How to Create a Lesson Plan: A Guide for Teachers 

On average, there are 180 days a year of required educational instruction.

No two days of teaching are the same. This means nearly 180 different lesson plans will need to be made to teach the material. 

How can you make this process more efficient? What are the key points that need to be included in a lesson plan? 

Keep reading to walk through the steps of how to create a lesson plan and learn a tool to help you make them:

Learning Objective

It is important to start with the goal or learning objective for the lesson. This spells out what needs to be covered in the lesson. The objective of the lesson should be realistic and measurable as you follow the requirements of the course curriculum for the subject matter.

Materials 

What materials are essential for the lesson? Knowing what both you and the students need to complete the lesson will ensure that everyone is prepared for it. This also helps you plan if any of the materials need to be set up ahead of time, such as signing out the laptop cart for a specific lesson.

Types of Activities

Determining what types of activities will be the best way to teach the information to the students is an important step. Including a diversity of instructional activities within the lesson will help the students stay engaged in the learning. Sitting and being talked at for an entire class period has not proven to be the most successful approach.

Instructions

The plan for the lesson should be detailed enough that anyone who reads it would be able to carry out the lesson. Having the instructions planned in advance helps if you have a last-minute sick day so that the substitute teacher knows how to continue the lesson. 

Timeline

Having a timeline for the lesson will help guide you along if the students get off-task or a certain part takes longer than expected. Paired with the instructions, you can estimate how long each part of the lesson should take and then make adjustments as needed. If you teach the same class multiple times a day, this will be helpful for making each lesson as efficient as possible. 

Assessment

The lesson plan should include some form of assessment to gauge the student’s comprehension of the material. This can come in the form of a writing assignment, hands-on activity, group presentation, or exit slip to name a few. A group discussion could also count as a form of assessment in which the students are engaging in a conversation with you over the material that you covered.

Final Step of How to Create a Lesson Plan: Reflection

After you have completed the lesson, it is important to reflect on how well it went. If the lesson went well, it can be used again in the future.

Designing a template for lesson plans can make creating them daily a more efficient process. Creating lesson plan templates from Adobe Spark is easy to do and there are several templates for a variety of lessons and subjects. 

Start Creating Today!

Now that you have the essential parts of how to create a lesson plan, you can get started creating your templates. We are happy to share tips that can save you time. Keep exploring our site to find more helpful articles like this one.