Tips for effective lesson planning

To me, walking (or login) into the classroom has always felt like navigating through uncharted waters. Every class is unique, untouched. I believe that facing this fluidity with a plan makes things a thousand times easier, though. In the following lines, I am going to share with you some tips I would love to have read when I was a novice at this craft.

1- Plan

Always have a plan. I heard once that planning is a thinking skill – it is the ability of ‘seeing’ your lesson before it happens. If writing a formal lesson plan is not a policy in your teaching context, you do not necessarily have to write down your plan as an intricate description of procedures, aims, timing, etc. A lesson plan can take the shape of a list of bullet points, a coupleof post-its in the coursebook, or even existin the teacher’s mind alone. Nevertheless, do not underestimate the power of a plan.

2- Have a clear objective

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going nowhere. Having the objective of your lesson in mind before and during the lesson is very important to your students’ success. However, I believe it is worth noting that ‘getting to page 35’ is probably not the most appropriate objective. Think of it in terms of What will my students be (better) able to do by the end of this lesson? This way you will be focusing on the improvement of a communicative skill rather than the development of explicit knowledge of language. For example: to be better able to report a car crash to a police officer.

3- Think of an activity to assess that objective

Designing an activity to assess this objective is probably your next step. You don’t want to get to the end of your lesson and not be able to tell whether your students have achieved the aim. What you can do to avoid this is think of an activity to be done that would allow you, and the students, to assess goal achievement. To do so for the aim above, students could role-play this conversation between a police officer and someone who has seen the accident happen. This way, when students finish this task, you’ll be able to tell whether or not they achieved the aim and to what extent they did so.

4- Don’t get too attached to your plan

You’ll probably have to adapt (and sometimes to the point of complete revamping) most of your lesson plans, and that’s ok. Actually, that’s expected. How could you foresee that interesting piece of language that students produced?

Planning is crucial and a skill to be honed through practice and reflection, but it can never entangle you to the point of blindly following commands set in stone. After all, as previously said, lessons are fluid and quite unpredictable, and we, teachers, should adapt and remodel mour plans to meet our students’ needs. Sail with the wind, not in spite of it.