Lesson Plan

By now, we should have clearly defined the workshop goals and audience. The next step is to define a lesson plan: a step-by-step plan for how the workshop will proceed. How you teach a workshop is entirely up to you – depending on what you’re teaching, it could be a presentation with time for questions, or a series of guided, hand-on activities. Think about:

1. provide ways for highly skilled participants to be challenged and still meet the needs of newbies
2. set the context at the beginning of the class
3. use meta-talk during the class to contextualise the activity (e.g. “here’s why we’re doing this…”, or “after we’ve done this we’re going to…”)
4. make a class that is language/tool agnostic i.e. more about essential principles of how to do something than what to do something with. (of course, this depends on the workshop)
5. make space for questions
6. find ways to build community through the workshops
7. ways to feel personally connected despite laptop screens
8. each person on their own vs. working in small groups
9. help attendees continue to explore the topic after the workshop

A typical lesson plan could look like this…
0. Setup
1. Agenda/introduction
2. Frame the problem
3. Introduce the tools/platform
4. Activity 1
5. Activity 2
6. …. etc
7. Summarize learnings
8. Ideas to develop further
9. Resources for exploration

etc.

For each step in the lesson plan, think about:

  • What people will learn from this step
  • Activities in this step
  • Materials required in this step
  • How long it will take

A good lesson plan should help you outline your presentation/documentation, identify materials you’ll need, help you decide if your scope is right, and allow you to rehearse your workshop beforehand.

This is an important step, and we’ll likely go through a couple of iterations before we move on to creating the teaching materials.