You want to make sure that a lesson contains all three of these elements. In some cases, activating and engaging students could be as simple as asking students what they think about the topic of the lesson at the end of a study-oriented activity (S-A-E). Or you may warm-up by getting the students to talk about the topic in relation to their personal life, then study vocab, then activiate by having them talk in more detail about their personal life (E-S-A). You may also have students try a task with new vocab or grammar, and then study the new language with the background of already having practiced (E-A-S).

At the same time you are balancing these three elements and making sure the lesson has some variety to it--otherwise it gets very boring--you also need to be sure the lesson is coherent. The link between different activities might be the topic (Cars, Food, Sports, Einstein...) or it might be a grammar point (Present Perfect, First Conditional, Prepositions) or it might be a task/structure (How to Ask for Favours, Describing People, Slang) but there needs to be consistency and coherence. Otherwise the lesson will feel haphazard. Furthermore, activities in one lesson should also complement each other, and reinforce each other.

Activities in a lesson should be related and they should also go in logical order. If you plan to teach students the vocabulary of car parts and you don't think they know the words, it's better to teach the vocab before having a conversation. On the other hand, if you want to find out what they know and don't know, you will want to ask students questions first and then go over any vocab they don't know. When you do a reading exercise, you might need to teach them some difficult vocab before they read. Think about what you need students to know before they do a part of the lesson to make sure you aren't either making them do something they aren't ready to do or repeating something you already did in the lesson. Make sure there's some flow to the lesson and things go in a logical order.

Lessons should also have goals or aims. What do you want your students to learn? What should they be able to do? What will they know after this lesson? And how will you evaluate that? How will you know if you achieved your aims with your lesson? A good lesson plan will always have goals or aims and some way to test whether or not students acheived those aims. Or at least you will have thought this out carefully.

Finally lesson planning should also include consideration of problems. As I mentioned above, you should anticipate what words, concepts or idioms will be hard for students. You should also have some idea of what activities might be hard for the students to complete, or hard for them to understand what they should do. You might have a back-up plan in case students hate the activity and just rush through it. Or what will you do if you planned a role play with 7 parts, and everyone is sick that day so only 2 students come to class? While not every problem can be predicted, a good teacher has some idea what the big problems in their lessons are likely to be. And of course every lesson has some potential problems. The point isn't to design a flawless lesson; it's to be ready in case something goes wrong.

My lesson plans are usually handwritten bits of paper with an outline on them. For example, a recent lesson plan I put together was:

1. Warm-Up/Engage: Write Whodunit on the board. Explain what it means, then ask students if they like detective novels, favorite authors, favorite books, why or why not?
2. Activity: Elementary, My Dear Watson [this is a lesson out of Advanced Conversation Games where students read about a murder and then are given clues one by one and have to theorize who committed the murder]--go over vocab as needed [in this case I want the pace to go fast so I decided to handle vocab problems as they come up. But I had a list of Vocab words that might be hard and translations in Russian. Providing a translation keeps the pace of the murder mystery fast].
3. Aim: Give opinions, hypothetical (he might have done this, he could have done this, I think this is interesting)
   criminal vocab: clue, suspect, weapon, murder, investigation, footprint...
4. Ask students Who Done It and Why. Reveal answer.
   Comprehension Questions: [Here I had some key questions to make sure everyone understood the subtlities of the murder, but these proved unnecessary as the students understood very well]
5. Evaluation, Activation: What kinds of crimes are common in Astana? Is murder common? Are white collar crimes as serious as violent crimes? What crime is the worst?

So even though it's brief, it covers engaging students, study and activation both together and then closing the lesson with some more engagement and activation. I tried to anticipate vocab problems by being ready to explain key words. I also tried to anticipate students' getting bored by keeping the pace fast. Finally the lesson is linked by a single theme--Crime--and in this case a centerpiece activity.

One tool that is highly recommended by educators is a Lesson Plan Blank, a form to be filled out before each lesson. One example I sometimes do use which can be printed out, is here. But you may have a format you are more comfortable with. Some schools now require such plans and schools may have their own form to be filled out before and/or after the lesson. But required or not, it can be a good tool to force you to think everything through. I also like have a record of what activities I used together so that I can use them together again. Finally I like to keep track of what problems I had so if I use a lesson again, I can be ready.

My Lesson Plan Blank has 14 fields:

1. Class: What class are you planning to use this lesson for? Just helps you keep organized.
2. Date: When do you plan to do this lesson? Helps you keep track of what you have covered, what you will cover.
3. Unit/Chapter: Where are you in the textbook or on the syllabus? This is good for keeping track of chronology but also for making sure the lesson plan is linked to the theme of the class and to other lessons.
4. Theme: What's the topic or theme of this lesson? Might be anything from Airplane Travel to Sentences with Can. Useful to know what the lesson will be about so that you stay focused and so you can use the lesson in other classes when the same topic comes up.
5. Objective: What do you want the students to know at the end of the lesson?
6. Assessment: How will you test whether they learned it or not? This might be as simple as having them generate a conversation using key words or structures, or it might involve doing a grammar exercise or expressing an idea.
7. Materials: What do you need for this lesson? Make sure you don't leave anything at home. Also a great time to think through how you will conduct the lesson. What will you write on the board? What will you give as a worksheet? Do you need to Xerox things?
   The activities of the lesson are broken down into 4 categories:
8. Timing: How long will it take, or what time do you want to start this part. Just a good way to keep on schedule. After the lesson you might adjust these values to reflect reality so next time you have a better idea how long each part of the lesson takes
9. For each activity you also want to note what you will do and what the students will have to do. What will be going on? Doing a worksheet, lecturing, reading a text?
10. Objectives: Each part of the lesson should have some goal or objective all of which reflect or add up to the lesson objective.
11. Anticipated Problems and What you can do about it should go on the left side of the sheet. And after the lesson you should note
12. Real Problems-what actually went wrong?
13. Homework: Finally make a note of any homework or follow up you plan to do. Maybe you'll start next lesson with a quick review or a pop quiz, or something. There should always be some kind of follow up or review of some kind.

Hopefully now you have some idea of why lesson plans are important and how to put together a complete lesson plan. As usual I love getting feedback and hearing your ideas and experience, so feel free to write.

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