Intro­duc­tion:

A les­son plan is the expres­sion of the course design. It allows the teacher/trainer/professor/facilitator a way to ensure that the les­son is deliv­ered as effec­tively and effi­ciently as pos­si­ble. It offers the per­son respon­si­ble for the deliv­ery of the les­son a roadmap on how best to accom­plish the objective(s) of the lesson.

While it would be com­fort­ing to state that there is one right way to develop a les­son plan, the real­ity is that teach­ing is as much of an art as it is a sci­ence. This paper will present some of the gen­er­ally agreed upon steps and com­po­nents of good lessons plans.

Side Note: teacher, trainer, pro­fes­sor, facil­i­ta­tor there are so many words for the var­i­ous pro­fes­sion­als that impart knowl­edge to oth­ers. For the sake of con­ve­nience to both the reader and the author, the term “trainer” will be used to rep­re­sent all these noble professions.

Depend­ing on the envi­ron­ment of the train­ing the les­son plan could be devel­oped after the course has been designed, dur­ing the course design, or the les­son plan could BE the course design. More often than not in a K-12 school set­ting the les­son plan serves as the course design, while in the train­ing envi­ron­ment a les­son plan serves as a doc­u­ment deliv­ered to a client at the con­clu­sion of the devel­op­ment of a course. At the col­le­giate level, well no one cares…thank you tenure.

There are three main stages that the les­son plan should address: prepar­ing, deliv­ery, and con­clu­sion. Depend­ing on the envi­ron­ment that the train­ing will occur in there could be more or less steps within the stages. For exam­ple, when a trainer must travel to a train­ing site there are the con­sid­er­a­tions of travel. If train­ing is local, some parts of the stages could be omitted.