Lesson Plan Template

In academic institutes, creating a lesson plan is considered one of the easiest approaches to ensure that a teacher covers all the important topics about any given subject. In general, a teacher can go ahead and consult a lesson plan template to create a customized lesson plan that can last up to a week or a month, or even the entire semester. In this guide, we will dig deep into learning about lesson plans by creating some lesson plan templates using EdrawMind.

In the field of education, a lesson plan is a road map followed by the teacher or the instructor where they lay out all the important areas as to what students need to learn and how they will learn during their classroom sessions. By creating a lesson plan, an instructor ensures that they cover every topic in detail under the stipulated time allotted to them.

As we create a lesson plan using lesson plan templates, we see that there are five major components of creating a lesson plan, which are:

• Lesson Topic
• Class Objectives
• Procedure
• Time Management
• Student Practice

As a student or even as a teacher, you might wonder what is the need to make a lesson plan in the first place? If you check out the important components mentioned above, you will learn that planning lesson topics or creating a particular roadmap beforehand ensures that the teacher is fully prepared when they enter the classroom. At the same time, even the students will be aware of the topic that the teacher has planned for them. Put simply, creating a lesson plan provides time for both the teacher and student where they can learn about the topics and save crucial time.

Now that we have seen the lesson plan's basic components let us see how to make a lesson plan in general. You can also use EdrawMind to avail yourself of some great lesson plan templates to create lesson plans quickly.

• Determine the Scope of Your Lesson Plan:
  The very first step that you need to consider is whether you plan to create the lesson plan for the entire semester or you have planned to break it down into different topics or chapters. Different teachers follow different teaching approaches. Some create a full-fledged lesson plan that consists of the activities that are planned out by the teacher spread across the entire year, while some teachers create smaller and more flexible lesson plans for their students.

• Identify Objectives:
  Every lesson plan must serve some greater purpose! In this step, you should ask yourself several important questions, like:
  • What important topics do students expect to cover from this plan?
  • What do I have planned for the students after they are done with this lesson/topic?
  By asking such questions, you will learn the objective behind creating the lesson plan. Once you have laid out the important points, you can create the lesson plan according to your needs.

• Plan Activities:
  Plan activities comprise all the physical activities that you have planned to perform during the course of your lesson plan. Some of the most common lesson plan activities can be group discussion, visiting a place, inviting a particular speaker, presenting a particular topic, watching educational videos, creating KWL Charts, etc. Such activities and tasks go on to acknowledge how serious a teacher is when they decide to create the lesson plan.

• List Required Materials:
  You might require access to some reading materials or equipment to conclude some of the topics. When you create a lesson plan, ensure that you keep a space for listing out such important material. Some of the most important study materials are books or notebooks. If you mention the reading material at the beginning of the lesson, all the students will manage to bring the material on time. It will not only save much time while teaching but will also be helpful for students who need time to concentrate on their study material.

• Create a Flexible Timeline:
  In order to ensure that there is a creative space for the students, you should always work around creating flexible timelines. In the lesson plans, you should add time slots for multiple activities, like:
  • 9:00-9:30: Discussing what we studied in the last class
  • 9:30-10:30: Students will read out from their books
  • 10:30-11:00: Students can engage in a Q&A session
  Remember to add a flexible timeline, as several internal and external environmental factors might affect the course of the lesson plan.

• Leave Extra Space:
  It is always considered good practice to leave some space at the bottom of the lesson plan to make some revisions, leave some feedback, or leave additional notes to the students. As a teacher, you can even ask your students to fill out the feedback box where they can share their learning and provide your input so you can make the changes accordingly.

In this lesson plan template, we have clearly specified the objectives, materials, and notes that the 11th-grade students have to follow for the entire week in their literature class, which Mr. Lin is teaching. You can customize this template according to your need and distribute it among your students after filling out every necessary detail.

As you can see in this lesson plan template, we have created different blocks or sections that outline grade, subject, date, topic, lesson, lesson goal, learning objective, reading material, and additional notes. Once your lesson goals are achieved, you can ask your students to add their feedback in the Notes section.

This is an English Lesson Plan template created in EdrawMind. Here, the teacher intends to cover 'Language and Culture.' In order to better illustrate the lesson, we have created multiple sections, like Lesson Plan Information, Material, Expectation, and Notes. In the Expectation section, the teacher will point out the expected topics from the students after they have studied the mentioned topic.

This is a completely blank lesson plan template where the teacher can put down different activities or topics that need to be covered in a week's schedule. You can easily download this template and start adding the details before sharing it with your students.

Won't it be considered a time-saving activity if everyone in the classroom, including the teacher and the students, understands the topics or chapters that will be covered in advance? If a teacher creates a lesson plan as per the provided course material and timeline allocated, they can easily manage all the students while ensuring that they cover everything in detail. Some of the other important reasons for creating a lesson plan are:

• Creates a better time management
• Ensures that the teachers are well-prepared to tackle any question
• Creates a clear roadmap for effective teaching

Even if you know your subject, it is always possible that you might skip a thing or two. If you felt that you might have a skip something while teaching or your students caught you off-guard, then there are a couple of quick questions that you need to ask yourself:

• How uncomfortable were you when the students asked any questions?
• Did any of the students notice that you were not prepared?
• Did your lack of preparedness somehow demotivate your students?
• How quickly will you study and cover those topics that left you flabbergasted?

Creating a lesson plan is the first step in ensuring that you feel comfortable teaching any topic or chapter to your students. If you have created a lesson plan at the beginning of the year, you will have a roadmap that you need to follow to teach everything in the correct order. This way, your students will get to learn everything before the exams, and you will be well-prepared if any of the students ask any random question that you might not have yet taught in the classroom.

Instead of wasting your time making lesson plans on complicated tools or on paper that will make it hectic for you to share them within the class, you can opt for EdrawMind. The mind mapping software is free for you to use and allows you some amazing features that let you create lesson plans in just a couple of minutes. From free templates to having hundreds of themes and clip-arts, EdrawMind is a powerful tool, well equipped to create and easily share lesson plans. So, do not waste your hours fiddling with over-complicated tools, and download EdrawMind to work on offline and online platforms.