Planning lessons

❑ Tarbiat Modares University

❑ Faculty of Humanities
❑ Department of English
Language Teaching
➢ Practicum course

❖ Professor: Dr. Zia Tajeddin

❖ Presenter: Farzad Rezaei

o Source: How to teach English: Ch,

12, P. 156-165
o October 2021
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Overview

▪ Reasons for Planning

▪ A Proposal for Action
▪ Lesson Shapes
▪ Planning Questions
▪ Plan Formats
▪ Planning a Sequence of Lessons
▪ After the Lesson (and before the next)
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Why should Teachers plan?

▪ For students, lesson plans show the Teacher has devoted time thinking
about the class

▪ For teachers, a plan gives the lesson a framework, an overall shape

▪ However, departure may happen

▪ Teachers can respond creatively to what happens in the class, but they
need to have a plan showing their destination and how to get there.
▪ The plan reminds them what they intended to do

▪ Planning is specially important when teachers are to be observed

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➢ Lesson plans are proposals for action, they are not to be “slavishly followed”.

➢ How closely they are followed depends on what happens when we put them to work (good
teachers are flexible)

❑ E.g.:
Suppose, for example, that the teacher has planned that the students should prepare a dialogue and
then act it out, after which there is a reading text and some exercises for them to get through. The
teacher has allowed twenty minutes for dialogue preparation and acting out. But when the students
start working on this activity, it is obvious that they need more time. Clearly the plan will have to be
modified. A similar decision will have to be made if the class suddenly encounters an unexpected
language problem in the middle of some planned sequence of activities. The teacher can bypass the
problem and keep going, or they can realize that now is an ideal time to deal with the issue, and
amend the plan accordingly.
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Good teachers are ‘Flexible’:

Imagine that during a discussion phase a student suddenly says something really interesting,
something which could provoke fascinating conversation or suggest a completely unplanned (but
appropriate and enjoyable) activity. In such a situation - when this kind of magic moment
suddenly presents itself - we would be foolish to plough on with our plan regardless. On the
contrary, a good teacher will recognize the magic moment for what it is and adapt what they had
planned to do accordingly. Magic moments are precious, in other words, and should not be
wasted just because we didn’t know they were going to happen.

➢ Tension between what we had planned to do and what we actually do when magic
moments or unforeseen problems present themselves exists
✓ But good teachers know when and how to deal with unplanned events, and how to
balance a proposal for action with appropriate flexibility.
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Lesson shapes

➢ A good lesson needs to contain a judicious blend of coherence and variety

▪ Coherence means that students can see a logical pattern to the lesson.
• Connection between activities
• Perceptible reason for changing direction

▪ Variety is the key to Students’ engagement

➢ In effective lessons, the teacher has thought (and is thinking) carefully about the balance of
engagement, study, and activation (ESA), and how one can lead to the others in a variety of
different sequences such as the straight arrows, boomerang, and patchwork sequences

➢ The ideal compromise, then, is to plan a lesson that has an internal coherence but which
nevertheless allows students to do different things as it progresses.
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Planning questions
➢ Who exactly are the students for this activity?
▪ Students’ age, level, cultural background and individual characteristics to be taken into
account when deciding what activities, texts or methodologies to use in the classroom. This
includes an understanding of the kinds of individual differences in learning style

➢ What do we want to do and why?

▪ What to do: in terms of both activities, skills and language.
▪ Why: because we ourselves like the activity, or because we think it will be appropriate for a
particular day or a particular group.
• Thinking about the learning outcomes of the activity;
giving students a greater understanding of an area of vocabulary, providing them with
better listening strategies, teaching them how to construct conditional sentences, etc.
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How long will it take?

o The students’ confidence in the teacher can be undermined if they never finish
what they set out to do

o Teachers, for their part, are made uncomfortable if they have overestimated the
amount of time something might take and are thus left with time on their hands
and no clear idea what to do.

o There is no absolute way of preventing such problems from occurring, but we should
at least try to estimate how long each activity will take (based on our experience and
knowledge of the class) so that we can measure our progress as the lesson continues
against our proposed ‘timetable’

o We can also plan for our material taking too little time by having some spare
activities with us
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❑ How does it work?
▪ How to do the activity?
• Who does what first? How and when should students be put in pairs or groups? When
do we give instructions? What should those instructions be? What should we be doing
while the students are working in groups?, etc.
• Even experienced teachers need to think carefully when they try out something new

❑ What will be needed?

What to use (a computer, board, projector, etc.)
It is important to think about the best way of doing something (in other words, the most
effective piece of classroom equipment) rather than automatically choosing the most
technologically exciting option.
It is also important to consider the physical environment of the classroom itself and how
that might affect whatever teaching equipment we wish to use
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❑ What might go wrong?

▪ Trying to identify potential problems:

o enables teachers to deal with them better if and when they occur
o gives the teacher insight into the language and/or the activity which is to be
used.

➢ Predicting everything that might happen may not be possible.

➢ Nevertheless, thinking around our activities – trying to put ourselves in the students’
minds, and gauging how they might react - will make us much more aware of
potential pitfalls than we might otherwise be.
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How will it fit in with what comes before and after it?

