Planning lessons from the end

Greetings to everyone It doesn’t matter whether you are a very experienced teacher or you are just starting your teaching career, planning is a must. Everybody knows that teachers are very busy and planning is time-consuming. So it would be nice if we could discover a secret of efficient lesson planning. Today, our teacher and teacher trainer, Helen Taranenko, suggests some useful tips to help you plan your lessons.

Why do we plan our lessons? Planning is a must. Why? Students spend time and money to reach certain goals in their English class and it requires a professional approach from a teacher to make sure that students achieve their objectives. First of all, every lesson has to have the main aim. For example: By the end of the lesson students will have learnt how to talk and ask about life experience using the present perfect simple tense. While working on that grammar structure, students might need to read a short text which sets the context. So they will develop their subskill of reading for the main idea, which could be called a subsidiary aim of the lesson. To make sure that the aims are achieved, the teacher needs to decide what activities to include in the lesson, how much time to spend on each of them and how to group students for the activities.  Teacher training courses such as CELTA or Delta require detailed lesson plans which carefully describe every aspect of the lesson. This is how teachers develop that crucial skill of lesson planning. However, it is not realistic to think that a full-time teacher will be able to continue writing such plans every day. A lesson as a chain of blocks

What if we think of each stage of a lesson as a block or a brick. We need to build a chain of those blocks to achieve the aims of the lesson. If you want your students to talk about their life experience using the present perfect simple tense, as we mentioned above, you need to have a presentation ‘brick’ and controlled and freer practice ‘bricks’. The lesson might look like this:

When you know the main blocks, you should build your lesson… from the end.

Why not from the beginning? The answer is simple: because it helps us to keep the main aim in mind. To have evidence that the main aim was achieved, students need to complete a Freer Practice activity successfully. Estimate how much time it will take. Don’t forget that students will definitely want to know what they did well and what needs improvement, so the last stage of the lesson will be Feedback and Error Correction. Student-centred error correction usually takes time. So 10 minutes is necessary for Feedback and Error Correction and 10-15 minutes for the Freer Practice stages. Let’s continue to build our lesson up. Before the Freer Practice students have to practise the target language (TL) in a controlled way (Controlled Practice) for 7-10 minutes and after this stage, the feedback is also necessary (+5 minutes). (10+15+5+10 = 40 min.) If a lesson is 60 minutes, there is 20 minutes left for the Presentation of the TL and the Lead-in (15+5 = 20 min.) If teachers start planning from the beginning, from the Lead-in, they usually plan activities at the beginning of the lesson which are too long and they don’t have enough time for the essential Freer Practice and the last Feedback, which play a more important role in the lesson than a Warm-up or a Lead-in.

Skills Lesson Plan For Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing lessons the secret is the same. Think of the main aim, for example: By the end of the lesson students will have learnt how to write a formal report in the context of X. Draw the blocks starting from the end:

Estimate the time for every stage and see how much time you have left for the Lead-in. It will probably be a short brisk activity. No time for more. As you can see, a short block plan can go a long way. It is fast, it is logical, it allows teachers to estimate time more effectively when it is built from the end. It doesn’t take much time to write it. Enjoy it.

From Grade Education Centre