Fail to plan, plan to… A lesson on planning a lesson

The idea behind planning a lesson is to give yourself, as a tutor, the perfect backdrop to lead in your session. The better prepared you are when you enter the session with your tutee, the more confident you will be. The element of control is important in your relationship dynamic when educating.

We would advise that going into the session, you over-prepare materials, objectives, aims and specific goals for your tutees to meet.

This is for two reasons:

1) If your tutee is a fast-paced learner

2) If your tutee takes their time to adapt to the materials, you have a bank of materials to use in future

This way, your gathering of resources is not wasted and the tutee will always benefit from your diligence.

Planning timing is also important, if your session is 1 hour, we’d advise 5 minutes introducing a topic/going over homework, 5–10 minutes of explaining the theory behind the topic, 30 minutes of activities followed by time summarising the session and speaking about next steps e.g. homework.

If your session is longer than an hour, we’d recommend incorporating breaks into the session. This is due to focus dropping for students after 50 minutes on average, so even a 5-minute break after 50 minutes would work wonders in the long term.

Over-planning materials gives you the choice to incorporate more materials into the session, should you need to, and it’s always handy if you have materials you can use across your tutees

Happy planning!

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