Effective Lesson Planning For English Language Classrooms

 by MOHAMMED RHALMI
 November 20, 2021

Table of Contents

o Introduction To Effective Lesson Planning

o Concept Defining
o What is an effective lesson plan?
o Pre-Planning
o Effective Lesson Planning (What, Why, How)
o What Knowledge Should We Have Before Starting Designing A Lesson Plan?
o What do language teachers teach?
o Philosophy Of Teaching And Learning
o Three philosophies of learning simplified
o Learning By Experience Or By Being Told
o Principled Lessons
o Effective Lesson Planning And The Textbook
o Planning
o Components Of A Lesson Plan
o Reflection
o Merits Of Lesson Plans
o Advantages Of Lesson Plans For Teachers?
o Advantages Of Lesson Plans For Learners?
o Flexibility
o Summary
o Powerpoint Presentation:
o References
 An effective lesson plan refers to the roadmap the teacher adopts to make his lesson
successful in producing the desired results. The process of designing a lesson plan
starts with identifying the needs of the students, determining the objectives or
standards the students need to attain, and selecting the approach and methods that
best suit the learning situation. Most lesson plans consist of several components. These
include the class profile, the targeted objectives, the procedure (which includes
stages), the mode of work, the timing of each activity, and a reflective section

Introduction To Effective Lesson Planning

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Concept Defining

Before listing the components of lesson plans, let us define some essential terms.

What is an effective lesson plan?

Let us start by defining some concepts.

o Effective
o Lesson
o Plan
o Lesson planning

What Does Effective Mean?

According to a dictionary definition, if something is effective it is:

“Successful in producing a desired or intended result.”

Dictionary definition

For example, an effective medicine is successful in healing from an illness. It has the
desired effect or produces the wanted result. Similarly, an effective plan has the effect
of reaching the objectives we desire.

What Is A Lesson?

Here is a situation to understand what is intended by the term “lesson“:

Suppose you go out of your home, close the door and to your surprise, you realize that
you forgot the keys inside.

Obviously, this experience teaches you a lesson: you should never close the door
before you make sure that the keys are in your pocket, or at least you have a plan B in
case you forget the keys (i.e., having a double copy of the keys somewhere.)
 This is a lesson learned from experience. But we can also learn by studying. Books, the
internet, and myriads of other sources of information can teach you lessons.

Accordingly, a lesson can be defined as:

“Something learned by study or experience.” Merriam Webster Dictionary.

What Is A Lesson In The Language Teaching Context?

According to Brown (2001, p.149), a lesson is:

“a unified set of activities that cover a period of classroom time… These classroom time
units are administratively significant for teachers because they represent “steps” along
a curriculum before which and after which you have a hiatus (of a day or more) in
which to evaluate.”

Lessons And The Curriculum

As the above quote states, a lesson is a coherent whole of well-selected activities that
cover a period of classroom time, generally50-55 minutes. These lessons have an
administrative implication because they are part of the curriculum design. They should
abide by a well-defined syllabus.

Note: Some approaches like the Critical Theory and the Dogme Approach

minimize the importance of a syllabus designed by higher authorities and

advocate, by contrast, a syllabus that is co-built by both the teacher

and the needs of the learners.

What Is A Plan?

According to some dictionary definitions, the term plan means:

o a method for achieving an end.

o a detailed formulation of a program of action.
o an orderly arrangement of parts of an overall design or objective.
All the above definitions emphasize the idea that a plan refers to a strategy, a method,
a program, or an arrangement, the aim of which is to reach an outcome.

Having a plan necessitates determining both the point of departure and the point of
destination and the decision taken to reach the objectives.

What is effective lesson planning?

According to Jeremy Harmer (2001, p.308):

 “Lesson planning is the art of combining a number of different elements into a
coherent whole so that a lesson has an identity.”

In other words, effective lesson planning is the process of selecting and organizing a
coherent set of activities that cover a period of classroom time. Each lesson has an
identity. If one has a look at different lesson plans, one can be sure that these lesson
plans cover specific points of the syllabus or that they are designed for specific types of
learners.

Effective lesson plans require the teacher not only to set learning and teaching routines
but also to visualize the lesson before it is actually delivered.

Effective Lesson Plans As A Sequence Of Routines

Lesson plans can be also viewed as a set of classroom routines. According to Yinger
(1980), lesson planning can be described as:

“decision-making about the selection, the organization, and the sequencing of

routines”.

