A successful lesson starts before students enter the classroom. Preparing a lesson does not simply mean knowing which pages of the coursebook you are going to cover. Teachers should know what they are going to do, why they are doing it, how they are going to do it and approximately how long each stage will take.

Know your lesson

Before the lesson, teachers should review the content and activities they are going to use. This means:

• Knowing the language and content being taught and anticipating possible difficulties.
• Checking the answers beforehand.
• Preparing any audio, videos, links, worksheets or additional materials.
• Deciding which activities will require explanation or modelling.
• Thinking about whether activities should be completed individually, in pairs or in groups.
• Having an additional activity ready in case students finish earlier than expected.

Teachers should not be discovering the material at the same time as their students. Even when teachers are confident with the level, insufficient preparation can lead to unclear explanations, slow transitions and poor time management.

Plan your time

Teachers need to be aware of both the total length of the lesson and approximately how much time should be spent on each activity.

Before the lesson starts, have a rough idea of how the available time will be distributed. For example:

Warm-up → presentation/model → practice → communicative activity → correction and feedback → lesson close.

Timing should not be completely rigid. Some activities will take longer or less time depending on the group. However, having approximate timings helps teachers make better decisions during the lesson and prevents one activity from taking up too much of the available time.

Prioritise

Not every activity is equally important. When planning, it can be useful to distinguish between:

• Must do: essential activities needed to achieve the lesson objective.
• Should do: useful activities to complete if time allows.
• Could do: additional activities that can be used if the class progresses faster than expected.

One common mistake is trying to complete every planned exercise at the expense of learning. Finishing a particular number of pages is not the main objective; students understanding and practising the target language is.

Anticipate

Good preparation also means thinking about what could happen during an activity:

• What vocabulary might prevent students from understanding?
• Which instructions might be difficult?
• What mistakes are students likely to make?
• What will faster finishers do?
• What can we remove or shorten if we are running out of time?
• What can we add if an activity finishes earlier than expected?
• Are all the materials ready so that transitions are quick?

Anticipating potential problems and possible solutions is an important part of effective lesson planning.

The lesson plan is a guide, not a script

Planning does not mean following a plan regardless of what is happening in the classroom. Effective teachers prepare carefully but also respond to their students.

If students clearly understand something, there may be no reason to spend another fifteen minutes practising it. If they are struggling with an important point, however, the teacher may need to spend longer on it than originally planned. But not too match longer if this compromisses the lesson plan. You will have time in another lessons in the future.

Before entering the classroom, teachers should therefore be clear about:

Objective + activities + approximate timings + materials + anticipated difficulties + alternatives.

Good preparation gives teachers more freedom, not less. When the practical aspects of the lesson have already been considered, teachers can focus their attention on what matters most during the lesson: the students and their learning.