Designing and delivering a lesson plan

A lesson plan is any planning tool that helps both student and educator enjoy the best learning and teaching experience possible. There are so many ways to approach lesson planning, that it is often difficult to know what will be most efficient for you and/or your teaching team, without needlessly adding to your workload.

This article will cover the common building blocks of a lesson plan that can be applied to most teaching experiences, including lectures, tutorials, seminars, workshops and labs.

Why?

As the content and context of learning and teaching at UOW varies significantly, it is useful to see lesson plans as sharing a common function, but rarely a common format. As such, a lesson plan can take many forms, including:

• A series of dot points jotted down on paper.
• A visual pie chart of how the lesson time is broken up.
• A detailed table documenting running order, timing, content and resource links.

Your lesson planning style may be determined through experimentation to find your personal preference. However, if designing lesson plans for a teaching team, choosing a more detailed format (e.g., a detailed table) can reduce risk of miscommunication. There are examples of templates available at the end of this article.

Regardless of format, lesson plans all serve the same four core functions (Gagne & Briggs, 1974):

• To design the optimal learning experience for students.
• To ensure consistent learning experiences across a subject (when used by a teaching team).
• To act as a memory aide during delivery to ensure all content is covered.
• To record your teaching practice for self-evaluation and external recognition.

Thus, even if you receive a lesson plan or activity from a coordinator, there is often still flexibility in how you introduce, deliver, conclude and reflect upon the teaching experience. To make your teaching experience more efficient and enjoyable, consider where you could apply the following lesson planning principles to your future teaching.

How?

Using the EAS Model

There are central principles in learning and teaching that address how humans learn best, including active learning, cognitive load and constructivism (McKivigan, 2019). These principles can be applied to any lesson through applying the EAS Model to your lesson plan:

1. Explanation (E): Begin with a brief explanation of why the content is important and explain the context.

• • This context may reference students’ prior learning or interests, theory, related coursework, past assessments, professional implications, etc.
  • This may include watching a video, doing an icebreaker or reading an article. Students might also be asked to consider why the topic is important.

2. Activity (A): Introduce and implement the activity that demonstrates the content.

• • Give clear instructions (written, where appropriate) and monitor your students’ level of engagement.
  • This may include asking questions to individual students in a large lecture, or working in teams during a tutorial or lab.

3. Summary (S): Summarise and share the outcomes of the activity. 

• • Summarising the main points of the explanation, and drawing on the outcomes of the activity, supports the students in understanding the material being presented.
  • This may include asking groups or individuals to share their findings and recap what has been learned.

Bringing it Together

This structure can be repeated with a follow-up activity, which would usually involve deeper levels of inquiry or engagement with the content, to fit longer teaching experiences (e.g., a lecture or seminar). These sections can also be sandwiched between an introduction and conclusion involving feedback, as shown in the image below.

Including active learning strategies within these plans also requires a certain degree of flexibility. When students become deeply engaged in an activity, you may choose to allow longer than initially planned, or technology may not work as planned on the day. Therefore, it is a good idea to plan for more activities than you may need, so you have back-up options when plans need to change on the spot.

Applications for Lesson Plans

Once you have designed and/or delivered your lesson plan, ensure that you store these plans for later reflection and evaluation. They are also great ways of evidencing your evolution as an educator in future probation, promotion or award applications.

References