Guidelines for Lesson Planning 1. How to begin planning In most normal circumstances, especially for a teacher without much experience, the first step of lesson planning will already have been performed for you: choosing what to teach. No doubt you will be—or have already been—given a textbook and told to teach from it, with either a suggestion or a requirement of how many chapters or units you should cover. As you look over the chapter you are to cover for a class hour, you might go through the following sequence:
(a) Assuming that you are already familiar with (a) the curriculum your students are following, and (b) the overall plan and "tone" of the textbook(s), look over the textbook chapter.
(b) Based on (a) your view of the whole curriculum and (b) your perception of the language needs of your students, determine what the topic and purpose of the lesson will be and write t hat down as the overall goal.
(c) Again considering the curriculum and the students' needs, draft out perhaps one to three explicitly stated terminal objectives for the lesson.
(d) Of the exercises that are in the textbook, decide which ones you will do, change, delete, and add to, all based on the objectives you have drafted.
(e) Draft out a skeletal outline of what your lesson will look like.
(f) Carefully anticipate step by step procedures for carrying out all techniques, especially those. that involve changes and additions. State the purpose(s) of each technique and/or activity as enabling objectives. For teachers who have never taught before, it is often very useful to write a script of your lesson plan in which your exact anticipated words are written down and followed by exactly what you would anticipate students to say in return. Scripting out a lesson
plan helps you to be more specific in your planning and can often prevent classroom pitfalls where you get all tangled up ' explaining something or students take you off on a tangent.
Writing a complete script for a whole hour of teaching is probably too laborious and unreasonable, but more practical and instructive (for you) are partial scripts that cover:
(a) introductions to activities
(b) directions for a task
(c) statements of rules or generalizations
(d) anticipated interchanges that could easily bog down or go astray
(e) oral testing techniques
(f) conclusions to activities and to the class hour.