How to Write Lesson Plans

How to Write Lesson Plans – There are a few different ways to write lesson plans. Many lesson plan templates may be a bit confusing for a beginner. That’s why I decided to put this article together, to help people find the right template to use. We’ll discuss all the different types of lesson plans that exist. The best part is that the lesson plan templates found here are completely editable.

The best way to differentiate your lessons is to customize your teaching material as much as possible. Not only will you save time from writing from scratch, but also have a better structure in place by doing so. We now have a variety of options to choose from, depending on your preferences and choices as a teacher.

Method 1: Creating the Basic Structure

1. Identify the learning objectives

Before you plan your lesson, you will first need to identify the learning objectives for the lesson. A learning objective describes what the learner will know or be able to do after the learning experience rather than what the learner will be exposed to during the instruction (i.e. topics). Typically, it is written in a language that is easily understood by students and clearly related to the program learning outcomes. The table below contains the characteristics of clear learning objectives:

The Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (link) is a useful resource for crafting learning objectives that are demonstrable and measurable.

2. Plan the specific learning activities

When planning learning activities you should consider the types of activities students will need to engage in, in order to develop the skills and knowledge required to demonstrate effective learning in the course. Learning activities should be directly related to the learning objectives of the course, and provide experiences that will enable students to engage in, practice, and gain feedback on specific progress towards those objectives.

As you plan your learning activities, estimate how much time you will spend on each. Build in time for extended explanation or discussion, but also be prepared to move on quickly to different applications or problems, and to identify strategies that check for understanding. Some questions to think about as you design the learning activities you will use are:

• What will I do to explain the topic?
• What will I do to illustrate the topic in a different way?
• How can I engage students in the topic?
• What are some relevant real-life examples, analogies, or situations that can help students understand the topic?
• What will students need to do to help them understand the topic better?

Many activities can be used to engage learners. The activity types (i.e. what the student is doing) and their examples provided below are by no means an exhaustive list, but will help you in thinking through how best to design and deliver high impact learning experiences for your students in a typical lesson.

It is important that each learning activity in the lesson must be (1) aligned to the lesson’s learning objectives, (2) meaningfully engage students in active, constructive, authentic, and collaborative ways, and (3) useful where the student is able to take what they have learnt from engaging with the activity and use it in another context, or for another purpose.

3. Plan to assess student understanding

Assessments (e.g., tests, papers, problem sets, performances) provide opportunities for students to demonstrate and practice the knowledge and skills articulated in the learning objectives, and for instructors to offer targeted feedback that can guide further learning.

Planning for assessment allows you to find out whether your students are learning. It involves making decisions about:

• the number and type of assessment tasks that will best enable students to demonstrate learning objectives for the lesson
  • Examples of different assessments
  • Formative and/or summative
• the criteria and standards that will be used to make assessment judgements
  • Rubrics
• student roles in the assessment process
  • Self-assessment
  • Peer assessment
• the weighting of individual assessment tasks and the method by which individual task judgements will be combined into a final grade for the course
  • information about how various tasks are to be weighted and combined into an overall grade must be provided to students
• the provision of feedback
  • giving feedback to students on how to improve their learning, as well as giving feedback to instructors how to refine their teaching

To learn more about designing assessment, click here.

4. Plan to sequence the lesson in an engaging and meaningful manner

Robert Gagne proposed a nine-step process called the events of instruction, which is useful for planning the sequence of your lesson. Using Gagne’s 9 events in conjunction with Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (link) aids in designing engaging and meaningful instruction.

