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Success in Lesson Planning
by Paul Davies and Eric Pearse, authors of Success in English Teaching in the Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers Series
For truly professional teachers, lesson planning is not optional, it is essential preparation for teaching. It is a matter of deciding exactly what you are going to teach, and how. Unless you establish your objectives and activities in this way, you may find yourself just going mechanically through the course book, or trying to improvise whole lessons. Such approaches usually produce poor results, although some improvisation and flexibility is good, even essential, in teaching. Learners can easily notice the difference between teachers who plan and those who do not. And if their teacher does not make an effort, why should they?
To begin your lesson plan, decide where the lesson fits into your weeks work plan or teaching cycle. Then establish specific objectives for the lesson. These will largely be determined by the phase in the teaching cycle.
Here are some examples of lesson objectives:
To present and achieve controlled production of a new grammatical-functional item.
To achieve guided communicative use of a new item.
To achieve the communicative use of a mixed range of language in writing.
To promote the learners confidence in the conversational use of English.
To develop comprehension of public announcements.
The activities and materials should be appropriate for your objectives, and also for your specific group of learners. When deciding on appropriate activities and materials, take into account the learners age, interests, and abilities. Calculate the approximate time for each activity so that you do not end up doing only half of what you planned, or having no plan for the last quarter of the lesson. And remember that there needs to be a variety of activity and interaction, for example, between pair work, group work, and individual work.
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