Lesson Guide Plans: Introduction
Suggested (initial) study time for this unit, including note-taking, questions and reflection: 95 minutes.
One of the most crucial aspects of delivering good lessons is ensuring they are well focused. This means that the training you provide should have a clear purpose. Lessons that are not well focussed tend to result in 'aimless driving' sessions in which the instructor is reactive* - the learners are uncertain about what they are trying to achieve.
*Reactive: The instructor reacts to errors and mistakes randomly as they arise instead of being proactive and planning for specific opportunities and outcomes.
To keep your lessons on track, you need a lesson guide plan.
Practising lesson planning by producing simple lesson guides will help you think about how the component parts go together. The more you practise, the better able you will be to produce lesson guide plans 'on the fly' after you qualify.
In this section, we give an example of a guide plan, but before we start, there is an important message that you must understand:
The most crucial aspect of any plan is that it MUST address the learner's needs.
Over the years, many people have failed Part-Three even though they had excellent 'subject plans'. The problems they encountered were:
Others have failed Part-Three and Standards Checks because they had no idea what they were trying to achieve - there was no planning!
Understanding the lesson planning process will help you to recognise and deal with any situations that might arise during your lessons and exam. Of course, a considerable additional benefit is that you will have lots of ideas for lessons when working on a Trainee Licence and after you qualify to enable you to teach a wide range of customers from day one.
The more plans you complete, the more you will recognise that there is a lot of 'cross-over' between lessons. For example, a systematic approach (hazard routine) will feature in every lesson you teach.
In an ideal world, all lessons would have a complete, formally-written guide. However, the practicalities of the time and cost involved in doing this for day-to-day driving lessons make this an impossibility for most instructors. But you must still plan your lessons.
You will initially develop generic plans for a range of lessons. These plans have elements that will be the same for all learners. For example, as mentioned earlier, a 'roundabouts' plan might split a session into three mini-lessons, turning left, going ahead and turning right.
While the content of a generic plan will be the same for all learners, each learner will have additional needs that you will add to the main plan goals. For example, they might be weak with mirror use or approach junctions too fast. These needs will be incorporated into your plan.
You will discuss the guide plan with your customers and ensure that there are goals that relate to their specific needs.
Incidentally, we refer to the plans as 'guide plans' because although they will help keep your lessons on track, they are not set in stone. Sometimes you will need to deviate from the plan temporarily to fix an issue – other times, you might need to change the plan completely. The learner's needs are always more important that 'sticking to the plan'.
Next: Some lesson basics...