What connection does the activity have with the activities which come before and after it?
How does it fit into our need for the three ESA lesson elements?
Is there a language tie-in to previous or future activities?
Perhaps two or three activities are linked by topic, one leading into the other (like the threads of
a multi-lesson sequence).
Perhaps an activity has no connection with the one before it: it is there to break up the
monotony of a lesson or to act as a ‘gear change’.
Perhaps we may decide to start our lesson with a short icebreaker (sometimes called a warmer)
for no other reason than to get the students in a good mood for the lesson that is to follow.
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Plan formats: The Elements

✓ Description of the students:

Anything from a general picture of the group (its level, age range, atmosphere,
etc.) to detailed descriptions of individual students (what they find easy or
difficult, how they respond to different activities, etc.).

✓ Aims and objectives:

o we generally say what we hope to achieve; the more specific we are, the
easier it will be to see whether they are achieved
o Broad aims like ‘have a good time’ are bound to be less useful than ‘sensitize
students to uses of pitch and intonation to indicate enthusiasm (or lack of it)’.
o Most lessons will have a series of primary and secondary aims.
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✓ Procedures:
➢ the meat of the plan is in the description of how it will be executed.
▪ The section on procedures can include patterns of interaction. We might write T -►
SS (for times when the teacher talks to the whole class), S -*■ S (for pair work) or
SSS ->• SSS (for groupwork); or we could write ‘groups’, ‘pairs’, etc., or record these
patterns in some other way.
▪ Frequently we will include timings as well, so that we have some idea of how long
we expect things to take.
▪ We will also include the actual procedures, such as ‘students look through the
pictures and match them with the phrases’.
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✓ Anticipated problems:
• A list of potential difficulties - and suggestions about what to do if they arise.
• what to do if there is problem with a computer or other piece of equipment
• or if some other student based eventuality occurred (such as the activity being a
lot more difficult for the class than expected).

✓ Extra activities/material (just in case):

many teachers make a note of extra activities they could include if things go quicker
than anticipated.

✓ Material to be used in the lesson:

especially when they are to be observed, teachers attach examples of the material
they are to use with the students to their plan.
 Group Date Time No. of students
Lesson plan
example
Recent topic work: Recent Language work:

Aims: (stated in input terms, i.e. what the teacher intends to do)
Objectives: (stated in output terms, i.e. what the students are expected to do)
Assessment:
Materials:
Anticipated problems:
Timing Teacher activity Student activity Success indicators Aims of the stage

Additional possibilities:
Homework/further work:
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✓ Success indicators
the planner has to note down how they will be able to measure the success of what happens
This forces the planner to focus on exactly how both teacher and students will know if
something has worked, in other words, if the learning outcomes have been met.

✓ Homework/Further work
which will show the planner thinking ahead beyond the actual lesson to be taught.

➢ The format of the plan may depend on training course or work place preferences

the purpose of a plan is to be as useful as possible to the people who are going to use it
(whether they are the teachers themselves, their observers or an examination board). This, in
the end, is what should guide the form in which teachers put their thoughts down on paper.
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Planning a sequence of lessons

➢ Coherence and Variety
▪ In planning a sequence of lessons, there should be a coherent pattern of progress and
topic-linking so that there is a transparent connection between lessons, and so that Ss can
perceive some overall aims and objectives to their program of study

o Two dangers may prejudice the success of a sequence of lessons:

▪ predictability; if students know exactly what to expect, they are likely to be less
motivated than if their curiosity is aroused.
▪ Sameness; students may feel less enthusiastic about the lesson if it starts with the
same kind of activity.
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➢ An ideal multi-lesson sequence has threads running through it.

These might be topic threads, language threads (grammar, vocabulary, etc.) or skill
threads (reading, listening, etc.). Over a period of lessons, students should be able to
see some interconnectivity rather than a random collection of activities.

➢ Perhaps the most important thing to remember, however, is that a long teaching
sequence (e.g. two weeks) is made up of shorter sequences (e.g. six lessons) which are
themselves made up of smaller sequences (one or two per lesson perhaps). And at the
level of a teaching sequence we have to ensure the presence of our three elements,
engage, study and activate in their various permutations
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➢ After the lesson (and before the next)

❑ Evaluation of how well things have gone (for both teacher and students) is vital if our
lessons are to develop in response to our students’ progress. In other words, we need
to plan future lessons on the basis of what happened in previous classes.

❑ Not only that, but our decision about whether to use an activity more than once (or
whether we need to change the way we use that activity) will depend on how
successful it was the first time we tried it.

❑ When we evaluate lessons or activities, we need to ask ourselves questions such as,
Was the activity successful? Did the students enjoy it? Did they learn anything from
it? What exactly did they get from the activity? How could the activity be changed to
make it more effective next time?
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Evaluation of the lesson (and reflection)

❑ One kind of data which will help us evaluate lessons and activities is feedback from
students.
➢ ex., to write down two things they want more of and two things they want less
of

❑ Giving students special evaluation forms to rate different activities with a score, or
put them in some kind of order and then add comments about what they thought.

❑ Inviting a colleague into the classroom and ask them to observe what happens and
make suggestions afterwards
➢ most successful when both teachers discuss the content and practice of the
lesson both before and after the observation
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❑ Keeping journals to record thoughts about what happened after the lesson
has finished

❑ Assessing how well students are progressing through a variety of measures

including homework assignments, speaking activities where the teacher
scores the participation of each student and frequent small progress tests
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