How to Write a PGCE Lesson Plan (With a Full Worked Example)

A lesson plan is the single most heavily scrutinized artifact of PGCE placement — mentors and university tutors use it to judge subject knowledge, pedagogical reasoning, and awareness of pupil needs simultaneously. Trainees often treat it as a bureaucratic requirement to complete before teaching, when in practice a well-constructed plan is the mechanism through which most of the Teachers’ Standards actually get demonstrated in observed lessons.

Plan Backward From the Objective, Not Forward From the Activity

The single most common structural mistake trainees make is designing a lesson around an engaging activity first, then retrofitting a learning objective to justify it. This produces lessons that are enjoyable but pedagogically incoherent — the activity doesn’t reliably build toward what pupils actually need to learn.

The more reliable approach, sometimes called backward design, works in this order:

1. Decide precisely what pupils should know or be able to do by the end of the lesson (the objective)
2. Decide how you’ll know they’ve achieved it (success criteria and assessment)
3. Only then design the activities that will get pupils there

Component 1: Learning Objectives

A learning objective should describe an observable outcome, not a vague aspiration. Compare these two versions of an objective for a Year 9 English lesson on persuasive writing:

Weak objective: “Pupils will understand persuasive techniques.”

Strong objective: “Pupils will be able to identify and explain the effect of at least three persuasive techniques (rhetorical questions, rule of three, emotive language) in a given text.”

The weak version can’t actually be assessed — “understand” isn’t observable. The strong version gives you something concrete to check for during the lesson and in pupils’ written responses, directly supporting Teachers’ Standard 6 (accurate and productive use of assessment).

Component 2: Success Criteria

Success criteria break the objective into specific, checkable steps — often shared explicitly with pupils so they can self-assess their own progress.

Worked example, continuing the persuasive writing lesson:

• I can name at least three persuasive techniques
• I can find an example of each technique in the source text
• I can explain, in a full sentence, why the writer chose that technique

Sharing success criteria transparently (written on the board, referenced during the lesson) is a specific, observable practice that mentors and tutors commonly look for during placement observations.

Component 3: Starter Activity

A starter serves one of two purposes: activating relevant prior knowledge, or settling the class and establishing routine at the start of the lesson. It should be short (5-10 minutes) and low-stakes.

Worked example: Pupils are shown two short advert slogans and asked to jot down, individually, which one they find more convincing and why — surfacing intuitive awareness of persuasive language before formal technique names are introduced.

Component 4: Main Teaching Sequence

This is the substantive core of the lesson plan, and it’s usually where the most planning detail is expected. A commonly used structure follows an I do → We do → You do progression:

I do (modeling): The teacher explicitly demonstrates the skill. For the persuasive writing example: the teacher reads a short persuasive extract aloud, thinking aloud about how to identify a rhetorical question and articulate its effect, modeling the exact thought process pupils will need to replicate.

We do (guided practice): The class works through a similar task together, with the teacher scaffolding and prompting rather than doing the work independently. For example, annotating a second extract as a whole class, with the teacher cold-calling pupils to identify techniques while providing sentence starters for weaker responses (“This technique makes the reader feel… because…”).

You do (independent practice): Pupils apply the skill independently on a new, unseen extract, writing their own analysis using the sentence structures modeled earlier.

This progression matters pedagogically because it provides decreasing scaffolding as pupil confidence and competence increase — jumping straight to independent practice without modeling or guided practice is a common early-trainee mistake that produces poor-quality independent work, simply because pupils haven’t yet seen what a strong response looks like.

Component 5: Differentiation

Differentiation is one of the most consistently underdeveloped areas in trainee lesson plans, and one of the most heavily assessed against Teachers’ Standard 5. It should be planned explicitly for specific pupils or groups, not written as a generic afterthought.

Weak differentiation note: “Support lower ability pupils; extend higher ability pupils.”

Strong differentiation note, worked example:

• For pupils working below age-related expectations (e.g., three named pupils with identified literacy needs): provide a writing frame with sentence starters for each success criterion, and a pre-highlighted extract identifying where each technique occurs, so the cognitive load shifts from finding techniques to explaining them
• For pupils working above age-related expectations: remove the sentence-starter scaffold and additionally ask them to evaluate which technique is most effective and justify their reasoning, extending the task from identification to evaluation

Specific, named differentiation strategies (rather than a generic “support/extend” note) demonstrate genuine awareness of individual pupil needs, which is precisely what Standard 5 assesses.

Component 6: Assessment for Learning (AfL)

This section describes how the teacher will check understanding during the lesson, not only through final written work. Common AfL strategies to plan explicitly:

• Targeted questioning — planning specific questions for specific pupils based on known prior attainment, not just open questions to the whole class
• Mini-whiteboards — all pupils show an answer simultaneously, letting the teacher scan for misconceptions across the whole class in seconds
• Live marking during independent work — circulating with a specific focus (e.g., checking whether pupils can correctly name techniques before moving on to checking explanation quality)

Worked example: During the “We do” phase, the teacher plans to specifically question two pupils whose baseline assessment data suggested a weaker grasp of figurative language, checking their understanding before releasing the class to independent work — rather than assuming the whole class is ready based on a few confident volunteers’ correct answers.

Component 7: Plenary

The plenary consolidates learning and checks it against the original objective and success criteria — it should not simply be “pack away time.”

Worked example: Pupils complete an exit ticket: “Name one persuasive technique you learned today, and explain its effect in one sentence.” The teacher collects these to inform planning for the next lesson (e.g., if many pupils still can’t articulate effect, the next lesson may need to revisit that specifically, rather than moving on to new content).

A Complete Worked Lesson Plan Summary

Common Student Mistakes

• Writing objectives that can’t be assessed — vague verbs like “understand” or “know” don’t specify an observable outcome; use verbs like “identify,” “explain,” “compare,” “evaluate”
• Treating differentiation as a generic label rather than a planned strategy — “support weaker pupils” isn’t differentiation; a specific scaffold, resource, or task adaptation is
• Skipping the “We do” stage — moving directly from modeling to independent work removes the guided practice pupils need to attempt the task successfully, often resulting in poor independent outcomes that then get misread as a behavior or motivation problem rather than a planning gap
• Planning assessment only as the final task — AfL should happen during the lesson, allowing the teacher to adjust pace or grouping in real time, not only be discovered after marking books that evening

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Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a PGCE lesson plan be? There’s no fixed length — providers often specify a template, but the more important standard is whether every component (objective, success criteria, differentiation, AfL) is specific enough that another teacher could deliver the lesson coherently from the plan alone.

Do I need a full written lesson plan for every lesson during placement? Typically yes during PGCE placements, particularly for observed lessons, since the plan itself is evidence of pedagogical reasoning assessed against the Teachers’ Standards — this expectation usually reduces once qualified, when planning becomes more internalized and less formally documented.

What’s the difference between a learning objective and a learning outcome? An objective is often framed as the intended target (“pupils will be able to…”), while an outcome describes what pupils actually demonstrated by the end of the lesson — the gap between the two (if any) is often useful material for reflective evaluation after the lesson.

Why is the “I do, we do, you do” structure so commonly used? Because it provides a gradual release of responsibility, matching support to pupil confidence at each stage — jumping straight to independent work without modeling or guided practice tends to produce weaker outcomes, since pupils haven’t yet seen a successful example of the task they’re being asked to complete.