Planning lessons

Different attitudes to planning

Some teachers spend hours PLANNING what to do in their LESSONS the next day. Others don't seem
to need the same amount of time to think about what they are going to do. Some schools and
institutions expect teachers to provide detailed plans. Some teacher qualification exams expect
teachers to present plans for the lessons they are going to teach.

To plan or not to plan?

• When teachers don't plan - and leave everything to chance - they sometimes have wonderful
lessons, full of creativity and fun. But it's a big risk. Sometimes the lesson is just chaotic and no one
learns very much. If this happens too often, the students may start to think that the teacher is
unprofessional and this is bad for teacher-student RAPPORT.

• When teachers plan too much and then follow the plan exactly, without changing a single thing
whatever happens in the lesson, the lesson may be uncreative and boring.

• We need to be ready for MAGIC MOMENTS (when students do or say something really interesting)
and be prepared to change our plan to take advantage of them. We also need to be ready for
UNFORESEEN PROBLEMS (when something happens that we had not anticipated) and be prepared
to change our plan to deal with them.

What are lessons like?

• We need to have an idea of what we hope the students will achieve in a lesson. We need to think
of the best ways to help them do this. Then we start to think what the AIMS of a lesson are and how
we will help the students to achieve those aims, we are already planning, whether we write the plan
down or not.

• Lesson plans are like maps. They tell us where we are going and help us to take the best route to
get there. But we still have to make decisions as we travel. Should we take a detour? Do we prefer a
motorway or a country road?

• When we think of a lesson as a journey, it is just one METAPHOR we can use. We might also think
of a lesson as a film or a novel or a meal - and use those metaphors to help us put the pieces
together to make, for example, a narrative or a fantastic dining experience.

• Lesson ideas can come from many different places. They can be inspired by films we see or
something we read. They can come from the ideas of our colleagues or from something we have
read about in a teachers' magazine or heard from an online community. They can come from the
SYLLABUS we are following or the COURSEBOOK we are using - or they can simply arise because we
think our students need some extra work on something. They may be part of a SEQUENCE OF
LESSONS.
What goes into a plan?
Different schools and institutions (and exam boards) have different plan forms and formats.
But they all have several things in common:
• The most important part of the planning process is to decide what our precise learning
aims are. In other words, we need to consider the learning OUTCOMES. We can think of a
learning outcome as the answer to the question: What will my students know or be able to
do at the end of a lesson (or lesson stage) that they could not do or didn't know at the
beginning?
• We need to consider TIMETABLE FIT. In other words, we will say what the students have
been learning recently and what they will be doing in the next lesson(s) after this one.
• We need to have (or write) a good CLASS DESCRIPTION. This needs to say who the
students are in as much detail as we can give. We can say what they find easy and difficult,
how well they participate in lessons, etc. When we know who our students are, we can plan
especially for them - and plan activities that DIFFERENTIATE between different students.
• We need to list the LANGUAGE EXPONENTS (GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY or
PRONUNCIATION items) that we are going to teach or the LANGUAGE SKILLS (reacting,
writing, speaking and listening) we will focus on.
• We will say what ACTIVITIES we are going to include in our lesson and what TEACHING
AIDS we need to achieve them.
• We will describe the PROCEDURES that will happen in our lesson and what INTERACTIONS
will be taking place - in other words, who is working with whom. For example, perhaps the
teacher is talking to the whole class. Or perhaps the students are working in PAIRS or
GROUPS.
• It helps to estimate the TIMING of each lesson stage. If we include this in our plan, when
we are teaching we will know if we can slow down or if we need to speed up.
• We often include PERSONAL AIMS. In other words, we say what we (the teacher) hope to
achieve. This is different from our aims for the students. We might say something like this:
In this lesson I am going to evaluate what it feels like to teach without using any technology
at all. All lessons are opportunities for TEACHER DEVELOPMENT and ACTION RESEARCH like
this.
• It helps to ANTICIPATE PROBLEMS that our students might have with the lesson we are
preparing. If we do this, we can then imagine POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS to these problems.
• We will list ADDITIONAL POSSIBILITIES so that if the class goes more quickly than we
anticipated (or in a different direction), we have something ready.
 Lesson Approach (PPP)
What is Presentation, practice, and production (PPP)?
The PPP method could be characterized as a common-sense approach to teaching as it consists
of 3 stages that most people who have learnt how to do anything will be familiar with.
The first stage is the presentation of an aspect of language in a context that students are
familiar with, much the same way that a swimming instructor would demonstrate a stroke
outside the pool to beginners.

