The Plan That Looked Complete
Ms Okafor's 45-minute A2 lesson plan for 24 adults lists a main aim ('By the end of the lesson, learners will be able to order food in a café'), three stages (lead-in 5 min, presentation 15 min, role-play 20 min), and the materials needed. It has no stage aims, no anticipated problems, no interaction patterns, and no contingency time. Ten minutes in, learners ask about 'would like' versus 'want', and the teacher spends 12 minutes explaining. The role-play starts with 8 minutes left and collapses into choral repetition. In the post-lesson review, the observer says the plan 'looked complete on paper' but did not support decision-making.
1. Two failures occurred: the presentation overran and the role-play collapsed. Identify which missing plan components best explain each failure, and explain the causal link.
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Trace the causal chain.
- The presentation overran because the plan had a time allocation but no stage aim or checkpoint. With no stated outcome ('learners can use three café request chunks accurately in a controlled exchange'), the teacher had no criterion for deciding that the explanation was finished. The unplanned question about would like/want then became the de facto aim.
- The role-play collapsed because the plan named the activity but not the interaction pattern (pairs? groups? who moves?) or the anticipated problem (learners may not know how to start). With 8 minutes left, the teacher defaulted to choral repetition, which is a pronunciation activity, not a role-play.
- The missing contingency time is a symptom, not the root cause: a plan with stage aims and anticipated problems can absorb a 12-minute detour by cutting a later stage deliberately.
So the two components that best explain the failures are stage aims (for the overrun) and interaction pattern plus anticipated problems (for the collapse).
2. Add three entries to the presentation stage that would have changed the teacher's decisions in the moment. Show them as they would appear in the plan.
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Add these entries to the presentation stage.
| Plan component | Entry |
|---|---|
| Stage aim | Learners can select would like vs want in three café requests with 80% accuracy in pairs. |
| Interaction | T–whole class (2 min), pairs (5 min), whole-class check (3 min). |
| Anticipated problem | Learners confuse would like (polite request) and want (direct). Response: board a two-column contrast, elicit one example each, park extended grammar for later. |
| Timing check | If not at the pair task by minute 12, cut the second example set and move to role-play. |
Why this changes decisions: the stage aim gives a stopping rule; the interaction pattern prevents the role-play from starting without grouping; the anticipated problem turns a surprise into a planned 2-minute board contrast; the timing check makes the 12-minute detour visible while it is happening.
3. What does the observer's comment reveal about the function of a lesson plan?
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Document completeness is not plan quality. The comment separates two functions. A plan as a document can list stages, times and materials and still be silent about decisions. A plan as a working framework must contain what the teacher needs when the lesson diverges: what each stage is for, who interacts with whom, what might go wrong, and what to cut.
This also shows that components are interdependent. A main aim without stage aims cannot regulate time; a procedure without interaction patterns cannot regulate grouping; materials without anticipated problems cannot regulate language questions. The test is not 'does the plan have headings?' but 'could another teacher, or this teacher under pressure, make the same decisions from it?' On that test, Ms Okafor's plan fails despite looking complete.