There’s nothing like giving back to generations of future students. Being a teacher is a wonderful profession, and one that many agree can bring a lot of satisfaction and pride. If you’re new to teaching, there will certainly be a learning curve you need to get used to.

For example, if you’ve just started running a classroom, you might not know how to make a lesson plan. There are many things you need to know to design one successfully.

Need an overview of the basics? Read on, and we’ll walk you through what you need to know.

Know Your Goals

When you create a lesson plan, it’s essential to keep the big picture in mind. What knowledge do you need your students to walk away with? The simpler you can narrow down this goal, the better you’ll be able to design a plan to reach it.

It’s important that your goal be specific as well. Something such as, ‘students will be able to identify the possible causes that led to the Civil War.’ This is specific enough to be able to plan directly for, yet simple and broad enough to be summed up as simply as that.

If you want to take an extra step, elaborate a little on how students might go about learning these things. Are you using a video, an exercise, or putting them together for a group project? You might not know this yet, but if you do this is a good place to mention it.

Create an Overview and Timeline

How do you see the class going? Briefly, in a few sentences, write out a summary of what you hope to happen in the lesson and how you will get your students to reach the outcome you mentioned previously.

Then, break down this summary into a rough timeline of class. Break it down into minutes if you can. How much will you spend on each part of your lesson? If you have your students doing a group project, how much of the class time will that take up?

Being as specific as possible will be important if you want your lesson plan to succeed. If you’re unsure of how to map this all out, you can use the lesson plan templates from Adobe Spark to help guide your way.

Allow for Wiggle Room

It’s easy to get so in your head when designing your lesson plan that you forget to consider that your students are real people and won’t always adhere directly to your plans.

Leave room in your plan to be flexible and expect the unexpected. Perhaps your students will need more time than you anticipated, or you’ll need to adjust your methods on the spot to get the outcome you deserve.

Keep back-up plans and adjustments in mind and you’ll never regret it!

Learning How to Make a Lesson Plan

If you’re a new teacher, learning how to make a lesson plan is a must if you want to succeed in the classroom. The above information can help.

Need more career advice or information? Keep scrolling our blog for more.