Lesson Plannin Guide
Lesson Plannin Guide
Lesson Plannin Guide
1. Main Aim
Your main aim is the most important pat of your lesson. This is what you want the learners to
be able to do, or do better, by the end of the lesson that they couldn’t do at the start. Think of
your lesson in terms of a journey. Your main aim is your destination. You should only have
one main aim (or two in a long lesson). Articulate your main aims in terms of what the
learners will do in the lesson, not as teacher behavior.
2. Subsidiary Aims
You may have some subsidiary aims in addition to your main aim. These are aims that are
not the main focus in the lesson, but are aims you hope will be achieved along the journey to
your main aim.
3. Personal Aims
These are aims that relate to you as a teacher, rather than the lesson itself, and will help you
to focus on your own personal development. Your TP tutor will highlight areas for you to work
on and specify these on your written feedback. Refer to these when you complete the
Personal Aims section on your plan.
4. Assumptions
These are areas relating to your lesson that you assume that your learners will know, perhaps
because you have heard your learners using certain language or because a previous teacher
has covered an area. They may also be assumptions based on general information you know
about the learners. For example:
The learners will have basic knowledge of the political systems in their own countries
The learners will be familiar with past participles of the verbs used in the lesson
The learners will be familiar with the meaning, form and pronunciation of the Present
Perfect Simple (if, for example, you are following on from another teacher who is
going to present the language)
The learners will know some of the lexical items included in the lesson (but specify
which items you assume they know e.g. provide an exact list of the items)
a. Language
These can be problems of meaning, form, pronunciation and possibly appropriacy (remember
that not every language item causes all these problems for learners). This section must be
completed in detail. For example, learners will encounter form problems is insufficient. You
must specify what problems they will encounter with the form e.g. is it the question form,
infinitive with or without ‘to’, word order, spelling, third person ‘s’ etc. Clarifying language
means checking meaning, pronunciation and form (MPF). We focus on these things when the
main aim of the lesson is language but also at other stages e.g. pre-teaching vocabulary,
teaching useful language for a writing/speaking task. This means that you need to submit a
full analysis of the language you are teaching on paper as part of your lesson plan.
b. Skills
This depends on the skills focus you are teaching. For receptive skills (listening and reading),
you need to consider blocking lexis, the content of the text, the degree of difficulty, your
learners’ different abilities, the length of the text, any cultural issues the text or topic may
raise, etc. For productive skills (speaking and writing), you will need to consider whether the
learners have the necessary language to complete the task, whether they will be interested in
the topic, problems with grouping your learners, whether they will have sufficient ideas to
contribute etc. You will then need to consider the classroom-based solutions for these.
7. Procedural Detail
Once you have articulated your main aim, as well as the potential problems and solutions to
deal with these, the next step is to decide how you will reach the destination. Therefore, think
of your plan as a route map i.e. it informs you as to how to get there.
2
CAMBRIDGE English CELTA
Lesson Planning Guide
Stages
All lessons must be broken down into stages. You can have a number of stages depending
on the lesson type.
Examples of stages for a language lesson include:
Lead in
Discovery task *
Focus on language –meaning/form and phonology
Controlled practice –oral /written
Freer (or less controlled) practice
Stage Aims
Each stage must have an aim e.g. a rationale for why you are doing this during the lesson.
This aim must enable learners to move forward to achieve the main aim. If it doesn’t, you will
need to reconsider the rationale behind the stage.
Procedures
For each stage, you need to decide how you are going to achieve your aim, i.e. your
procedures. These state exactly what you are going to do in class to achieve the particular
stage aim. You don’t need to write verbatim what you intend to say, but you should script your
instructional language to ensure that is it chunked and checked.
3
CAMBRIDGE English CELTA
Lesson Planning Guide
4
CAMBRIDGE English CELTA
Lesson Planning Guide
1. The main theme or subject matter that the lesson is based on – not the
language point
5. Checking what individual learners are able to do and helping them with
the task
8. The aspect you devote the most lesson time on – what you want learners
to leave with
11. Other important goals you intend your learners to develop during the
lesson
13. Ensuring the lesson doesn’t go too fast for learners or too slow to
maintain their interest
5
CAMBRIDGE English CELTA
Lesson Planning Guide
LESSON FRAMEWORKS
Think about what you are teaching and the appropriate lesson plan ‘shape’.
Be clear about what whether your lesson is a language focus lesson (lexis,
grammar or functions) or a skills focus lesson (reading, writing, listening or
speaking).
6
CAMBRIDGE English CELTA
Lesson Planning Guide
New Cutting Edge Intermediate Student’s Book, Cunningham and Moor, 2007
Pearson Longman.
7
CAMBRIDGE English CELTA
Lesson Planning Guide
Decide whether the following are main aims, stage aims or activities:
c. Ls will have developed their ability to talk about their daily routines
e. Ls do a role play
g. To do pair work
i. Ls will have developed their reading for gist and specific information in a
blog about living in Edinburgh
j. Ls will have developed their listening for detail skills in the context of a
podcast about travelling in Burma
m. Ls will have developed their ability to make small talk when on business