1. Gain attention: Obtain students’ attention so that they will watch and listen while the instructor presents the learning content.
   • Present a story or a problem to be solved
   • Utilize ice breaker activities, current news and events, case studies, YouTube videos, and so on. The objective is to quickly grab student attention and interest in the topic
   • Utilize technologies such as clickers, and surveys to ask leading questions prior to lecture, survey opinion, or gain a response to a controversial question
2. Inform learner of objectives: Allow students to organize their thoughts regarding what they are about to see, hear, and/or do.
   • Include learning objectives in lecture slides, the syllabus, and in instructions for activities, projects and papers
   • Describe required performance
   • Describe criteria for standard performance
3. Stimulate recall of prior knowledge:
   • Help students make sense of new information by relating it to something they already know or something they have already experienced.
   • Recall events from previous lecture, integrate results of activities into the current topic, and/or relate previous information to the current topic
   • Ask students about their understanding of previous concepts
4. Present new content: Utilise a variety of methods including lecture, readings, activities, projects, multimedia, and others.
   • Sequence and chunk the information to avoid cognitive overload
   • Blend the information to aid in information recall
   • Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy can be used to help sequence the lesson by helping you chunk them into levels of difficulty.
5. Provide guidance: Advise students of strategies to aid them in learning content and of resources available. With learning guidance, the rate of learning increases because students are less likely to lose time or become frustrated by basing performance on incorrect facts or poorly understood concepts.
   • Provide instructional support as needed – as scaffolds (cues, hints, prompts) which can be removed after the student learns the task or content
   • Model varied learning strategies – mnemonics, concept mapping, role playing, visualizing
   • Use examples and non-examples
   To find out more about scaffolding student learning, click here
6. Practice: Allow students to apply knowledge and skills learned.
   • Allow students to apply knowledge in group or individual activities
   • Ask deep-learning questions, make reference to what students already know or have students collaborate with their peers
   • Ask students to recite, revisit, or reiterate information they have learned
   • Facilitate student elaborations – ask students to elaborate or explain details and provide more complexity to their responses
7. Provide feedback: Provide immediate feedback of students’ performance to assess and facilitate learning.
   • Consider using group / class level feedback (highlighting common errors, give examples or models of target performance, show students what you do not want)
   • Consider implementing peer feedback
   • Require students to specify how they used feedback in subsequent works
8. Assess performance: To evaluate the effectiveness of the instructional events, test to see if the expected learning outcomes have been achieved. Performance should be based on previously stated objectives.
   • Utilise a variety of assessment methods including exams/quizzes, written assignments, projects, and so on.
9. Enhance retention and transfer: Allow students to apply information to personal contexts. This increases retention by personalising information.
   • Provide opportunities for students to relate course work to their personal experiences
   • Provide additional practice

Method 2: Planning Out the Stages

1. Warm them up. At the beginning of every class, the students’ brains aren’t primed yet for the content. If someone just started explaining open heart surgery, you’d probably be all, “Woah, woah. Slow down. Go back to “take the scalpel.”” Ease them into it. That’s what the warm up is for — it not only gauges their knowledge, but it gets them into your groove.
   • The warm up can be a simple game (possibly about vocab on the topic to see where their current knowledge lies (or what they remember from last week!) or it can be questions, a mingle, or pictures used to start a conversation. Whatever it is, get them talking. Get them thinking about the topic (even if you don’t explicitly say it yet).
2. Present the information. That’s just about as straightforward as it gets, huh? However your format, you need to start with the information presented. It could be a video, a song, text, or even a concept. It’s the very core the entire lesson is based on. Without this, the students will go nowhere.
   • Depending on your students’ levels, you may have to go pretty bare bones. Think about how far back you need to go. The sentence “He put the coat on the rack” makes no sense if you don’t know what “coat” and “rack” mean. Give them the very basic concept and let the next lesson (or two) cultivate it.
   • You may find it useful to flat out tell the students what they’ll be learning. That is, give them your objective. You can’t make it any clearer than that! That way, they’ll walk away knowing what they learned that day. No two ways around it!
3. Do a guided practice. Now that the students have received the information, you need to devise an activity that allows them to put it into action. However, it’s still new to them, so start off with an activity that has training wheels. Think worksheets, matching, or using pictures. You wouldn’t write an essay before you do a fill-in-the-blank!
   • If you have time for two activities, all the better. It’s a good idea to test their knowledge on two different levels — for example, writing and speaking (two very different skills). Try to incorporate different activities for students that have different aptitudes.
4. Check their work and assess their progress. After the guided practice, assess your students. Do they seem to understand what you’ve presented so far? If so, great. You can move on, possibly adding more difficult elements of the concept or practicing harder skills. If they’re not getting it, go back to the information. How do you need to present it differently?
   • If you’ve been teaching the same group for a while, odds are you know the students who might struggle with certain concepts. If that’s the case, pair them with stronger students to keep the class going. You don’t want certain students left behind, but you also don’t want the class held up, waiting for everyone to get on the same level.
5. Do a freer practice. Now that the students have the basics, allow them to exercise their knowledge on their own. That doesn’t mean you leave the room! It just means they get to do a more creative endeavor that lets their minds really wrap around the information you’ve presented to them. How can you let their minds flourish?
   • It all depends on the subject at hand and the skills you want to use. It can be anything from a 20-minute puppet making project to a two-week long dalliance with the oversoul in a heated debate on transcendentalism.
6. Leave time for questions. If you have a class with ample time to cover the subject matter, leave ten minutes or so at the end for questions. This could start out as a discussion and morph into more probing questions on the issue at hand. Or it could just be time for clarification — both will benefit your students.
   • If you have a group full of kids that can’t be paid to raise their hands, turn them amongst themselves. Give them an aspect of the topic to discuss and 5 minutes to converse about it. Then bring the focus to the front of the class and lead a group discussion. Interesting points are bound to pop up!
7. Conclude the lesson concretely. In a sense, a lesson is like a conversation. If you just stop it, it seems like it’s left hanging in mid-air. It’s not bad…it’s just sort of a strange, uncomfortable feeling. If time allots for it, sum up the day with the students. It’s a good idea to literally show them they’ve learned something!
   • Take five minutes to go over concepts for the day. Ask them concept-checking questions (not introducing new information) to reiterate what the both of you have done and gained from the day. It’s sort of a full-circle type of thing, book-ending your work!

