English Teaching Talks - Lesson planning

About the English Teaching Talks series

English Teaching Talks is new series produced by the British Council and presented by English language teaching experts from around the world. Divided into 6 short episodes, each video gives practical and useful advice, and is designed to help you develop your skills as an English language teacher in a number of different areas. 

Other episodes in the series are available. Click or tap on the title of the talk to visit the page:

• Integrating ICT - Nik Peachey
• Assessing learning - Carolyn Westbrook and Richard Spiby
• Learning Outside the Classroom - Claudia Rey
• Inclusion - Susan Douglas
• Managing resources - Renee Selikowitz
• Understanding differentiation - Rachael Roberts

About the videos

In this series of six short videos, Tyson Seburn explains how good lesson planning can help us be clear with our learners, allows us to be flexible in response to what happens in class, keeps learners at the heart of the lessons and helps teachers with their own professional development. Below is a list of each video.  

All videos include subtitles in English:  

Video 1: Introduction  

Video 2: Lesson planning. Why am I doing this? Matching learning outcomes to the components of lessons. (3:51 minutes)  

Video 3: Lesson planning improves the ability to explain to others.  (3:39 minutes)  

Video 4: Lesson planning keeps us prepared yet flexible. (3:59 minutes)  

Video 5: Lesson planning keeps the learners at the centre of the lesson. (4:04 minutes)  

Video 6: Lesson planning as a tool for teacher development. (3:25 minutes)  

Watch all the videos on YouTube

Rationale

Planning lessons gives us more control over many aspects of our teaching and learning context. To make the most of planning time, Tyson Seburn explains that teachers have to:   

• Understand why they are planning, and be able to match individual components of lessons to learning outcomes.   
• See lesson plans as a communication tool that allows them to explain their actions to learners and others who need to know.  
• Have a plan that organises classwork and also allows them to be flexible and respond to their learners’ needs.   
• Put the learners at the heart of their planning.  
• Use lesson planning as a tool for their own development.   

 Pre-viewing task  

Before you watch the videos, think about the questions below. If you are using this resource as part of your professional development in your institution, discuss the questions below with your colleagues  

• What are the key parts of your lesson plans? Why?  
• What do you tell learners about the plan each day?  What do others know about your plans?  
• Do you usually stick to your plan? If not what changes most often?  
• How do you plan for different individuals in class?   
• What happens to your plan after the lesson is finished?  

  While viewing   

• What ideas does Tyson give for each of the points in the rationale above? 

  After viewing  

Review a lesson plan you have made for a class you are going to teach soon. If you are doing this task with other colleagues, you could exchange plans and review and give feedback on each other’s.   

Think about Tyson’s suggestions in each part of the video.  

• What (if any) other parts would you add to the plan. Why?  
• What are you going to tell your learners about the plan? How?  
• Is the plan ‘overplanned’ or ‘underplanned’ or seem just right? Does it allow you to change and adapt the lesson?  
• How might it change in class?   
• Would you add any other sections? Why?  
• What extra information would another teacher need to be able to use your plan?   

Tyson tells us to ‘imagine a lesson plan as a framework to guide us, with spaces devoted to what you must do and spaces in-between for flexibility’.  Would you change anything about the lesson plan you have reviewed to make it more like this definition?  

Are you going to change anything about your lesson planning as a result of watching the videos? If so, what?  

Watch the introduction below and watch all six videos in the series on YouTube