How to plan a tutoring lesson

A topic is a chapter heading: the past tense, prepositions of place, the conditional. A gap is what this student gets wrong: they use the past simple where the present perfect belongs, every time, in speech but not in writing. The first is a plan for a class. The second is a plan for a lesson.

Working from the gap changes what you prepare. You do not need forty minutes of material on the present perfect; you need six well-chosen items that force the distinction, a way of explaining it that is not the one that already failed, and something to do when they get it right in exercises and wrong in conversation.

It also gives the hour an obvious shape. If the lesson has one job, you know what to cut when you run out of time — which you will.

Open with last week, not with today. Five minutes recovering what was set: what they did, what they got wrong, what they avoided. This is diagnostic, not administrative — the errors in last week's homework are the best evidence you have about what to teach in the next fifty minutes.

Then teach one thing, briefly. If the explanation takes more than a few minutes, it is doing work that practice should do. Follow it immediately with controlled practice, where the answer is either right or wrong and the feedback is instant, so the rule gets tested while the explanation is still warm.

Then push it into freer use — speaking or writing where the student has to choose the form rather than fill a slot. This is where you find out whether they learned the rule or the exercise. Reserve the last five minutes to set work that follows from what just happened, and to say in one sentence what the lesson was about. Students who can say what they did remember it.

The common failure is preparing a script for sixty minutes and being derailed at minute nine. The fix is not to prepare less; it is to prepare a spine and a bench. The spine is the one gap and the two or three activities that address it. The bench is extra items at a range of difficulty that you may never touch.

The bench is what lets you respond when the student turns out to be further ahead or further behind than last week suggested. Without it you improvise, and improvised material is almost always too easy, because easy material is what comes to mind under pressure.

This is the part that eats preparation time, and it is mostly assembly rather than thinking: finding exercises at the right level on the right point, from books you already own. Anything that shortens the assembly is time returned to the teaching.

A plan in a notebook is a plan you read out. A plan on the surface you teach on becomes the lesson itself: the exercises are already there to be worked through, the notes you make land next to the thing they are about, and at the end the record of what happened exists without anyone writing it up.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The reason most tutors cannot remember what a student got wrong three weeks ago is not memory — it is that recording it was a separate task after a tiring hour, and separate tasks after tiring hours do not get done.

Homework set from the textbook's next exercise is homework about the book. Homework set from what the student got wrong forty minutes ago is homework about them, and it is the difference between practice and compliance.

Keep it short enough to be done. A student who finishes twenty minutes of well-aimed work has practised more than one who abandons an hour of general revision. What to set, and how to make it get done, is its own problem: homework students actually do.