College Lesson Plan Format: Fill & Download for Free

In college, I was taught to write seven-point, full-page lesson plans for each lesson. Those plans included things like “assessment,” “resources,” “benchmarks,” etc… Honestly, I don’t even remember all of the things I was taught constitutes a well-done lesson plan, because I realized after about two weeks of teaching that they were a total waste of time.I spent more time making lesson plans than actually teaching the lessons. When I was teaching the lessons, I never looked at the lesson plan. My boss never checked them. It was one of the biggest wastes of time I ever did when it comes to teaching, so I stopped doing them.Now, my lesson plans are just page numbers and vague reminders of what I wanted to cover that day. I spent about 30 seconds putting together the plan for a 40-minute-long class. My lesson plan for my first class tomorrow, for example, is just this:Review Friday’s homework.p. 240 - more work with verbals.New vocab words.That’s it. I know what to do from there.Whatever I’m doing is working. My students consistently do much better than average on standardized tests, so my boss leaves me alone and lets me do my thing my way. I love that.

When I first started teaching, there was a 1:1 ratio between planning time and teaching time. That was because I was still learning how to use the resources I had, and I was still writing detailed lesson plans like I learned to do in college.By Christmas break of my first year as a teacher, I had that down to a 1:2 planning/teaching time ratio. I became familiar with how to use the resources I had, I learned my students’ personalities, and, most importantly, I quit making such detailed lesson plans.Now, in my 8th year as a teacher, my planning/teaching time ratio is probably about 1:50. That’s not an exaggeration. I spend very little time planning, because I’ve literally done all of this before. My plans are just a few scribbled notes to remind me what I wanted to cover during that lesson. The rest is in my head.I don’t have to write an entire page describing a single lesson plan for, say, a lesson in transitive verbs. I literally just write that in my plan book: transitive verbs. That’s it. I know what to do from there.

Overdressing for summer meetings. That usually means this is their first teaching job and they think they have to be dressed up every time they go to the school. You only have to be dressed up when there are students at the school. If it’s a day full of teacher meetings and setting up your classroom, jeans or even sweatpants are fine.Overly detailed lesson plans. This usually means the teacher is fresh out of college or hasn’t learned to build flexibility into their lesson plans, which is a critical part of teaching. Laminated lesson plans are a bad sign, too. It shows the teacher is not open to change.Planning small-group work within the first few days of school. Small-group work is one of those things that colleges say teachers should do more of, but you really need to know your students before you start letting them work in groups. It can turn very chaotic very quickly if you don’t know them well enough to keep certain kids away from certain other kids.Non-traditional seating arrangements on the first day of school. You have to establish alpha-dog status in the classroom at the beginning of the year. The best way to do that is with all of the student desks facing you. If you want to do desks in groups or rows or whatever, that’s great! But not on the first day. Every time one of my coworkers has done this, they’ve had discipline problems in their classroom throughout the year.