Lesson plan

A lesson plan is a descriptive or detailed plan of content and activities for one or more individual lessons. Creating lesson plans is known as lesson planning.

Purpose

Advantages of creating lesson plans:

• Lesson plans help with organization. Organization improves the confidence of teachers, and the trust of students.
• Lesson plans help teachers plot trajectories to fulfill course objectives, often by setting lesson aims.
• Lesson plans can be reused, or adapted, saving future time

Content

While a lesson plan might be prepared in more or less detail, and in many possible formats, it may contain some or all of the following items:

• a title of the lesson
• target students
• keywords (especially useful for indexing & cross-referencing)
• lesson aims
• target language and sometimes an analysis of the target language too
• anticipated timings
• additionally required materials
• anticipated problems
• lesson stages

• warmer activities
• instructions, such as those to lead-in to the lesson content
• anticipated interactions
• plenary activities
• evaluation opportunities
• lesson extension strategies
• reflective analysis
  

Difficulties

Lesson planning can take a lot of time. The preparation of additional materials to accompany lesson plans can also take a lot of time.

Tips

Tips for lesson planning are offered by many organizations to help remedy the difficulties of lesson planning, and to help prepare teachers for the difficulties that may arise during lessons.

SWOT Analysis

When preparing a lesson plan or classroom activity, it may be useful to consider the following attributes of the students as individuals or the class as a whole and any external conditions that may affect the success of the lesson:

• Strengths: attributes of the student or class that will lead to successful completion of the activity. May include motivation, level
• Weaknesses: attributes of the student or class that may lead to the activity failing in its aim. May include motivation, level
• Opportunities: external conditions that are helpful to achieving the aims. May include novelty of the activity, perceived usefulness of the material
• Threats: external conditions which could affect the results. May include factors such as time, number of students attending

Reflective Analysis

While not part of the preparation for the lesson, it may be useful to note down how lessons went, and possible improvements, perhaps in content or time management etc.