Research suggests that expert teachers use routines to make parts of their teaching
more automatic. This automaticity helps these teachers free their working memory for
other more difficult parts of their teaching process.

Visualizing The Lesson For Effective Teaching

According to Scott Thornbury, there is a long legacy of visualization in athletics as a

means of performance preparation. In this regard, the story of Marilyn King, a
pentathlon athlete who, after a crippling accident, ‘visualized’ herself back into
Olympic-standard performance, is frequently mentioned.

Successful athletes run the race in their minds several times before they actually run it
in real life. They use a technique called mental rehearsal to run through their
performance, over and over again.

Like these successful athletes, teachers may benefit from delivering the lesson over
and over in their heads before coming to the classroom. This will have the positive
double effects of:

o Anticipating the potential problems that they may encounter while delivering the
lesson;
o And deciding on the best options to address these problems before they actually occur.
Accordingly, effective lesson planning can be viewed as the ability of the teacher to
visualize and forecast how the lesson delivery will take place. It is the cognitive
process of thinking about what will happen in the classroom when delivering the lesson
and making decisions about what, why, and how the teaching-learning process will
occur.
 Pre-Planning

Effective lesson planning involves taking the most appropriate decisions about what,
why, and how the teaching process will take place.

What Why How

Syllabus, content, activities, materials, exam Rationale, approach, Methods, philosophy, theory, Proced
requirements… objectives… techniques…

Effective Lesson Planning (What, Why, How)

Before starting to design a plan, teachers must make sure that they have the right
knowledge about the students, the subject matter, and how the knowledge will best be
imparted to these students.

What Knowledge Should We Have Before Starting Designing A Lesson Plan?

Knowledge of the
Knowledge of the syllabus
students

Level of proficiency, The content and organization of the syllabus. (What

learning styles, age, type of syllabus it is? Structural, notional/functional,
gender… situational…)
Exam requirements

This knowledge will help us make decisions about the content and the activities that
we should prepare to teach the language system and skills (see below).

What do language teachers teach?

Language teachers are required to teach both

1. The language system: the grammar and lexis

2. And the language skills: the receptive skills (i.e., listening and reading), the productive
skills (i.e., speaking and writing).
What do language teachers teach?
Here are some important remarks about the above categorization:
o There are differences in the way we teach the above different aspects of the language.
Teaching grammar differs from teaching writing for example.
o Some native speakers may have internalized all the aspects of the language system,
yet they may be unskilled in writing or reading, or they may even be illiterate
altogether.
As teachers, we are required to teach both the system and the skills.

Philosophy Of Teaching And Learning

Before you start designing plans, as a teacher you must have your own philosophy of
teaching and learning.

Note: If you want to read more about the philosophy of education, read this
article: Philosophy Of Education For Teachers

So, what’s your personal philosophy of learning?

Learning takes place in a certain sequence:

1. First, the learners do not know or they know little of what you want to teach. This is
the phase where they are ignorant or partially ignorant.
2. Then the teacher exposes the new knowledge (generally through listening or
reading.) At this stage, the learners notice that there is a feature they do not
understand. This is a stage when their awareness is raised and their attention is
drawn to the new information.
3. Once they notice the gap between what they know and what they do not know, they
start working on reducing this gap by making hypotheses and experimenting with
them. At this stage of the learning process, the learners are trying to understand – to
make sense of the new feature of the target language, most probably with
the guidance of the teacher.
4. Once the learners understand the new feature, they try to use it (probably with some
errors popping out). This is the stage when learners practice the target language to
make its use more automatic.
5. When they have practiced the target language enough, learners integrate the item into
their interlanguage system and use it, hopefully with relatively minor errors. This is the
stage of active use.
The steps in the above sequence are adopted by teachers with some fundamental
changes according to their philosophy of learning and teaching.

Three philosophies of learning simplified

Teachers may adopt one of three methods of teaching that underlie important
theoretical principles. As a teacher, you should take a stance. How do you think people
learn a language?

1. Do you think people learn better because language is clarified and explained by the
teacher? (Things explained)
2. Do you think that learning occurs because the teacher draws learners’ attention to
specific items and guides them to discover how they are formed and used? (Things
discovered)
3. Do you think that learning occurs spontaneously when learners are exposed to
authentic language? Things (unconsciously) acquired

Learning By Experience Or By Being Told

There are three different approaches to learning: either by being told, by experience,
or by being guided to discover things by ourselves.

