Tips for Teachers: Strategies for Effective Lesson Plan

An effective lesson plan clarifies the course’s objectives, lays down how those objectives are achieved, and has room for feedback from students. What is a lesson plan? First, you decide to teach a particular subject or a topic. It includes a lot of sub-topics. And among those, you choose a few to teach your students. Once you know what you will teach, you plan the whole course in a sequence. This is your lesson plan.

Here are the best tips for teachers to prepare lesson plan.

Benefits of having a lesson plan

A clear lesson plan before you start teaching helps both teacher and students. You have a set checklist of things you need to prepare. So, you can plan the lessons according to the time you have to teach the whole course. The students know beforehand what to expect from the course. They can prepare themselves for the lessons by reading the textbooks before the lecture. 

It also stops you from wandering off into unrelated topics and keeps you on the right track. The lesson plan steps tell you exactly what to do and when. So, there is no ambiguity, confusion. In this article, we discuss how to make a lesson plan. 

State the objectives clearly

What is an objective? It is what you aim to achieve with your course. So, before creating your lesson plan, write down all the course objectives. By the time the course ends, what is it that your students are going to leave with? What are all the things they are going to learn? Answer these questions, and you’ll figure out your objectives.

Once the objectives are stated, it becomes easier for the teacher planning his/her course. You can include all the subtopics that align with your goals and discard the rest.

List all the subtopics

Divide the whole topic into small chunks. This way, you can be specific when you are teaching the students. Keep only the subtopics relevant to your course’s goal and discard the irrelevant ones. This saves both your and your students’ time. The course becomes value intensive devoid of any fluff. 

To get an idea of what all comes under the topic you are covering, check out the courses of your competitors or do some online research. You will find new stuff that was probably missing in your lesson plan. Make the course as comprehensive as possible. You don’t want to realize that you are missing specific topics in the middle of the course. This disrupts the flow of the course.

Plan the sequence

Now that you have a comprehensive list, it’s time to arrange the topics sequentially. Teach all the basics first. And then go on to the advanced stuff. Each lesson should serve as a prerequisite for the next one. And if there are any miscellaneous topics, you can put them at the end of the lesson plan.

Learning activities for the students

Passive one-sided learning, where the teacher lectures and the students listen, is ineffective. The students need to be actively involved in the learning process to successfully absorb the course material. Include assignments, practical projects, and quizzes in your lesson plan.

Students actively engage with the course material through these learning activities. For example, if the subject being taught is Maths, the learning activity for students would include solving some Maths problems. If it’s science, experiments in labs could be conducted.

Feedback for your course

Place a system where you get feedback from your students regarding the lesson plan. This will show you what worked and what didn’t. You can modify the course accordingly mid-way or use this feedback when designing your next lesson plan.

One way to get your course feedback would be to directly ask your students. Another way would be conducting exams. The result of the exams would show how much of what you have taught is grasped by the students. Take the feedback into consideration and see where your lesson plan lacked. Modify the course accordingly. 

Final Note

Create effective lesson plans using these strategies. Then, implement these plans in your online coaching class. You can host these classes on your own app designed by Classplus. Finally, create a brand for your coaching institute with the help of Classplus. We will help you in the marketing of your institute by creating a marketing dashboard in your app where you can handle all things related to the promotion of your class.

We aim to provide teachers with an online platform where they can reach more and more students beyond their geographical location.