Lesson Planning - Part 3 - What does a lesson plan contain?
Then, we have a set of objectives and aims. Here, the learner objectives relate to what we're hoping the students are going to be able to do by the end of your lesson and quite often, that can be a useful way of writing out what the objectives are. So, we would start the sentence "By the end of the lesson, students should be able to?" and then a list of two, three or four items that we're expecting the students to be able to do by completing this lesson. The learner objectives are different to the teacher aims the teacher aims are what you are expecting from that lesson itself. Now, when you first start teaching, quite a normal aim might be to complete the lesson successfully, to get through the whole thing without having any problems. As time goes on and you become more experienced, then what you would expect is that these teacher aims become more and more specific. So, some examples of things that might be in your aims here might be things like: to improve my board work, to increase student talk time and to reduce teacher talk time and so on and so forth. The next section is going to relate to what we might call anticipated problems and there'll be anticipated problems for both our students and for ourselves. The types of problems that we may anticipate from our students are that they will have difficulties with pronunciation. They may have difficulties with the level of grammar and being able to put it into context and so on and so forth. Anticipated problems for ourselves - types of problems that we can put in here would be things like: making sure that we stick to the plan, making sure that the focus of the lesson is maintained throughout the whole lesson and so on and so forth. So, a set of problems, anticipated problems for the teacher and for the students. Now, because this is part of the planning process, if we've anticipated problems then it's fairly reasonable to assume that we thought about what we can do if those problems do occur. So, one of the examples we have here was that we were anticipating problems with their pronunciation. So, a solution to that problem would be to do some form of drilling to help them with the pronunciation problem. One of the problems we had with the anticipated problems of the teacher was that we wanted to make sure that the lesson flows smoothly and so we need to refer to our plan throughout the lesson. Now, this doesn't mean that we stand up with a piece of paper in our hands. That doesn't generate any confidence from our students whatsoever, but there's no reason at all why we shouldn't have a set of bullet points on a piece of paper on the desk in front of us that every now and again, we can just refer to quickly to make sure that we're following our plan in sequence. So, these are some of the things that might be on our lesson plan. What we're going to do now is to fill out an actual lesson plan using this particular form.
Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.