A lesson plan is a specific arrangement of instructional materials designed to convey specific educational content. Most teachers, especially in elementary and high school, have detailed lesson plans for each and every class. Lesson plans can obviously follow a number of different models, but the following scheme usefully divides a lesson plan into five key parts: objective, introduction, input, activity, and review.
The objective states the standard from the instructor's curriculum guide: "to understand how to change a fraction into a decimal" might be an example of one such objective. The introduction relates the objective to material that the students already know. In this case, perhaps they already know, intuitively, that the fraction (1/4) is equivalent to .25, or the fraction (1/2) is equivalent to .5. An effective lesson plan will leverage this knowledge in the exploration of new territory. The input is the presentation of the new material. In this instance, a teacher might show how one divides the numerator by the denominator in order to generate a decimal equivalent of the fraction. The activity portion of the lesson plan asks students to generate their own decimal equivalents of given fractions. It is critical that the "activity" have within it mechanisms that check the student's developing understanding. The review will summarize the results of the lesson and perhaps incorporate further activities to be completed at home.
Lesson plans are an important part of an effective classroom. Well-designed lesson plans allow teachers to move seamlessly across a curriculum, with each unit building on and reinforcing the previous unit. (Hence the presence of the "introduction" component of each and every lesson plan). Students also benefit from well-designed lesson plans, as such plans that allow students to focus on the material to be learned, removing any uncertainty about what is to be learned on any given day.