Advanced TESOL Skills: Masterclass in Lesson Planning

In this section, you’ll see exactly what goes into a full lesson plan, with a model you can download and adapt for your own use. More than just paperwork, planning gives teachers the time and space to think clearly about their lessons, sharpen their objectives, and organise their ideas into a sequence that really works. A well-structured plan builds confidence in the classroom and makes teaching smoother, sharper, and more effective.

For teacher trainers, these plans become invaluable tools for mentoring, observation, and feedback. They make a teacher’s thinking visible, reveal strengths and gaps, and provide a concrete basis for professional development. In short, lesson planning helps teachers teach better and trainers train smarter.

We’re starting with aims because they’re the foundation of every successful lesson. Think of the aim as your destination: if you know exactly where you’re going, you can choose the most direct route and pack only what you need for the journey. With a strong aim, your lesson is lighter, leaner, and far more purposeful.

In this section, you will learn how to recognise the components of a strong main aim, how to phrase aims so they are clear and learner-centred, and how to use them as both a teaching tool and a training tool. You’ll see how aims can guide your lesson design, shape your classroom choices, and provide a framework for supporting other teachers in their professional growth.

Interaction patterns, who’s doing what, with whom, and for how long, reveal a huge amount about the pace, balance, and overall energy of a lesson.

Recognising and balancing interaction patterns prevents too much 'teacher talk', makes lessons more interactive, and supports learners with different styles and needs. As teacher trainers, these patterns are diagnostic gold: they show how active learners will really be, reveal a teacher’s preferred roles, and expose common misconceptions about what 'student-centred' actually means.

In this segment, you will learn how to spot imbalance in interaction patterns, how to calculate realistic percentages of teacher vs learner talk, and how to use this analysis to give constructive, practical feedback. You’ll also explore strategies for helping teachers reduce teacher-fronted time and build lessons where learners do more of the talking, problem-solving, and learning.

The teacher’s role is far more powerful than it often seems. How you see yourself in the classroom shapes the lesson, the learners’ engagement, and the overall classroom dynamic. In this segment, you’ll explore the many roles a teacher can play—from facilitator and monitor to assessor and expert—and learn how each affects learning and classroom interaction.

You will learn how to reflect on your own teaching style, experiment with learner-centred approaches, and assess the impact of your questions, feedback, and presence in the classroom. For teacher trainers, this section provides practical tools to help teachers step back, pass over the power to learners, and foster authentic, engaging, and effective learning experiences.

In this section, we focus on the level of mental engagement your learners experience and how to plan for it using Bloom’s Taxonomy. From lower-order thinking, like remembering and understanding, to higher-order thinking such as analysing, evaluating, and creating, Bloom’s framework helps teachers design lessons that challenge and stimulate learners effectively.

You will learn how to identify the cognitive level of each classroom activity, balance lower- and higher-order tasks, and adapt the same materials to suit different learners’ abilities. For teacher trainers, this segment provides practical strategies to help teachers recognise and increase higher-order thinking, craft measurable objectives, and foster critical thinking and creativity in the classroom, making lessons both engaging and intellectually rewarding.

Finally, in this section, we're going to look at how AI, in this case ChatGPT, can be utilised to create effective lesson plans. We will look at how to develop the prompts as well as how to use ChatGPT to analyse and assess your lesson plan.