How to plan a great lesson - fast!

Within a successful lesson, students should have opportunities to learn and/or consolidate vocabulary and structures by practicing some of the core skills – speaking, listening, reading, writing. Teachers should have a clear idea of what they want students to know and be able to do during the lesson and wider unit, and they should assess how well this has been learned, in order to adapt the teaching so it is effective for all. However, teachers also have little time and a huge workload! I recently read a discussion about how long planning lessons can take, and wanted to share some tips to help speed this process up. 

Lessons are all about the learners and how they are developing. In my department we use the EPI methodology, which breaks down the key stages of development in a really clear way, but the principles shared here can apply to any classroom. There is no point expecting learners to be able to run before they can walk – this is simply a recipe for frustration, for us and them! 

I break down the key elements of each sub-topic by knowledge and skills that students need to know before we can move the learning on. Even if your school doesn’t follow the MARS EARS sequence, you will still have to go through the same stages to ensure that students actually learn what you would like them to know.  

EPI stage	Modelling &  Awareness Raising	Receptive  Processing	Structured Production	Expansion & Autonomy	Routinization & Spontaneity
Skills	Listening  Speaking	Listening  Reading	Speaking  Writing	Reading  Writing	All
What students will be able to do	Identify words, patterns, and sound-spelling links  Recognise and copy sounds	Recognise words and sounds in context  Understand meaning of vocab	Produce words with accurate sounds and spellings  Develop sentences	Understand and apply explicit grammar rules  Use knowledge in new contexts	Develop fluency  Embed knowledge and skills

For faster planning, I refer to a document reminding me of the above, plus my best/favourite/most common activities for each stage. When planning, I use this document to remind me of what activity types I could choose, select 3-5 tasks for the stage I am at, and insert the relevant vocabulary. I typically plan 4-8 lessons at a time (depending on the complexity and size of the sentence builder we are using), following these stages until students are likely to be confident and proficient enough with the topic to move on.  

Personally, I also include a short retrieval ‘do now’ starter (school policy), as well as the 2-minute Speaking Questions Challenge, at the start of most lessons. I can also be adaptable easily – I can skip tasks if students are understanding well or add another task from the list if they need further consolidation. 

For most tasks, particularly at the modelling and receptive processing stages, you can reuse sentences and paragraphs across several different tasks to speed things up even further. (If you subscribe to the Sentence Builders website, you can use it to generate sentences and/or chunks based on your sentence builder in English and target language). You could also potentially use AI tools to help you generate sentences quickly. Additionally, if you are planning for the new GCSE, you can use MultiLing Profiler to quickly check the vocab you’ve used against the exam board vocab lists. 

Essentially, the planning document – with skills and activities – really is a game changer to speed up planning. It may take some time initially to create the document, but it will be well worth it. You could create a shared version as a department, and it doesn’t have to be a finished version immediately – you should still be able add things you’d like to try and remove things that may not work as well with your classes. 

There have been similar documents kindly shared by many other MFL teachers over the years - you can download my full document (including the activity types I like to use) for FREE on my TES shop. This includes a template for you to write your own.