How to plan a lesson: a helpful guide for teachers

Welcome

We’ve pooled the knowledge of experts from across the teaching community in one place. From high-level to everyday lesson planning and resourcing, it’s all right here, created by experts.

We also have thousands of teaching resources and curriculum plans across national curriculum subjects. These resources can give you a high-quality head start on your planning.

Read on for a full guide to lesson planning, plus tips on how to use our resources to save yourself time.

How to write a lesson plan: what are the basics?

First things first. Where does your lesson sit within the planned curriculum?

It’s important to know what concepts, ideas and connections you want your pupils to develop over time so that you can plan the steps to make this happen.

Your lesson should reflect a small step that is part of a wider coherent curriculum plan. View our curriculum plans to see what units make up our curriculum and what lessons make up our units, all carefully thought through to build pupils' knowledge.

When planning a lesson, you will want to think about your school’s expectations for what happens in a lesson. These might include:

• How to start a lesson
  We suggest beginning with a starter quiz to activate prior knowledge.
  
• When to build in explanation, checks for understanding and practice
  These three steps and their order are really important. All of our teaching resources have checks for understanding following an explanation so that you can quickly assess if your pupils have understood your explanation. Finally, practice consolidates this knowledge.
  
• Quizzing
  Our teaching resources include an exit quiz so that you can check pupils' understanding at the end of a lesson.

However, it’s really important to check what your school expects lessons to look like. These are some of the foundations you could use to start your planning.

Are you already confident about where the lesson sits within the curriculum plan? Let’s jump straight into the planning basics, including how to plan a lesson and how long this could take you.

Deciding what to put into your teaching lesson plan

If you’re using a lesson plan to guide your classroom practice, remember that the most important part of the process is the thinking that goes into it.

Only you can decide what is right for your lesson plan, as only you know your school and your pupils. If you’re happy about where your lesson will sit within the school’s curriculum plans and units of study, you might want to consider these factors when putting a lesson plan together:

1. Your school’s policy
   
   Every school will have different expectations for what lessons will look like because each school will have its own approach to curriculum. Check your school’s policy to make sure you’re meeting these requirements when planning.
   
2. The confidence and strength of your pupils
   
   What is their prior knowledge? What are they building towards? And, what is the classroom dynamic? All of these could inform how you plan your lessons. You may also consider whether you have any support available in the lesson, such as a teaching assistant, and how they can help you.
   
3. Lesson length
   
   This is an important logistical factor. You will want to avoid overrunning or underestimating the length of the lesson.
   
4. Subject knowledge
   
   Nobody can be an expert on all things. But, you will need to make sure knowledge is secure when you start teaching a new topic or subject. You could use our resources to upskill and close knowledge gaps. You can also read further advice about how to build confidence when teaching a new subject.

Learning and lesson objectives

Firstly, what are ‘learning and lesson objectives’? We call them ‘learning outcomes’ and they are the skills or knowledge your pupils should have gained by the end of your lesson. Your school or educational setting might call them something slightly different.

Creating clear learning outcomes is crucial to make sure there's a cohesive and, most importantly focussed, learning journey through the lesson. If you know what you’re aiming to achieve when planning for your pupils, this can help secure clear outcomes and successes.

Need to write a learning objective? Search for the topic or keyword and explore our teaching resources. There, you'll find examples of learning outcomes, just like the one in the image below, that might just inspire your own.

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Creating your lesson plan structure

When planning your lessons, you might need to adapt lesson structures, resources and approaches to meet the needs of your pupils and your own planning schedules.

For example, you might be introducing a new topic and want to hook pupils in. In this case, you might alter the usual cadence of the lesson as you get started on something completely new.

If you’re in the flow of planning, you might find that having an outline or standard template and structure helps you move through things more quickly, in addition to providing pupils with familiarity and routine.

Alternatively, you might want to update your lesson objectives or learning outcomes and tweak resources so that they reflect these priorities.

Explanation and modelling in teaching

Explanation, modelling and checks for understanding, are important when teaching any subject and phase. But, what is modelling?

Modelling is an impactful strategy to include in your explanations for pupils. It means showing the pupils exactly how to achieve skills or knowledge by demonstrating it in front of them.¹

It’s good to know how to make meaningful models for your pupils, and particularly how to model a difficult concept, as pupils will need the most support to unlock this learning.

Carefully planned modelling can even help you to pre-empt and expose common misconceptions, particularly where a topic is difficult or challenging for your pupils.

Want inspiration? Alongside our teaching resources, we include a video of an experienced teacher delivering the lesson using the resources.

Practice or task-based learning

‘Task-based learning’ is the practice that your pupils do in order to consolidate your teaching. Your pupils will learn over time, through carefully sequenced concepts and ideas and repeated practice.

These concepts and ideas need to be broken down into smaller chunks. That’s where your individual units and lessons come in. Your objectives for these feed into the bigger picture. These units and lessons are the small steps that build towards the desired learning outcomes, and they need repeated practice to secure learning over time.¹

We structure our resources around learning cycles, which use ‘practice’ repeatedly as a key step to promote pupil progress.

Of course, the practice within each subject and phase will look different, depending on your pupils, context and the curriculum you are following. Why not use our worksheet tasks as a foundation for your lesson planning or for inspiration before doing it independently?

Checking for understanding

When you’re teaching a lesson, it’s important to know that your pupils understand what you are delivering. But, how do you check for understanding?

We suggest that you check for understanding after each explanation. After all, it’s really important that your valuable time is maximised and pupils are able to understand everything you’re sharing with them.

Checking for understanding regularly throughout the lesson allows you to make the most of your time and theirs. It can capture misconceptions before they become embedded, reinforce pupil progress and help them to access the next steps of your subject curriculum.

Want to see an example? Look out for the ‘check’ icon in our slide decks for a suggestion of how you might check for understanding in the lesson after a teacher explanation.

Scaffolding

All teachers support pupils of different abilities. Each pupil has their unique strengths and weaknesses, in addition to trends that you might notice across a class or even whole cohorts, such as a year group.

To help your learners achieve the best possible progress on their learning journey, you’ll want to adapt your lessons for your classes. For pupils or classes that need extra support, you might want to use scaffolding.

Scaffolding in an educational context refers to the extra steps or support your pupils might need to reach the desired educational outcome. They are the ‘temporary devices and procedures used by teachers to support students as they learn strategies’.¹

The Education Endowment Foundation2 defines it as ‘a metaphor for temporary support that is removed when it is no longer required’.

This could involve adding additional practice, changing the pace, adapting your class explanation, or using models that are broken into more chunks.

Classroom ideas: making the most of our resources

Getting to grips with teaching can be challenging. Whether you’re starting a new school, teaching a new topic, planning a curriculum or refreshing units of study - we’ve got you covered.

We’re here to guide you with our expertise so that you can feel confident that the decisions you make are right for you and your pupils.

That’s why, alongside the slide decks, worksheets and quizzes we provide, you can also find a ‘teacher tip’ and ‘common misconception’ to help guide your instruction.

Reflection

You’ve got an excellent curriculum in place and your teaching resources are prepared. Now it’s time to head into the classroom. Good luck!

Planning lessons and teaching is an ever-evolving process. As you progress through the year, you should continue to ask yourself: what is working, and what could be even better? It might be small tweaks to the strategies you are using in the classroom and the way you are explaining concepts to your pupils, right through to bigger ideas about your wider curriculum.

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