Short-term Planning

The lesson-by-lesson and week-by-week planning that turns scheme-of-work entries into teachable sessions. Short-term planning is where general aims become specific Lesson Aims, where target language is checked for meaning, form, and pronunciation, where Anticipated Problems are surfaced, and where the procedure — what the teacher and learners actually do, in what order, for how long — is committed to paper.

The lesson plan and the weekly view

A short-term plan exists at two granularities. The weekly view groups three to five lessons within a unit, ensuring they cohere internally: the language presented on Monday is recycled on Wednesday, the receptive skill input on Tuesday feeds the productive output on Friday, the assessment on Thursday matches what was actually taught. The lesson view zooms in on a single session and makes the procedure executable: Staging with timings, materials, interaction patterns, instruction-checking moves, and feedback structure.

Detailed plans are typical for novices, observed lessons, and unfamiliar material; experienced teachers running familiar content often work from a sparse plan or a mental procedure shaped by repetition. Both extremes have failure modes. Over-detailed plans lock the teacher to a script that ignores in-class evidence; under-detailed plans bury problems that a few minutes of preparation would have surfaced.

Decisions made at this scale

Short-term planning resolves the granular questions that medium-term planning leaves open. Which examples will model the target structure? Which Concept Checking Questions test understanding? How will instructions be staged so learners know what to do without long teacher monologue? Where in the lesson does feedback happen, and on what (accuracy, fluency, content, organisation)? Which task will reveal whether the lesson aim was actually met?

Time budgets shape every decision. A sixty-minute lesson with twenty minutes of input, twenty of controlled practice, and twenty of freer practice does not survive a five-minute late start, a lengthy lead-in, or a cohort that needs the input run twice. Realistic short-term plans designate which stages are negotiable under time pressure and which carry the lesson aim and must run to completion.

Relationship to the wider plan

Short-term planning inherits constraints from Medium-term Planning and feeds back into it. A lesson that overran by fifteen minutes, a stage learners finished in half the planned time, a controlled-practice activity that exposed a gap not anticipated in the scheme — these become inputs to the next medium-term revision. The plan is disposable; the learning from planning compounds.

References

• Scrivener, J. (2011). Learning Teaching: The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching (3rd ed.). Macmillan Education.
• Harmer, J. (2015). The Practice of English Language Teaching (5th ed.). Pearson Education.