How to Plan Lessons

Why plan at all?

Some teachers with experience seem to have an ability to think on their fact, which
allows them to believe that they do not need to plan their lessons. However, most teachers go
on preparing lessons throughout their careers, even if the plans are very informal.
For students, evidence of a plan shows them that the teachers but devoted time to
thinking about the class. It strongly suggest a level of professionalism and a commitment to
the kind of preparation they might reasonably expect. Lack of a plan may suggest the
opposite of these teacher attributes.
For the teachers, a plan - however informal – gives the lesson a framework, an overall
shape. It is true that he or she may end up departing from it at stages of the lesson, but at the
very least it will be something to fall back on. Of course, good teachers are flexible and
respond creatively to what happen in the classroom, but they also need to have thought ahead,
have a destination they want their students to reach, and know how they are going to get
there.
Planning helps, then, because it allows teachers to think about where they’re going
and gives them time to have ideas for where tomorrow’s and next week’s lesson. In the
classroom, a plan helps to remind teachers what they intended to do – especially if they get
distracted or momentarily forget what they had intended. Finally planning helps because it
gives students confidence: they know immediately whether a teacher has thought about the
lesson, and they respond positively to those that have.
No plan is written on tablets of stone, however. On the contrary, the plan is just that –
plan, possibilities for the lesson which may or may not come about, in other words. Of
course, we will be happy if things go ‘according to plan’, but they often don’t. as we said at
the very beginning of this book (page 6), all sorts of things can go wrong: equipment not
working, bored students, students who’ve ‘done it before’, students who need to ask
unexpected questions or who want or need to pursue unexpected pathways etc. That’s when
the teacher has to be flexible, has to be able to leave the plan for however long it takes to
satisfy the student’ needs at the point in the lesson. Sometimes, the plan has to be abandoned
completely and it is only after the it are recoverable for future lessons.
There is one particular situation in which planning is especially important, and that is
when a teacher is to be observed as part of an assessment or performance review. The
observer needs to have a clear idea of what the teacher intends in order to judge the success
of the lesson.

What are the aims of a plan?

A good lesson needs to contain a judicious blend of coherence and variety. A good
plan needs to reflect this.
Coherence means that students can see logical pattern to the lesson. Even if there are
three separate activities, for example, there has to be some connection between them – or at
the very least a perceptible reason for changing direction. In this context, it would not make
sense to have students listen to a tape, ask a few comprehension questions and then change
the activity completely to something totally unrelated to the listening. And it the following
activity only lasted for five minutes before something completely different was them
attempted, we might well want to call the lesson incoherent.
Nevertheless, the effect of having a class do a 45-minute drill would be equally
damaging. The lack of variety coupled with the relentlessness of such a procedure would
militate against the possibility of real student engagement. However present it might be at the
beginning of the session, it would be unlikely to be sustained. There has to be some variety in
a lesson period.
The ideal compromise is to plan a lesson that has an internal coherence but which
nevertheless allows students to do different things.

What should be in a plan?

The kind of plan that teachers make for themselves can be as scrappy or as detailed as
the teacher feels is necessary. If you look at experienced teachers’ notebooks, you may find
that they have simply written down the name of an activity, a page number from a book, the
opening of a dictation activity or notes about a particular student. Such notes look rather
empty, but may, in fact, give the teacher all she needs to remind her of all they necessary
elements. Other teachers, however, put in much more detail, writing in what they’re going to
do together with notes like ‘remember to collect homework’.
On teacher training courses, trainers often ask for a written plan which follows a
particular format. The format will vary depending on the trainer and the course, but all plans
have the same ingredients. They say who is going to be taught, what they are going to learn
or be taught, how they are going to learn or be taught, and with what.
The first thing such a written plan needs to detail is who the students are: How many
are there in the class? What ages? What sexes? What are they like? Cooperative? Quiet?
Difficult to control? Experienced teachers have all this information in their heads when they
plan; teachers in training will be expected to writer it down.
The next thing the plan has to contain is what the teachers/students want to do: study a
piece of grammar, write a narratives, listen to an interview, read a passage etc. looking
through a plan, an objective observer should be able to discern a logical sequence of things to
be studied and/or activated.
The third aspect of a plan will say how the teacher/students is/are going to do it. Will
they work in pairs? Will the teacher just put on a tape or will the class start by discussing
dangerous sports for example. Once again, an objectives reader of the plan should be able to
identify a logical sequence of classroom events. If four activities in a row are teacher-led
dictations, we might start to think that the sequence is highly repetitive and that, as a result,
the students are likely to get very demotivated by this incessant repetition. For each activity,
the teacher will usually indicate how long she expects it to take and what classroom materials
or aids she is going to use. The plan will say what is going to be used for the activities. A tape
recorder? Photocopies? An overhead projector?
Lastly, the plan will talk about what might go wrong (and how it can be dealt with)
and how the lesson fits in with lesson before and after it.
In order to be able to say these things, however, we need to go a little bit deeper and
ask some searching questions about the activities we intend to use.