Note: Read about the difference between approach, method, procedure, and
technique.

To illustrate these three ways, let’s take the metaphor of the electric fence.

Electric fence

Finding for yourself

The fastest way to learn about electric fences is to deliberately touch the wires and get
an electric shock. This teaches you that electricity gives you an unpleasant jolt and
that wires that tick should be avoided.

Being told

Another way of learning that electric fences hurt if you touch them is simply by having
a person who knows everything about electric fences explain to you what electricity is
and how a high voltage of electricity may hurt you if you touch it and that people build
electric fences to keep animals inside a farm or to deter and protect against
trespassers and predators.

Being guided to discover by yourself

You can also be guided by an experienced person who knows about electric fences.
That person might lead you to discover that electric fences hurt without having to
experience the unpleasant electric shock. That person might lead you to this
knowledge by guiding you step by step. He/she might ask you to put your ear close to
the fence to hear the buzzing of electricity. Then, he/she might ask you to throw a
piece of metal on the fence to see what happens.

The above three ways of learning can be transferred to the language classroom.
Teaching the aspect of the language system can be done by one of the following ways:

1. Teachers may either design lessons in which learners are given tasks to perform with
their limited linguistic resources. Once done, the teacher may give feedback and devise
accuracy-based activities. (Task-Based Instruction)
2. Teachers may also resort to just presenting and explaining the lesson and asking the
students to practice the target language item. The objective is that they will hopefully
 be able to produce that language item without making any mistakes. (Present-
Practice-Produce)
3. Finally, teachers may also start by establishing what the learners already think and
know. Then the teacher provides guiding questions to promote learning by helping
students to notice where their own thinking is incomplete or inconsistent. (Discovery
Learning)
Irrespective of the method you choose, there are two main principles that should guide
you in your teaching:

o The role of the teacher is to provide the time and space for students to interact with
some contextualized target language and to be able to step back and let this happen.
o What we teach is not always what we expect learners to learn. Learning does not equal
absorbing what was taught but activelysolving problems by seeking answers.

Principled Lessons

Lessons must reflect sound principles of language teaching and learning. Before
starting to design your lesson plan, as a teacher, you should take a stance.

How do you think learners will better be able to learn? By being told? By granting them
the full responsibility to learn by themselves? Or by creating learning opportunities and
guiding the students to experience and discover things by themselves?

How are you going to teach?

It is a conscious decision that a teacher has to take. Are we going to:

1. Simply present the target language and then invite the students to practice and
produce?
2. Provide opportunities for students to discover the target language, appropriate it
through well-devised controlled activities, and use it in appropriate situations?
3. Or ask the SS to do a task from the start and subsequently go through some language
focus and a follow-up task?
The method you choose will affect the way you design your lesson. The
selection and organization of the lesson activities are dictated by the
approach you adhere to.

Note: Although Jerome Bruner is credited with coining the term “discovery learning” in
the 1960s, his concepts are remarkably similar to those of John Dewey, Vygotsky, and
others. According to Bruner, practicing discovering things for oneself helps learners to
acquire information in such a way that renders it more readily applicable in problem-
solving.

Effective Lesson Planning And The Textbook

Textbooks are used extensively for teaching and learning. They are sometimes used
blindly as a teaching tool. After all, it is available, practical, and contains all the
content we want to teach. This makes it the only resource some teachers use to
prepare their lesson plans.
 But should the textbook be the only resource to use when planning a lesson?
Which is more important: to teach the textbook? Or to help your students
progress in their learning?

The textbook is undeniably practical and available, but this does not make it an
indispensable resource. Since it is our job as teachers to understand the needs of our
students, we are required to see whether the content and activities in a textbook fit
their interests. Learning has to be grounded in the needs and experiences of the
learners. Relying on a single textbook not only may hamper learning but may also not
serve the emotional, social, and cognitive needs of the learners.

Teachers must make important pedagogical decisions that are tailored to the abilities
and needs of various students. They must be creative and imaginative in order to
adjust the content of the textbook or create innovative learning opportunities that are
appropriate for the learner. Most of all, the teacher should be a reflective professional
who knows how to reconcile theory and practice.

Teachers must go beyond the textbook in different ways:

o Adapting the content.

o Removing unsuitable content
o Reordering content.
o Supplying new content.
The aim of the teacher is to diversify the learning opportunities by intervening to adapt
the textbook to the learning and teaching situations.

