This article is part of the “Career Advice” series.
Maybe you are a brand new teacher and are struggling with creating a lesson plan. Or, perhaps you want to simply take your lesson plans to a new level? You don’t know where to begin and want help creating a simple lesson plan template.
You have no desire to spend hours on lesson plans. It’s time to work smarter and not harder and get results for your students.
Lesson plans are essential for teaching in the classroom. Here are a few tips for creating a simple lesson plan template.
7 Tips for Creating a Simple Lesson Plan Template
The best way to communicate and teach students is with simplicity and clarity. It’s key to design effective lesson plan templates that ignite the love of learning for your students.
When you have a simple lesson plan template, you create plans easier and faster. This helps you and teachers have more time for yourself, your family, and your students. These 7 Tips for creating a simple lesson plan template will help you for years to come.
1. Choose the Best Template
When creating lesson plans, you must ensure that students learn in a clear and logical way. Start with selecting the best lesson plan template that works for you. When you decide on the format first, each lesson becomes easier.
To choose the best template, look for the elements you want and need in your lesson plans.
It’s important you choose a template that resonates for you in style and colours as well.
2. Objectives and Goals
Here is where you will outline your greeting for the lesson plan start. You want to include your objectives and goals for each and every lesson so you are clear on the intention.
What do you want to communicate with your students? What experience do you want them to have? What results do you want? This helps set the tone for the rest of the lesson and lesson plan,
3. Set Up for Success
After you communicate the objectives and goals, you want to be sure you set up for success. Here, you may remind your students of the prior activity in a previous lesson and how that will now relate to your new lesson and activity.
This could be something fun like an ice breaker, song, or game to help them move around and get excited for the lesson coming up.
4. Guided Practice
Once you have done the warm-up, you now want to communicate to the students what activity will be coming up. Get them excited about the activity that is coming up.
Make sure you give clear instructions for the set-up, the activity and the time. You want to ask the class 3-5 key questions after you explain and before you start to make sure they understand. Depending on the activity, you may want to include intentional pauses for feedback from the class.
5. Wrapping Up
Once the class completes the activity or guided practice, you want to ask for feedback and insight. This should tie to the objectives set in the lesson plan template, as well as what you communicated at the beginning.
Ask what they learned, how the activity helped them learn, and any additional questions.
6. Complete Assessment
Think about what worked in the setup, activity and wrap up. Assess what didn’t work and what may need to be adjusted for the future. Consider the questions asked for a follow-up lesson to enhance learning.
7. Follow-Up
Determine how follow-up will be completed for the objectives and goals. Will there be a related follow-up lesson? Will there be a game to emphasize the key points? How about a group activity? Or perhaps a quiz to determine the learning retained from the lesson?
The key is to make sure there are integration and follow-up points in lessons.
Creating a Simple Lesson Plan Template
In summary, it isn’t enough to simply have a great idea for a lesson plan. It is essential to have the best simple lesson plan template aligned to how and what you want to teach.
The lesson plan templates will help you make sure the key elements from objectives and goals to follow-up are all included.
The important part is to set up for success and improve each time.
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