What is a lesson plan?

A lesson plan is a detailed, formal description of how you would like your lesson to pan out. Lesson plans are designed to introduce new teachers to the production/flow of a lesson. They allow you to become aware of the length of your lesson and how long each segment takes to get through with students. As your teaching progresses throughout the year, you’ll quickly learn that every part of your lesson takes a different amount of time depending on the students, their mood, and the time of day- P.S., you do not get through a whole lot on a Friday after lunch time. Over time, you will begin to learn how long certain activities take and how to pace them out throughout your lesson(s).

Please do remember, your lesson plan is ONLY a guide on how you want your lesson to go. A lesson plan is not something you have to rigidly stick to, especially if the lesson does not flow how you had imagined. You can steer away from the lesson plan as long as it makes more sense to do so. If something is not working in the lesson at the time, be flexible and adjust your approach.

Elements of a Lesson Plan

You will most likely be provided with a template to fill out your lesson on. The template I had used in my first-year student teaching was provided by Maynooth University (see fig. 1). Lesson plans consist of a lot more than just the topic your covering and the activities you will utilise to facilitate students’ learning. 

Firstly, you will have basic information about your class to fill out, such as what year they are, what subject are you teaching them, and what topic you are on. This information will be followed by the resources you will use to aid the facilitation of students’ learning, for example, PowerPoint, videos, images, worksheets, activities, the whiteboard, and so on.

Secondly, you will be required to state any health and safety issues relating to students. Here, it is important to know about any health conditions your students may have, such as diabetes or heart conditions. This is also help prepare you if a student has a health problem in class as you will not be taken by surprise by their health condition.

There will also be a section on Special Educational Needs (SEN). Here, is another time it is important to know your class and find out any SEN they may have, such as ADHD. In this section, you will note down any activities or aspects of your lesson that will be suitable for students with SEN. This can include images of instructions in conjunction with you explaining the task, such as an ear for listening or a pen for writing. Additionally, it can include more hands-on activities to keep a student with ADHD busy and moving throughout the class and will also appeal to kinaesthetic learners.

Thirdly, you will have a section dedicated to your learning intentions and success criteria for the topic being covered in class. Learning intentions are what you would like to students to have learned when they walk out of the class. These learning intentions are derived from specific learning outcomes set out in guidelines by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) if you teach in Ireland. Success criteria are a method to measure if the student has met the learning intentions set out at the beginning of class, for example, working in pairs to generate ideas or complete a task, filling out a worksheet based on the information being taught in class, answering select questions, etc.

Afterwards, the actual development of your lesson occurs. This is broken down into the opening of the lesson, the development of the lesson, the closing of the lesson, and homework. Each segment of your lesson must be broken down into the duration of time it takes to cover. For example, five minutes for your learning intentions to be explained and taken down.

Lastly, there will be a section on reflection from your class. Here, you will be required to reflect on the content and pacing of your lesson, as well as student enjoyment, enjoyment, and behaviour.

How to Write a Lesson Plan

Step 1:

Fill out the basic details about your class mentioned above. This includes the class, year, subject, health and safety details, SEN, resources.

Step 2:

Fill out the topic of what you are covering. Here, it is important to note specific learning outcome(s) you wish to achieve or partially achieve in relation to the topic you are covering. You can write down the entire learning outcome or just the code designated to the learning outcome.

Step 3:

Come up with the learning intentions you wish to achieve. These must come from the learning outcomes. You can have as little as one learning intention or as many as three learning intentions. However, I would not recommend going beyond three learning intentions as class time limitations will not allow you to achieve these. You do not have to achieve the entire learning outcome in one class, only a section of it to be built upon.

Step 4:

In conjunction with your learning intentions, you must set your success criteria. This is to assess if the student has met your learning intentions for the class. Typically, you have the same amount of success criteria or more as your learning intentions to assess what has been learned in class.

Step 5:

Now is the development of the actual lesson and the amount of time you administer to each segment. At the beginning of student lesson planning, plan in multiples of 5 minutes as it makes it easier to break down the lesson and follow it.

At the beginning of each lesson, you can use a hook to gain students’ interest into the topic you will be covering in class. However, do not get too bogged down or obsessed with ‘the hook’ as it is only successful and time worthy when it is useful and relative to the topic. Do not try come up with a hook for the sake of having one otherwise it loses its effectiveness.

This can then be followed by disclosing the learning intentions to the students, so they know what is being covered throughout the class. Disclosing the learning intentions at the beginning of class aids student engagement as they know what is happening and what is going to happen. For these segments, spend no more than five minutes on each.

Step 6:

Includes developing the main focus of the lesson and any activities you may use to achieve facilitating students’ learning of the topic. For example, for the Journey of a River, you can use a Think, Pair, Share method, followed by YouTube video with questions and answers, a group activity, and taking down notes and diagrams (which can be a homework assignment). Not all of these have to be used. I would recommend at least one activity per class (depending on the duration of the activity) to help break up the class and engage students.

Step 7:

The conclusion of the lesson is also very important and should not be ignored. This section of the lesson allows you to assess what students have learned in class. Here, you can refer back to your learning intentions at the beginning of class and ask students what they have learned and what are the key learnings in relation to the topic. This can be aided by the use of exit cards, such as traffic lights, KWL charts, or post-it note summaries, etc. Assessing students’ learning allows you to prepare, focus, and/or refocus for the next lesson.

Step 8:

Reflecting at the end of a lesson is important in your teaching career to continue your developing as a teacher and methodologies you utilise in class. This reflection can be divided into 1. What went well in class?, 2. What could have gone better?, and 3. Focus for the next lesson. Here, you can not only talk about academics, such as what the students did or did not understand but also classroom management problems or techniques to prepare for in future lessons.

Your student teaching days are the only time where you will be required to plan your lessons in such detail. After that, they become a lot more informal and are not required to be submitted to or viewed by anyone. So, please do not stress too much about them! Do not spend hours trying to perfect your lesson plan and instead spend more time on the preparation of resources and activities for the lesson. This is more efficient use of your time.

Figure 1

Lesson Plan

Class:_________ Date:____________ Room:_____ Time:_______ No. Pupils:________

Subject:           Strand/Topic:              Prior Knowledge:

Teaching and Learning Resources: …………………………………………..

Inclusion/SEN issues: ………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Specific SEN Resources required: ………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Health & Safety Issues: ………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Learning Intentions for this lesson: By the end of this lesson, students should be able to…	Success Criteria: (i.e. how you will know the intentions have been met)
1. 2. 3.	1. 2. 3.

Stage of lesson	Duration	Student activity/ rationale	Teacher activity/ rationale
Admin/ Routines
Opening: Stimulus to engage
Development (Can be broken down further for each activity)
Conclusion/ Assessment
Homework/ Assignment
Closure/Exit

Evaluation:

What worked well:       

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Even better if… :

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Action point for next lesson: ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

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