Instead of just teaching the textbook, the teachers must intervene to supplement,
remove, adapt, etc.

Planning

After identifying the needs of our students and making decisions about the approach,
method, and content, it is time to start the process of planning.

When planning you have to make decisions about the components you have to include
and the procedure you want to implement in the design of your lesson plan.

Components Of A Lesson Plan

Here are some of the most important parts of a lesson plan:

1. Date, class, type of lesson, title, duration & materials

2. Objectives
3. Activities
4. Procedure
5. Mode of work
6. Timing
7. Extra-class work
8. Potential problems
9. Reflection
In what follows, the focus is on the objectives of the lesson, the activities, the
procedure, the mode of work, the timing, and the teacher’s reflection on the lesson
delivery.

The Learning Objectives

Teachers have to determine the learning objectives of each lesson because without
clearly set objectives failure is inevitable:

“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and
down the field and never score.” —Bill Copeland

What is a learning objective?

A learning objective is a statement that describes the behavior that the teacher wants
the students to show as a result of instruction and that can be used to assess the
session’s success.

In other words, learning objectives refers to what students should know or be able to
do by the end of the lesson that they weren’t able to do previously.

Formulating clear learning objectives when planning a lesson fulfills three main
functions:

1. Learning objectives give learners a clear picture of what they can expect to learn
and what is expected of them by the end of the lesson.
2. They also provide the teacher with a goal to achieve during the lesson delivery.
3. They serve as the foundation for assessing the effectiveness of the teaching, the
learning, and the lesson effectiveness.

What Is Your Destination?

Once we know the point of departure and the point of destination, decisions are easy
to make about how to reach the objectives. Otherwise, we will get lost in a maze,
unable to reach any goals. Both the teacher and the learners may go astray without
clear objectives.

With the destination in mind, the journey has a purpose and the right decisions are
made along the planning process.

Smart Objectives

The lesson’s objectives have to be SMART:

o S – Specific – Specifies precisely what the learner will know or be able to do.
o M – Measurable – The desired behavior can be observed by the end of the lesson.
o A – Attainable – Learners will be able to complete the task within the allotted time and
under the given conditions.
o R – Relevant – Relevant to the learners’ needs.
o T – Time-bound – Must be completed by the end of the lesson.
SMART Objectives

Example of Objectives

Task: Which of the examples below are SMART Objectives?

1. By the end of the session, learners will be able to distinguish between the simple
present and present continuous forms and use them appropriately to describe daily
routines, on the one hand, and actions that take place at the moment of speaking on
the other hand.
2. The teacher presents the present perfect using a context.
3. By the end of the session, learners will be better able to form and use the simple
present in the affirmative to describe daily routines.
4. During the lesson, learners will be asked to come up with examples with the simple
present.
5. By the end of the session, learners will be able to use prepositions of place
appropriately to describe objects in a kitchen.
6. To teach the reported speech.
Clearly, 1–3–5 are SMART objectives. They are all specific in the sense that they aim
at teaching well-identified language points. They are measurable since we can gauge
to what extent the learners learned the target language. They are attainable because
they are within the students’ Proximal Zone of Development. They are also relevant
and time-bound because they fulfill students’ needs and can be achieved by the end of
the lesson.

Activities

The choice of language teaching activities is determined by several factors:

o Students’ age, gender, and needs.

o The Stage of the lesson.
o The resources and materials that are available.
As a rule of thumb, the language teaching activities should be sequenced from easy to
difficult taking into consideration the age of the students, their level of proficiency, and
their interests.

Examples Of Activities
 Sequencing activities are essential. Some activities try to mobilize learners’ low-order
thinking while others necessitate more thoughtful decisions.

Here are examples of activities:

1. Matching
2. Gap filling
3. Chart completion
4. Sentence completion
5. Answering comprehension questions
6. Sequencing events
7. Reading and identifying the verbs in the past simple
8. Making a hotel reservation
9. Closing a deal on the phone
10. Summarizing a text
11. Designing a graph/poster
Activities 8-11 differ from the preceding ones. They focus on the use of authentic
language to complete meaningful tasks in the target language. These can be assigned
at the production stage when the focus is more on fluency.

Procedures

Lessons have an opening, a middle, and a closing.

