LESSON PLANNING

COURSE: ELT/TESOL
PROF DR ZULFIQAR ALI SHAH
WHAT IS LESSON PLANNING?
WHY PLAN A LESSON?
• There is a great variety in the amount of time that
different teachers devote to planning their lessons, and
the ways in which they do it. Some, for example, will
be carrying, as they walk down the corridor, a detailed
plan saying exactly what they hope will happen, how
long everything will take, and what teaching aids will
be used. Others will have a few ideas on their tablets,
perhaps with links to internet sites they can click onto
when they hook their tablet up to a data projector or
interactive whiteboard . Still others won’t have
anything written down, but will have a good idea in
their heads of what they and the students will be
doing.
• Some people, however, think that detailed lesson plans
(especially the kind expected on many teacher training
courses –are a barrier to responsive teaching since they
restrict the teacher’s (and the students’) ability to deal
with the unexpected, and prejudice the chances of
creative ‘flow’. This is especially true since, ‘lesson
plans rarely, if ever, work out the way they were
planned’.
• In discussing this, Underhill and Maley describe the
‘dark matter’ of lessons – those things we cannot
accurately predict and which we need to be able to
respond to appropriately and effectively as they occur,
even if they are outside the scope of any plan.
• Here, then, is a paradox. Planning is thought to be good
because it helps us to decide, especially in school settings
and with large classes, what we are going to do. It is also
good because students appreciate knowing that their
teacher has thought carefully about what would be best for
them. But over-zealous planning – and especially a plan’s
overzealous execution – may be stultifying.
• What would happen, for example, if we stuck rigidly to our
plan, and then a ‘magic moment’ arose – for example, a
conversation which developed out of the blue in a
wonderful way, a topic that produced a level of interest in
our students which we had not predicted, or a moment
when the students had a pressing desire to say something
which was outside the scope of what we had predicted?
 Thinking about Lessons
• Teachers do not plan lessons in a vacuum. They do so in the context
of who they are teaching, where they are teaching, what materials
and technology they have available, and, crucially, what they
themselves believe about the learning and teaching process.
• Teaching contexts:
• English is taught in many different contexts and situations around
the world. An important distinction, as we saw in 1.2, has been
made between EFL (where students learn English as a foreign
language for international communication in multiple settings) and
ESL (where they learn English principally in order to live successfully
in the English-language environment where they are living). Clearly,
our planning will vary, depending on which of these situations we
are working in. We will also think about planning very differently,
depending on whether we teach general English or English for
specific purposes (1.2.1). CLIL (content and language integrated
learning) demands a different kind of planning as well
 Syllabus and Curriculum
• Syllabus: A syllabus is the list of language or
other content that will be taught on a course
(and the order in which these items should be
taught). It is different from a curriculum,
which expresses an overall plan for a school or
subject (with its philosophy and how
evaluation will take place).
 Who the students are and what they need
• Lesson planning is based not only on the syllabus
designer’s (or lesson planner’s) understanding of how
language items (or tasks, topics, etc.) interlock, but also
on our perception of the needs and wants of the
students. If we are working in one-to-one teaching, we
have the advantage that we can design a programme
of study based entirely on one student’s needs and
learning preferences – and as we have seen, this may
be an ideal situation for what has been called
‘unplugged’ teaching (see 4.3.1). We can do this by
asking the student what he or she wants or expects
from the lessons, and we can then modify what we had
intended to teach accordingly.
 The materials and technology
available
• More than ever, there is now a greater disparity
in what is available for learners and teachers in
different educational settings. In some learning
contexts, everyone has access to good online
connectivity, so that they can use computers,
mobile devices and smart board technology
whenever they need them. In other places, there
is no such connectivity, and teachers use
whiteboards, blackboards, flipcharts and other
‘low-tech’ devices, while their students write in
workbooks and notebooks rather than on digital
platforms.
 Teacher beliefs, approaches and
methods
• Teachers plan lessons on the basis (consciously or
subconsciously) of the theories and approaches
which they believe will be efficacious for their
students’ learning. Are they wedded to task-
based learning, for example (see 4.4)? Do they
think that the best kind of learning opportunities
arise from conversational interaction?
• When and how should they give feedback to
students?
• Should they correct their mistakes?
 The course book
• For many teachers, decisions about what to
teach are heavily influenced by the
coursebook they are using.
• Most coursebooks have a carefully graded
syllabus of grammar, vocabulary and
pronunciation, together with a list of language
skills to be covered.
5-Phases of Lesson Planning
Lesson Plan Sequence
Ways to Begin A Lesson
Ways to End A Lesson
Ways of Providing Variety