A clear methodology
for every lesson you teach
Effective lesson planning doesn’t start with gathering fun activities.
It starts by knowing what kind of lesson you’re teaching, exactly what you want your students to achieve, and the framework that will help you get them there.
That’s the methodology at the heart of Online English Teacher:
Step 1: Start with the lesson type
First, determine the main focus of the lesson.
Are you teaching:
Reading? Listening? Speaking? Writing? Vocabulary? Grammar? Functional Language?
Each of these is a different lesson type — and each one requires a different approach.
A reading lesson shouldn’t be structured the same way as a grammar lesson. And a speaking lesson needs something different again.
Knowing the lesson type gives you the big-picture direction for the lesson.
Step 2: Set ONE clear main
aim
Once you know the lesson type, you can get specific:
What do you want your students to be able to do by the end of this particular lesson?
For example, you’ve chosen “reading” as the lesson type.
From there, a clear lesson aim might be:
By the end of the lesson, students will have developed their reading comprehension for gist and detail.
When your lesson has one clear main aim, it becomes much easier to decide:
what belongs in the lesson
what you can leave out
which activities actually serve a purpose
how students’ English will develop
whether the lesson has achieved what students need
Instead of trying to teach a little bit of everything, you can focus the lesson around one meaningful outcome.
3) Use the appropriate lesson framework
Now you know what kind of lesson you’re teaching and what you want students to achieve.
The framework gives you the structure for how to get them there.
Rather than starting with a blank page or piecing together activities and hoping they work, you have a clear process to guide the lesson from beginning to end.
And because you understand the purpose behind each part of the framework, you’re not locked into one rigid lesson plan.
You can adapt it for:
different learners
different levels
different materials
different timeframes
different teaching contexts
That’s the difference between simply following someone else’s lesson plan and being empowered to plan and teach for yourself.
Once you understand this process, lesson planning becomes much less about asking:
“What activity should I do next?”
and much more about knowing:
“What am I trying to achieve — and what does this lesson need in order to achieve it?”
Then you’ll use the relevant framework to guide you.
