Planning is important for teachers as it gives them confidence and acts as a map to follow when teaching. While plans do not need to be followed exactly, they help identify learning aims and anticipate potential issues. Effective planning considers students' backgrounds, motivation levels, learning styles, and exam requirements. It also balances activities, language skills and content to practice within topics. Planning can range from vague corridor plans to formal documented plans. Essential elements of plans include class description, timetable fit, aims, activities with details, anticipated problems, additional possibilities, and examples. Planning also considers sequences of lessons with short and long-term goals, thematic strands, language recycling, and balanced activities. Plans provide flexibility but also allow diversion and addressing

1. Class Notes by Camila Roldán
Class 22th May, 2014
1) Why is planning important? What sort of planning do people produce?
• All teachers prepare their classes, but in different ways. The plan gives you confidence.
Sometimes described as a map to follow. Not always we will follow it exactly as it was
made. It will have to be flexible. It will help the teacher but it will also help the learners.
• When you become skilled, you are able to plan two or three classes together.
Lesson planning is the art of combining different elements into a coherent whole so that a lesson
has an identity that students may recognize, work within and react to. Plans help teacher identify
aims and anticipate potential problems. They are proposals for action in the form of detailed
documents or hastily scribbled notes that do not need to be followed slavishly.
Pre-planning
Consider crucial factors about the students:
• What is their educational and cultural background?
• Levels of motivation (schools in the center: parents are interested in the process of learning
of their children)
• Different learning styles
• Organization of the syllabus or curriculum
• Exam requirements if present. (How are you going to assess them?)
Planning
Activities: aids, materials, types of interaction, timing (more or less 10 min per activity), and
balance in the type of activities chosen. (Different activities)
Skills: which skills and sub-skills do the students need to practice?
Language: new vocabulary, structures, functions.
Content: within which topics will the new language be embedded?
Teacher's KOL of the students/syllabus
(pyramid)
ACTIVITIES
-Language type
-Language skills/ Subject and content
-Practical realities / THE PLAN
The PLANNING Continuum
• Jungle Path → Vague (corridor plan/follow the coursebook exactly)
• Formal Plan (planning notes)
• Intercultural Awareness → often doesn't appear in the books
THE PLAN
Essential elements:
1) Class description: Nº of students, behaviour
2) Timetable fit.

2. Class Notes by Camila Roldán
3) Lesson aims.
4) Activities: aids, types of interaction, procedure, timing
5) Anticipated problems
6) Additional possibilities
7) (*) Show variety of examples)
Planning a sequence of lessons
− Before, during and after the lesson.
− Short and long-term goals. (Every three months and at the end of the year)
− Thematic strands or topic-based work. (New stuff teached is related to previous topics)
− Language planning: recycling, revising. (Maybe learn similar topics but on another
perspective or on more depth)
− Activity balance.
Using lesson plans
• Flexibility
• Magic moments.
• Sensible diversion. (Use it to go back to the English class)
• Unforseen problems.
• Plans as records and research tools.