Lesson Planning Through an Observer's Eyes

Early in my time as an Academic Manager, I sat through a lesson plan submitted by a very strong teacher, with every stage timed to the minute, every interaction pattern labelled, and by the third page I realised I had almost no idea what the lesson would actually feel like to sit through as a student. It was, by any formal measure, a thorough plan. What it wasn't, was a plan written with any real sense of what a learner, and by extension, an observer, would actually experience in that room.

I think that gap, between a plan that satisfies a template and a plan that actually holds up under observation, is one of the more persistently underexplained parts of teacher development, and it's shaped a great deal of how I've approached both writing and reading lesson plans since.

What a Plan Is Actually For

A lesson plan serves at least two audiences, though most training treats it as though it only serves one. It's a working document for the teacher, of course, but it also serves as an essential artifact for whoever observes or experiences that lesson. Teachers who write only for the first audience often produce plans that are perfectly usable in the moment but reveal very little about the teacher's actual thinking when someone else reads them afterward, which is precisely the situation I found myself in with that three-page plan. Farrell (2022) treats lesson planning and classroom observation as two ends of the same reflective practice rather than separate skills, and I think that's exactly right. A plan written with no thought for how it will be observed is only half-finished.

What I've come to look for, both as an observer and when coaching newer managers on how to observe, is less about formal completeness and more about whether a plan shows genuine anticipation. Has the teacher thought about what happens if an activity finishes early, or late? Is there a visible reason why one stage leads into the next, rather than a sequence of activities that could be reordered without anyone noticing? Does the plan show any awareness of where a specific group of learners, the actual humans in that actual room, might struggle with a specific piece of language, rather than a generic anticipated-problems section copied forward from a previous lesson?

Reading a Plan the Way an Observer Will

Mann and Walsh (2017) argue that reflective practice only has value when it's grounded in what actually happened in the room (real lesson data, not just stated intentions) rather than treated as an abstract exercise done at a distance from the teaching itself. I sometimes ask teachers, particularly ones early in their careers, to read their own plan as though they were a stranger walking into the observation with no other context. Can they picture in their mind how the lesson is going to unfold just by reading the plan? It's a surprisingly uncomfortable exercise for a lot of people, because it exposes exactly the gaps a template doesn't catch: stages that make sense to the person who wrote them but wouldn't be obvious to anyone else, timing that assumes a level of pace the teacher has never actually tested, and language aims that are technically accurate but disconnected from anything the learners in that specific class actually need.

I think this matters more than it's usually given credit for, because the plans that score well against a rigid checklist and the plans that actually produce a strong observed lesson are not always the same plans. A rubric can confirm that a plan contains a warmer, a presentation stage, controlled practice and freer practice, all correctly labelled, without ever confirming that the teacher has thought carefully about why this particular sequence, for this particular group, on this particular day.

"If I only had this document and no access to the teacher at all, would I have a reasonably accurate sense of what's about to happen in that room, and why."

What Changes Once You've Sat on the Other Side

Something shifts, I think, once a teacher has spent real time observing other people's lessons rather than only having their own observed. Reading a plan from the observer's chair rather than the teacher's desk makes visible things that are almost impossible to see from the other side: how quickly an unclear instruction stage becomes obvious once you're watching learners fail to start an activity, how a beautifully sequenced plan on paper can fall apart the moment real timing enters the room, how much of what actually makes a lesson work sits in transitions, and more natural, spontaneous interactions, that most templates barely ask a teacher to plan for at all.

This is part of why I think observation and lesson planning training work best when they're taught together rather than as separate skills, one focused on writing a document and the other focused on judging a lesson. A teacher who is more familiar with what an observer is actually looking for tends to plan differently, not necessarily more elaborately, but with a sharper sense of which decisions actually matter and which are simply filling space on a template because the template expects something there.

A Simpler Question Than the Template Usually Asks

If I had to reduce what I actually look for in a lesson plan to a single question, it wouldn't be whether every section of the template has been completed. It would be closer to this: if I only had this document and no access to the teacher at all, would I have a reasonably accurate sense of what's about to happen in that room, and why. Most plans that struggle under observation aren't struggling because a section was missing. They're struggling because the plan, however complete it looks, doesn't actually answer that question, and I don't think any template, however carefully designed, can substitute for a teacher who has learned to ask it of their own work before anyone else does.

The Observation Frameworks module of The Academic Manager's Survival Manual, and the Pre-Observation, Observation Record, and Post-Observation Conversation planners in the Toolkit, are built around exactly this handoff: from a plan on paper to a lesson an observer can actually read.