Method 3: Being Prepared

1. If you’re nervous, script it out. New teachers will find solace in scripting out a lesson. While this takes way more time than a lesson should, if it would help you, do it. It may ease your nerves if you know exactly what questions you want to ask and where you want the conversation to go.
   • As you teach, do this less and less. Eventually, you’ll be able to go in with practically nothing at all. You shouldn’t be spending more time planning and writing out than you are delivering! Just use this as an initial training device.
2. Allow for wiggle room. You’ve written out your timeline to the minute, right? Fantastic — but know that’s only really for reference. You’re not going to say, “Kids! It’s 1:15! STOP EVERYTHING YOU’RE DOING.” That’s not really how teaching works. While you should try to stick to this plan within reason, you’ll need to allow yourself some wiggle room.
   • If you find yourself running over, know what you can and cannot scratch. What must you cover in order for the children to learn most? What is just fluff and time killers? On the other side of the coin — if you have time left over, have another activity in your sleeve to pull out if need be.
3. Over-plan the class. Knowing that you have plenty to do is a much better problem than not having enough. Even though you have a timeline, plan on the underside. If something might take 20 minutes, allow it 15. You never know what your students will just whiz through!
   • The easiest thing to do is to come up with a quick concluding game or discussion. Throw the students together and have them discuss their opinions or ask questions.
4. Make it so a substitute could understand. On the off chance something happens and you can’t teach the lesson, you’ll want to have a plan someone else could understand. The other side of this is if you write it in advance and forget, it’ll be easier to jog your memory if it’s clear.
   • There are many templates you can find online — or ask other teachers what format they use. If you stick to one it’ll be better for your brain, too. The more consistencies, the better!
5. Form a back-up plan. In your teaching career, you’re going to have days where students whiz through your plan and leave you dumbfounded. You’ll also have days where tests got moved, half the class showed up, or the video you had planned got eaten by the DVD player. When this day rears its ugly head, you gotta have a back-up plan.
   • Most veteran teachers have a handful of lesson plans under their belt that they can whip out at any time. If you had a particularly successful lesson on Punnett squares, keep that material for later. You can turn it into a different lesson with another class about evolution, natural selection, or genes depending on the next class’ ability. Or you could have a lesson on Beyoncé up your sleeve (think the civil or women’s rights movement, progression of pop music, or just a music lesson for a Friday afternoon). Whichever.

Conclusion

Lesson plan is a plan that sets out the required learning objectives for a topic or theme, along with any prerequisites that must be present before it can be undertaken, and detailed steps for its implementation. It’s an instrument to help teachers guide students in their learning process.