Tips for making a good lesson plan

Making a good lesson plan very often can be a difficult job for English teachers. Actually, it is not that hard. But, as a good lesson plan is always juxtaposed to the word 'creative', the English teachers start to have wrinkles on their forehead. As long as they have all the necessary stuffs before creating it, a lesson plan is just a piece of cake, indeed.

Characteristics of a good lesson plan

• it contains clear indicators, deriving from the standard competency and basic competencies focused.
  
• the teaching learning activities should be clear and refer to recent and innovative language teaching methodologies, characterized by their meaningfulness, relevance to learners' characteristics and environment, and suitability to teaching goals, to name a few.
• the time allotment shows a logical teaching time-line based on each activity planned.
• learning materials are relevant to learners' characteristics and innovative, which can cover the use of texts, audios, and videos.
  
• learning sources from which the texts, audios, and videos used derive from should be referred to appropriately.
  
• it reflects innovative use of teaching media, one of which is the inclusion of ICT.
• the assessment should be authentic and can really reflect students' current competence.
  
• it shows a coherence among all of its components in the sense that the activities are relevant to the set instructional goals and indicators, which in turn are reflected by the assessment planned.
• it uses effective and grammatical sentences, which are easily comprehended.
  

Components of a lesson plan

A lesson plan shares a number of components, such as subject identity usually put on the top of it, standard competency, basic competency(-ies), instructional objective(-s), learning indicator(s), taught materials, teaching-learning activities with time allotment, teaching methods/techniques, learning sources, teaching aids/media, and assessment.

A good understanding to what each of them requires is of high importance in making a good lesson plan. Therefore, each of them will be further explained in detail below.