If you’re a trainee teacher, you may have seen already how ‘lesson planning’ looks different for everyone. It will probably look different across your different placements, and you’ll have been taught something different with your training provider as well. Lesson planning is such a large and key part of what teachers do, and it can feel overwhelming, especially at the start of a new school year when you’ve got the whole year ahead of you to plan. So we’re here to help!
Let’s discuss the three different types of lesson planning: long term, medium term, and short term. We’ll show you how you can use your TPTC Teacher Planner to do all of this, but you can do this digitally, in notepads, or whatever way works for you. If you’re a trainee teacher, hopefully this will help you to get your head around planning. If you’re an experienced teacher, then hopefully you can grab some tips to help you to streamline your planning and reduce your workload a little!
Long Term Lesson Planning
A long term plan looks at the entire school year, and gives you an overview of everything you’ll be teaching. We have a page for this in our Teacher Planner, and you can organise it term by term into subjects, year groups, classes, or in whatever way best suits your role. If you’re a secondary English teacher, you could plan out what each year group will be doing in English all year. If you’re a primary teacher, so you have one class and you’ll be teaching all subjects, you could separate your long term plan by subject.
Let’s look at our example: We’ve shown samples of how three different teachers may use the planner. The top three rows show a primary teacher – they’re using a different row for each subject, and we’ve shown history, geography, and science. Next is a secondary history teacher, and we’ve shown how they might plan out years 7, 9, and 11. You could even break it down further into different classes, if that suits your planning better – year 7 class A and year 7 class B, for example. At the bottom is an EYFS teacher planning out Literacy, Numeracy, and Understanding the World for a Reception class.
The long term plan lets you see a clear overview of the year. No matter what kind of teacher you are, it works the same way, showing what your focus will be for each term. You can use this in planning meetings with other teachers to make sure you’re covering the national curriculum over the course of the year. You can even use this long term plan to get some important things into the calendar, like planning a relevant school trip in plenty of time.
Medium Term Lesson Planning
Medium term planning looks at one term in more detail. You’ll use your long term plan as a starting point, referring back to everything you’ll be doing this term, and then breaking it down into more detail. We have multiple ‘term overview’ pages in our teacher planner, so you can do this for every term of the school year. There’s space for up to 8 weeks, and lots of different columns where you can plan out different subjects or different year groups.
Our example shows the same as in our long term example; primary, secondary and EYFS teachers. The primary teacher may be doing one lesson per week on history, so we can take the focus from the long term overview (Ancient Egypt) and start to plan this out across the whole term. Similarly for the secondary history teacher, we’ve shown what their medium term planning may look like for their year 7 class, writing in more detail about what will happen week by week. We’ve shown the ‘Understanding the World’ area for the EYFS teacher and noted down a focus for each week.
This is a great chance to think about what skills and knowledge you want your students to have by the end of the term. What do you want them to achieve across the term? You can then work backwards and break this down into steps, building on it so their skills and knowledge progress week by week. Focus on the learning and skills that each lesson will focus on, and note this down. Our notes here centre more on the skills and knowledge than what will practically being happening in each lesson (this will be covered more in the short term plan) but a note here about what the task will be may be helpful, like noting that they will be creating a timeline of important dates in week one.
Short Term Lesson Planning
Your short term planning might be weekly or daily, it just depends on what you prefer. Our Teacher Planner is a weekly planner so you can see Monday to Friday with 6 periods each day, but we also make a Daily Planner with one page per day, if you prefer to have more note space for each day. Your short term planning will be guided by your long and medium term plans, so let’s continue with our example and see how it looks in the Teacher Planner!
You’ll use the short term planning to put your day together. If you’re a primary teacher, you can pull from each subject in your medium term plans to see what you’re teaching that day – so if you have literacy, numeracy, history, reading, and art on your timetable for that day, take a look at that week of your medium term plan to build your lessons for the day. Similarly, for secondary teachers, if you look at your timetable and see you have years 7, 9, and 11 that day, then check that week number on your medium plan and just pull out what each year group is doing right now.
These plans are just for you, to help keep you organised and on top of your workload; the Teacher Planner isn’t designed to be a place to write a full lesson plan for each lesson. But you can note what you’ll be doing in a bit more detail, focusing on the practical side of what you’ll be doing and what you’ll need. Then you can pull some items for your To Do list from your short term plans to help to build your To Do list for the week. In our example of a primary teacher, we have History in period 3 today, so we’ve looked at Week 1 History in our medium term plan to find that students will be locating Egypt and the River Nile on a map. Thinking practically, we’ll need to grab some screenshots of these places on Google maps, so while planning out this week we’ve gone ahead and written that task on our To Do list to make sure it gets done.
The short term plan is more focused on the practical side – what will your students actually be doing, and what resources do you need to have prepared? The short and medium plans work closely together, as at the end of the lesson or end of the week, you can flick back to your medium term plan and take a look at the goals for that lesson – what skills and knowledge did you want your students to have gained this week? You can tick them off if you’re happy that they’ve been achieved, and if not then you may need to adjust next week’s plan to ensure you’re hitting that learning goal. This is a great way to work week by week, as you’re always staying on top of the things you need to prepare with your To Do list, while keeping an eye on the bigger picture of how this week’s lesson fits in to the rest of the term.
We hope you've found this guide helpful! Everyone plans in a different way, so feel free to use these pages in whatever way best suits you. And of course, we also recommend using lots of colour - and maybe even some washi tape!
