Tips on How to Create a Lesson Plan Template

A lesson plan provides a roadmap for efficiently delivering a lesson to the students in a classroom. It’s a document that is prepared by the teachers, and instructors covering lesson objectives, goals, and academic targets for a certain period of time. The time period could be a day, week, month, or whole academic session.

For teachers, it’s quite challenging to plan and achieve short-term sub-goals, and that’s when they need a lesson plan. It helps them monitor and manage the process throughout the scope of the academic session.

If you are looking for tips on how to create a lesson plan template, we have got your back. Today we are going to explain handy tips that you can use to create a lesson plan for any grade level or subject. Use these tips that will help you create lesson plans that are practical and beneficial for your next lesson plan. Work on the content, process, and evaluation to make the most of it.

Let’s dig into that. But before that let’s explain what you should do before creating a lesson plan template.

Have clear lesson objectives

The first part of the lesson plan is designing & creating lesson objectives. Your objectives for the lesson plan will depend upon its scope whether you are going to have a one-week-long lesson plan or a daily lesson plan or a monthly lesson plan. These objectives give you a pathway of which transferable skills and concepts you are going to teach your students effectively.

While gathering all the objectives could be very hard. However, you can work on this in multiple steps to find out objectives.

Set SMART goals

As you create your lesson plan template, you should keep in mind the following things:

Set SMART goals and objectives that are clearly defined
The objectives should be measurable so that you can track the results.
They should be achievable in a timely manner which a 9/80 work schedule can propel.

A great way to move forward with this is to consider the lesson objectives as the main goal of your students and the classroom. Ask yourself what lessons you would like your students to learn by the end of a class.

Examples:

After teaching the states of matter, your students should be able to explain the various states of matter using water.
Students should be able to explain the parts of a fraction by the end of the math lesson.
After a lesson on storytelling, your students should be able to identify the rise, fall, and climax on a plot diagram.

Elements of the Lesson Plan

Consider the following elements of the lesson plan as you design your template.

Lesson Information: It includes all the lesson information objectives that we have discussed early in this article.
Lesson Topic. Based on the lesson objectives you must have a lesson topic under discussion.
Benchmarks and Performance Standards. You should set some performance standards whether or not the students are able to grab the lesson and learn from it.
Intended Learning Outcomes. Identify what you expect your students to learn from this lesson.
Instructional Resources. List down all the instructional resources that you have.
Instructional Activities: Add any instructional activities that you might want to include during the lesson scope.

Tips on How to Create a Lesson Plan Template

Add Clear & Precise Content

With a lesson plan template, you want to present your information in a clear & precise way. It should be to the point content without any fluff. Use either Grammarly or Hemingway App to write clearly with zero fluff.

List the Required Materials & Resources

List down all the resources, and material that would need including videos and books, to strengthen understanding. You might also want to include workbook activities, open questions sessions, or deliver a PowerPoint presentation.

Encourage your students to bring anything ahead of time, so that there are no surprises when it’s time to teach the actual lesson.

Structure and Flow

Think from a student’s perspective whenever you are designing a template. The lesson plan should be clear and easily organized to follow through.

Get clear over the small yet important details including the format of each page when creating a template. You might want a header, a footer, or some extra space to add information to. Ask yourself what other options you might need for the template, and if you require specific education software for it.

Types of Lessons you would be teaching

Closely monitor what kind of lessons you would be teaching, and if they are sequential it’s great to start with the first one and follow through to the last one rather than just choosing the topics randomly. It’s okay to start them chronologically if the lessons are not sequential.

Think about how much information your students would be able to consume as you teach them. It depends upon which grade they are in, and how much is their knowledge base. Based on that decide the number of hours you would be teaching and the material that you might need for it.

Keep the Elements Minimal

In this social media world today, where students engage themselves with tools like TikTok & Snapchat excessively, it’s pretty hard to grab their attention.

Use your creativity to bring elements that are eye-catching but do not overdo it. Choose the elements minimally, and do not try to include too many pictures, images, lines, or other graphics unnecessarily. It will make the template look too cluttered.

The Template must look Professional

An organized and neat template that is designed with minimal effort always wins. Start by creating a table or grid and then add all the necessary sections that you need to. Make sure you add sections for visual aids, handouts, and materials separately.

Evaluation

Once you design your lesson plan template it’s important to see if it works or not. Evaluation is the key to the success of your lesson plan template. It’s about the practical implementation of the lesson plan and putting it into practice.

Identify and sensibly think about the design and theoretical structure of the lesson plan. Use a few methods to check the efficiency of your lesson plan. For example, you can have mini discussions with your classroom, or teach mini-lessons according to the lesson plan template.

These steps will help you to identify a great lesson plan that’s easy to implement efficiently. It provides a great framework to align your thoughts and teaching methods.

Assessment

The goal of the lesson plan is to identify if you are able to achieve a specific goal during a certain time period which makes assessment a crucial part of the lesson plan.

As a teacher, you don’t need to necessarily do an assessment at the end of the lesson plan. You can make an assessment during the lesson to get an idea of whether the students are making the right connections as the lesson progresses.

As a result, there is no limit on how many assessments you would like to make for each lesson plan. Create an assessment section when creating a lesson plan and create as many as you want during the scope of the lesson plan.

A Different Lesson Plan Template for Each Grade Level

You will have to work through the needs of your target audience to create a lesson plan template. A lesson plan template for kindergarten students would be far simple and easy than that for high school students. Thus before working on a lesson plan it’s important to get a clear understanding of your target audience.

For example, in a lesson plan template for the kindergarten, the objectives might be so small that you can conclude them in a single line, but if you are creating it for high school students it might consist of several pages.

A lesson plan is strategic planning that teachers and instructors use to make the most of the teaching session. You can create a lesson plan using some of the free templates, it’s easy and quick.