Richards and Lockhart suggest:

“Like other speech events, however, lessons have a recognizable structure. They begin
in a particular way, they proceed through a series of teaching and learning activities,
and they reach a conclusion.” Richards & Lockhart (1994. P. 114)

Lessons include:

o An opening that includes:

o a warm-up: a motivating activity that puts the students in the mood for learning (e.g.,
a tongue twister, chanting, etc)
o a lead-in – a short activity that prepares the learners to the topic of the lesson by
relating the learners’ prior knowledge with the new one.
o The lesson:
o A presentation stage: when the new knowledge is presented either through
explanation or guided discovery.
o A practice stage where the learners are invited to appropriate the new knowledge.
o A production stage in which learners use the target language in suitable situations.
o A closing stage includes a follow-up activity that aims at reviewing, summarizing, or
expanding the newly learned knowledge.
This procedure is typical of most types of lessons. It is very much similar to the ECRIF
Framework which is related to the teachers’ perceptions of what is going on in their
classrooms. First, learners encounter new information. Then, they try to clarify it.
After that comes the phase when they have to remember and internalize this
knowledge. The final phase consists of the learners’ attempts to fluently use the new
knowledge.

ECRIF Framework

Language Teaching Procedures

The following are suggested procedures to teach the aspects of the language system
as well as the language skills.

Procedures that teach the different aspects of the language system (e.g.,
grammar and lexis):

PPP procedure

o Present
o Practice
o Produce

Discovery Learning procedure

o Noticing
o Guided discovery (observing/noticing hypothesizing, experimenting)
o Skill getting
o Skill using

Task-based procedure

o Pre-task (assigning and preparing learners for the task)

o Task (learners perform the task)
o Post task (working on gaps)
Procedures that teach the different language skills:

Receptive skills procedure

o Pre-reading/listening
o While-reading/listening
o Post-reading/listening
 Productive skills procedure

o Model text
o Studying the text
o Practicing the language needed to perform the productive task
o Task setting
o Planning and production
o Structuring the output for the speaking skill.
o Going through the steps of process writing (planning, drafting, revising, and editing.)
o Feedback

Procedure & Activities: Key Principles

The selection and organization of both the lesson procedures and the activities should
be in line with some Key principles: The KISS and EEE principles:

KISS principle

The teaching and learning activities and the procedures followed in the lesson delivery
should avoid complexity:

KISS (Keep It Short and Simple)

One of the most important principles of effective teaching is to Keep It
Short and Simple. It is important to manage your teaching as simply as possible.
Simplifying teaching doesn’t mean discarding quality teaching. It means caring for
what is essential.

So that a lesson can follow the above KISS principle, teachers may use the following
tips.

Teachers should:

o Avoid long explanations.

o Avoid providing too many details.
o Avoid talking too much about exceptions.
o Sequence activities from easy to more challenging.
o Target the essential elements.
o Vary the activities – variety is the spice of life.
o Opt for guided discovery.
o Optimize exercise items – an exercise with 20 items may be time and effort-consuming
without necessarily being effective.

The Three Es (Ease Economy, Efficiency InTeaching)

 Ease, Economy, And Efficiency In Teaching
The activities and the procedure should be efficient in the sense that they should be
successful in reaching the desired objectives. They have also to be easy to teach
and economize energy and time.

Mode Of Work

There are three modes of work that can generate a number of interaction patterns in
the classroom.

1. Individual
2. Pair work
3. Group work

Interactions According To The Different Modes Of Work

If we take the participants in classroom interactions (i.e., students and teachers) into
consideration, we may deduce that there are three possible types of classroom
interactions:

o Teacher – Student
o Student – Teacher
o Student – Student
It can be argued that the more the initiative comes from the students, the more the
teaching-learning process is learner-centered.

When the focus is on learning, learners are free to ask and answer questions, make
decisions about their learning, participate in discussions, initiate conversations, access
resources, and be responsible for their progress.

Note: It is this aspect of learning that makes social constructivism so attractive. This
approach states that people work together to construct knowledge. By working
together and taking the initiative, the learners are more motivated and create learning
oportunities that maximize learning.

