What is the purpose of a lesson plan?

A lesson plan:

  • gives a clear idea of where you and the students are going;
  • keeps a record of what you have done;
  • is a helpful guide for anyone who has to take over the session;
  • gives you a base from which to review your session; and
  • provides the starting point for the next session.

A lesson plan details the content and sequence of the lesson, so when developing learning tasks you will need to consider the following.

  • How is this topic relevant for the students?

'[Avoid] trying to provide too much content for the working memory.  7 or perhaps even just 5 things is as much you can do in an hour's session … I have always hated the idea of text books that just go on and on and on.'

  • What is their prior knowledge, experience and/or skills? Some examples of methods to find out could be a quiz, a survey, or asking your students.

‘I’ve always tried not to make any assumptions about what the learners might know. I have always tried to teach … so that ‘anyone can get in the door’. My belief is that if you do that and do that well, then it is a revision for those who have already got it, as long as you don’t take too long over it and then they know that they know ... [it is like confirmation] … that they have understood what was in the lecture …’

  • What must the students know, what should they know, and what could they know? Of all the content that is available, identifying the must know, should know, could know helps determine the priority of the learning task and the allocation of time within the lesson.  
    disappearing students.jpg

'One of things that I saw …  that I had never thought to do was to actually write down the time it would take for the various parts of the session. I mean I did it mentally but to see it written down meant I could actually see the ways in which the time was planned which helped to make sure you made best use of your time.’ 

  • How have you moved from instruction only to include active learning? Have you planned learning tasks and set problems that will involve students in discovering and applying knowledge and skills for themselves? Your activity may be some well-structured questions to the whole group or small group activities. Refer to Active learning: Create your learning tasks (three pages ago) for further ideas.
  • How will you build student skills and knowledge as they work towards achieving the outcomes? For example, an outcome of the unit is to make a formal presentation of a position paper. To build this skill you would include activities that give the students opportunities to practice speaking to the whole group. This could come about by them reporting back to the whole group from a small group’s response to an activity.

TIP. After completing your design of the learning tasks, consider if they align with your intended learning outcomes. This is called constructive alignment (Biggs & Tang, 2011) and is covered in more detail in Week 6. Curriculum design.

Now that you have considered the critical elements for lesson planning by completing the initial learning design you are ready to devise a structured lesson plan. Here are several templates that you might use for that purpose.

Download Learning plan template [docx, 54KB]


Download Lesson plan template [docx, 38KB]
Download Lesson plan format [docx, 20KB]

You may wish to review the sample lesson plan provided at the beginning of the module. 

 

Image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-crowd-walking-9816/