Attention all teachers! Learning how to write a lesson plan that will engage your students and meet their goals involves a little preparation!

In 2017, 26% of students who dropped out of high school did it because their classes were too boring.

That says something about the way lessons are outlined. The good news is that it’s not that hard to solve this issue. 

If you find your students losing focus or even skipping classes, it might be time to reassess the way you structure your lessons. 

Don’t know exactly how to do it? Keep reading and find out how to write a lesson plan that will engage your students and make them look forward to your classes!

5 Tips on How to Write a Lesson Plan

When you’re planning your classes, it’s not enough to make a list of topics to cover and run with it.

A good lesson plan is a complete document, where you divide the lesson into sections according to the time you have and write some guiding information for each. 

To make this job easier, there are lesson plan templates where all you need to do is fill in the different fields. Adobe Spark Post, for instance, has a big variety of free templates to choose from.

1. Establish the Goals for the Lesson

What do you want the students to have learned by the end of the lesson?

The first step towards writing a good lesson plan is to identify your objective(s). From there, you can decide the approach you’ll take to achieve your goal.

A good practice is to take the first few minutes of the class to let the students know what you’ll be speaking about on that day.

2. Organize the Theory of the Lesson

This is probably the trickiest part.

Make it too theoretical and you’ll start hearing some yawns; make it too practical and you might lose focus from the goal of the class.

Consider the complexity of the topic and the type of students you’ll be talking to, and figure out how you can convey all the information in a way that’ll keep them involved.

Make sure you don’t speak nonstop for too long. Let the students participate so that this part of the class doesn’t become too monotonous for them.

3. Make Sure You Have All the Materials and Resources Needed

Having the right resources to support your theory can make the world of a difference in how engaged you keep the students.

Short videos, online quizzes, physical objects that are relevant to the topic – anything can work. 

Be creative!

4. Plan a Series of Exercises

After the theory, it’s time to see if the students understood the lesson.

One way of doing so is by asking questions or having them write a summary of what they just learned. 

But sometimes you can make things a little bit more exciting. Whenever it makes sense, organize activities that promote teamwork, discussion, and proactivity.   

5. Take the Last 5 to 10 Minutes to Go Over the Lesson

What’s the information you really want the students to take in from the lesson?

Chances are that they won’t remember every single thing you talked about, but take the end of the class to highlight the most important insights and give them some homework for reflection.

Practice Makes Perfect

Each class you teach will be different. Different grades, different students and maybe even different subjects.

This means that the way you approach your lessons might not always work.

As you gain experience as a teacher, it becomes easier for you to understand the type of students you’re dealing with and how to write a lesson plan that will make them interested in what you have to teach.

If you want to read more articles on everything education-related, we have an entire section dedicated to it on our blog. Read on!