Interaction Patterns

The following are types of interaction patterns in the classroom:

1. Closed-ended teacher questioning (T – Ss):

The teacher asks a question that requires one correct answer.
2. Open-ended teacher questioning (T – Ss):
The teacher asks a question that requires many possible correct answers.
3. Choral responses. (T – Ss):
This refers to choral answers that require all students to respond verbally to the
teacher’s cue.
4. Teacher talk (T – Ss):
This occurs for example when the teacher is giving a lecture. This might also include a
quiet student response, such as writing from dictation, but there is no effort on the
student’s behalf.
5. Individual work. (S):
The teacher assigns a task to the learners, who work independently while the teacher
monitors and assists as needed.
6. Pair work (S – S):
This involves learners working together in pairs at the same time.
7. Group work (Ss – Ss):
Students engage in small groups on tasks that require communication, such as sharing
information or making group decisions. The teacher observes and listens, but rarely
intervenes.
8. Collaboration (S – S or Ss – Ss):
This is not the same as “group work,” which requires interaction as part of the activity.
In collaborative work, the learners complete the same tasks as in “individual work,”
but they collaborate to produce the best outcomes possible.
9. The student initiates, the teacher answers (S – T):
The student takes the initiative to ask/talk. The teacher answers the student’s
questions, providing clarifications or responding to the student’s concerns.
10. Full-class interaction (Ss – Ss):
The students discuss a topic or do an exercise as a class; the teacher may intervene to
encourage participation or supervise the class.
11. Self-access (Ss – Ss):
Students decide on their own learning activities and work independently.

Learners-Centeredness: Us OR Them?

Learner-centredness
One may argue that learner-centeredness is maximized when the interaction is
initiated by the learner. The more learners take the initiative, the more they become
autonomous.

This moves the emphasis of instruction away from the teacher and toward the learner.
By placing responsibility for the learning in the hands of students, the teacher attempts
to foster learner autonomy and independence.

Timing

Each activity in the lesson plan should be given a time estimate. Yes, it is difficult to
anticipate how long any particular task will take. However, it is still a good idea to
schedule an estimated time for activities and even include the timing into your lesson
plan.

When planning lessons, timing is crucial to ensure that the activities you’re
using fit within the time allotted and that you stay on track.
 Assuming your class is 55 minutes long, you will need to have a set of coherent
activities to fill that time without being boring.

Here is an example of how the different phases of the lesson can be timed:

1. Warm-up (about 2 minutes):

Warmers or warm-ups are not necessarily linked to the topic of the lesson. They are
mainly used to put the learners in the mood of learning – to draw their attention and
make them motivated and more interested in learning English. Examples of warm-up
activities include tongue twisters, command drills, chanting, etc.
2. Lead-in (about 3 minutes):
The lead-in actually introduces the topic of the lesson. It is used to activate the
learners’ schematic knowledge – the student’s prior knowledge of or experience with
the topic.
3. Presentation/exposure (about 10 minutes):
This stage involves presenting the target language in appropriate contexts and either
clarification or guided discovery.
4. Controlled practice (about 15 minutes):
Practice activities like matching, true or false statements, gap-filling, and sentence
completion are activities that help learners practice the target language. By helping
students build on the concept they have learned at the presentation stage and
applying them in well-designed activities, you help your students practice, internalize
and automatize their knowledge.
5. Free production (about 20 minutes):
After having practiced enough the target language, it is time for the learners to do
something with the newly learned knowledge. This is the stage of the lesson where the
teacher should be involved as little as possible. The Teaching Talking Time (TTT) is
reduced to the minimum leaving the learners to interact and do open-ended tasks.
Depending on the task, the learners can work in small groups, in pairs, or individually.
6. Follow-up (about 5 minutes):
Follow-up activities are designed to summarize what has been learned, review the
essential points of the lesson, and enhance long-term memory. An example of a
follow-up activity consists of inviting the students to make lists of all the words they
can remember from the lesson.
As it can be seen from the suggested timings above, the presentation stage
must not be allotted the largest portion of the time. Instead, the practice and
production stages must be given much more importance.

Reflection

Instead of doing things the same way, reflecting on your lesson delivery allows you to
improve your teaching practices and assess their efficacy.

Reflection is about positively examining the rationale of your practices and deciding if
there’s a better or more effective way to do it in future lessons.

What Is Reflection In Lesson Plan?

 “Written plans are not just proposals for future action but also records of what has
taken place. Thus, when we are in the middle of a sequence of lessons, we look back
at we have done in order to decide what to do next.” Harmer (2001, p. 320)

The reflection stage of the lesson is crucial because it allows teachers to collect,
document, and evaluate everything that occurred during the session. The aim is to
improve teachers’ performance and lesson delivery in the future.