The second stage is practice, where students will be given an activity that gives them plenty of
opportunities to practice the new aspect of language and become familiar with it whilst
receiving limited and appropriate assistance from the teacher. To continue with the analogy,
the swimming instructor allows the children to rehearse the stroke in the pool whilst being
close enough to give any support required and plenty of encouragement.

The final stage is a production where the students will use the language in context, in an
activity set up by the teacher who will be giving minimal assistance, like the swimming
instructor allowing his young charges to take their first few tentative strokes on their own.

Lesson shapes, stages and sequences

• Then we plan lessons, we may use METAPHORS like maps, films, books or meals to come up
with a LESSON SHAPE.
• We think about establishing different episodes or LESSON STAGES within a lesson period. This
is because we believe that VARIETY within a lesson is important.
• When we teach a lesson, we need to make it clear when one stage is over and the next one
begins.
• We need to plan a coherent sequence of stages (and the activities and sequences within
them). Variety is important, in other words, but chaos probably isn't.

Planning a sequence of lessons

When we plan a sequence of lessons (say for two, three or four weeks or longer), there are
a number of things we will want to consider.
• We may decide to base our sequence on TOPICS AND THEMES.
For example, we could take photography as a topic and then plan lessons which look at a)
the development of photography, b) photographs that have changed the world, c)
snapshots that we take, d) the impact of digital photography on film, e) the way we use
photographs for social networking and f) the photographs we wish we had been able to
take (such as photographs of an event from history).
• We can base our sequence on the language, which we want our students to learn,
including GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY, LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS and TEXT AND DISCOURSE
features. Over a two-week period, for example, we might concentrate on narrative, with an
emphasis on tenses (PAST SIMPLE, PAST CONTINUOUS, PAST PERFECT), time LINKERS (first,
and then, later on, after that), LEXICAL PHRASE starters (J hadn’t intended to, I realized that
I had, then I found that ... ) and vocabulary that we have decided is important for our
students to know.
• When we plan a sequence of lessons, we try to ensure a balance between the different
LANGUAGE SKILLS that the students need to work with and the different ACTIVITIES we are
going to ask them to do.
• Then we plan a sequence of lessons, we think about short-term and long-term goals.
SHORT-TERM GOALS are the OUTCOMES that we hope the students will achieve by the end
of a lesson or a sequence within a lesson. LONG-TERM GOALS are the ones that we hope
they will have realized at the end of, say, a month or even a semester.
• Students need short-term goals so that they have something to aim for, something which
is not so far away that it is invisible. Short-term goals keep students MOTIVATED, especially
when the long-term goals seem too remote and far away.
• Although we may plan a sequence of lessons in advance, we must be ready to change and
amend our plans as the sequence continues and the lessons in it take place. If things are
going faster than we expected, we may need to add extra activities or material. If things are
taking a longer time, we may need to speed up or cut some activities or materials we had
planned to use. If the students are not responding to a topic or theme, we will have to
decide on how to make changes so that they respond better.
• It is probably not a good idea to plan a sequence of lessons just on language, just around
a topic, or only based on the range of activities we want the students to take part in.
Instead, we will create a MULTI-SYLLABUS, which includes all of these elements threaded
together.

Syllabus, curriculum, course

Some people use the terms syllabus and curriculum to mean the same thing, but this is
inaccurate. A CURRICULUM is an overall plan for a school or a SUBJECT. It expresses the
content, the overall goals, the philosophy (ideology) behind the program, and the way(s) in
which evaluations will take place. We call a particular number of weeks of teaching at the
LOWER-INTERMEDIATE level (for example) a COURSE. We can say what course you are
studying
• Most courses have a SYLLABUS: a list of the language or other content that will be taught
and the order that it will be taught in. For example, we can talk about a GRAMMAR
SYLLABUS (a list of grammar items), a TASK SYLLABUS (a list of tasks), a FUNCTIONAL
SYLLABUS (a list of language functions), etc.