Lesson Planning
Planning from the content backwards
Planning starts with what learners must understand and be able to do, then asks what language that requires. Analyse the language demands of the content: key vocabulary (technical and semi-technical), collocations, functions (defining, hypothesising, comparing, explaining cause), grammar needed for those functions, and the text types learners will read or produce. Pair each content outcome with a language outcome written as something observable, e.g. 'Content: explain how water is cleaned. Language: explain a process using first, then, after that, finally and the present passive.'
Plans usually stage: activation of prior knowledge (often bilingual, to reduce the cognitive load), comprehensible input with visual support, guided practice / collaborative task, production, and review with self-assessment. Build in scaffolding - models, substitution tables, sentence frames, graphic organisers, glossaries - that is gradually withdrawn. Match task cognitive level to Bloom's levels and check whether the language needed is available before expecting production.
Differentiation in CLIL is double-edged: learners differ in subject knowledge and in target-language proficiency, so support can be pitched at either dimension (e.g. a language beginner may be a strong scientist). Plan for mixed profiles with tiered questions, optional frames and pairing decisions.
Traps: plans that treat language as 'vocabulary pre-teaching' only; objectives that are unobservable ('learn about volcanoes'); assuming lower language level means simpler concepts; forgetting the metalanguage learners need for group work; confusing a task's language demand with its cognitive demand - a low-level task can be linguistically heavy.
Rule of thumb: for every activity in the plan, write the sentence a learner would need to say or write to complete it successfully. If you cannot, the scaffolding is missing.