Questions To Ask At The Reflection Stage Of The Lesson

o Here are some questions to ask when reflecting on your lesson delivery:
o Were the objectives attained?
o Did I sequence the practice activities from easy to more challenging?
o Was there only one type of interaction that seemed to predominate? Did the teacher’s
activity dominate? Did I talk too much?
o Did the students demonstrate an understanding of the TL at the production stage?
o Did the presentation stage take too much time?
o Did I vary the modes of work?
o Did I vary the type of activities?
o Did the SS practice enough to automatize the TL?

Merits Of Lesson Plans

Why is effective lesson planning important for teachers? Why are lesson plans crucial
in the teacher’s professional development? Why are they important in the teaching-
learning process? How do learners benefit from well-structured lesson plans?

Advantages Of Lesson Plans For Teachers?

For the teacher, lesson plans:

o Provide direction and serve as a guide & reference.

o Guarantee success by predicting possible problems & considering solutions.
o Promote teachers’ confidence & reduce uncertainty.
o Help teachers to reflect on, evaluate & improve their teaching.
o Help teachers to avoid thinking on their feet and not to lose face.
o Establish classroom routines and thus allow teachers to save time and effort.
o Economize cost in terms of time and effort.
o Foster professional development and creativity

Advantages Of Lesson Plans For Learners?

 For the learner, lesson plans:

o Provide learners with a well-structured lesson that is easier to follow and assimilate.
o Help learners focus on the learning objective(s).
o Ensure that learners get a balanced combination of different materials, content, and
interaction types.
o Make learners more respectful towards their teachers because of the effort deployed
by the teacher to cater to their needs.
o Minimize classroom misbehavior and disruptions because well-structured lesson plans
are more interesting to follow.
o Cater for different learning styles since teachers are more careful in the selection,
organization, and assignment of activities.

Flexibility

A plan reflects teachers’ professionalism. It minimizes unpredictability but it does not

guarantee that everything will occur as planned. Lesson plans are thus just proposals –
lesson projects – that may evoke our student’s reactions. As professionals, we have to
choose how to deal with our student’s reactions. Should we continue with the lesson
delivery or should we adjust our teaching according to the student’s reactions?

We do not have to keep on implementing the lesson plan we prepared come hell or
high water:

“But plans – which help teachers identify aims and anticipate potential problems – are
proposals for action rather than scripts to be followed slavishly.” Harmer (2001)

There are several reasons teachers may resort to a contingency plan, a plan B.:

o Unforeseen learning opportunities: sometimes, events occur that can be exploited as

valuable learning opportunities (news, an unexpected interesting conversation with the
students, a topic that raises the student’s attention, etc.)
o Unpredictable problems: problems often occur while teaching. Some activities that we
considered interesting may turn into a flop. The use of technology may also pose some
problems (e.g., power disruption).

Summary

o A lesson plan is a unified set of activities that cover a period of classroom time.
o Before designing a lesson, teachers must formulate their own personal philosophy of
learning & teaching.
o Do you think that students learn because we explain the target language to them?
o Do you think that students learn because they discover how language works with the
help of guiding questions?
o Do you think that only after learners had tried to do a task using their own linguistic
resources that accuracy-oriented activities should be introduced?
o Lesson plan components include among other things class profile, objectives,
procedure, mode of work, timing, etc.
o Objectives have to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-
bound.)
o Procedures and activities should follow the KISS (Keep It Short and Simple) and The 3
Es (Ease, Economy, and Efficacy) principles.
o The exposure/presentation stage shouldn’t’ take too much time. More importantly, the
students have to practice and use the target language.
o Teachers sometimes have to be flexible. Lesson plans are not to be implemented come
hell or high water.

Powerpoint Presentation:

Powerpoint Presentation about effective lesson planning.

References

Brown, Douglas. 2001. Teaching by principles. An interactive approach to language

pedagogy. San Francisco: Longman, 149-163.

Harmer, J. (2001). The practice of English language teaching. Essex, England:

Longman.

Richards, J. C., & Lockhart, C. (1994). Reflective teaching in second language

classrooms. Cambridge [England: Cambridge University Press.]

Scrivener, J., 2011. Learning teaching. [Oxford]: Macmillan Education.

Newspaper. Scrivener, J.

Yinger, R. J. (1980). A Study of Teacher Planning. The Elementary School

Journal, 80(3), 107–127. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1001636