Course Design: Planning a Class

When preparing to deliver a lecture or lead a tutorial, you need to consider:

  • Goals: What you would like the students to learn?
  • Learning Activities: How will you guide students through the learning process?
  • Time Management: How you will structure the class time?

This Tip Sheet discusses these three important aspects of class planning and the use of templates to help organize and document your class plans.

When preparing to deliver a lecture or lead a tutorial, you need to consider:

Goals

What are your objectives for the class? Perhaps you want to introduce or review specific content. One way to narrow your goals is to focus on concepts that are particularly important, complex, or difficult to understand. Alternatively, you may want the students to acquire new skills, for example, in solving certain problems. If you are clear about your goals for the session, it is easier to make planning decisions about what teaching and learning activities will be useful and how much class time should be allocated to each activity.

Teaching and Learning Activities

Once you know what you would like the students to learn, you can select activities that will help them acquire the desired knowledge and skills. Activities can include lecturing, discussions, question and answer sessions, brainstorming, quizzes, etc. Activities can take place face-to-face or online; ideally the online activities should be well integrated into the face-to-face aspects of the course and vice-versa.

For more information on activities and strategies for use in the classroom, see the CTE Teaching Tips “Lecturing Effectively in the University Classroom”, “Active Learning Activities,” and “Varying Your Teaching Activities: Nine Alternatives to Lecturing.”

Time Management

Time management is one of the most challenging aspects of class planning because it requires that instructors keep track of both in-class and out-of-class time requirements to reach an approximate student workload of 10 hours per week for each course.

When planning use of class time, it is important that the goals are addressed within the available time in a manner that promotes student engagement. The average attention span is only 15-20 minutes. As a result, it is important that instructors break up the flow of the lecture or tutorial every fifteen minutes or so. In-class activities and topic transitions are excellent ways to provide a change of pace. However, it can be difficult to estimate the amount of time required for certain activities. Many of us think we can do a lot more than we can within the time we have, and if you’re going to do any type of in-class group work or discussions, they will often take about 50% more time than your initial estimate. Also consider that the more time you spend on a topic area, the more important the students perceive it to be, and the more they will cover it in preparation for a test or exam.

One way to improve your time management skills is to keep careful track of your in-class timing the first few times you teach a course so that you can make informed adjustments from term to term. Also, consider asking a cross-section of your students about the time needed to complete out-of-class work.

Templates

Class planning templates allow you to quickly make note of your goals, ideas for activities, and time requirements associated with these plans. As a result, they are often a helpful way to organize your thoughts. Furthermore, these written class plans are an easy way to document lectures and tutorial plans for review when planning assignments and examinations, and for future revision and reuse.

A sample template is attached to this CTE Teaching Tip. When planning your own teaching events, please feel free to come up with your own template. There’s no one right way to do this. Some people require more information than others. Some like charts, some like paragraphs. The only essential aspect is that the template allows you to quickly jot down enough information that the notes will be useful to you when assessing your teaching, planning assignments, tests and examinations, or designing a future lecture on the same subject.

The template included asks you to describe pre-class, in-class, post-class, and online student work and indicate the time estimated for each activity, the topics or concepts being covered, activities for students to learn these concepts (e.g. course readings, brainstorming, lectures, small group discussions, assignments, tests, etc.), resources needed (e.g. audio-visual equipment, handouts, etc.), and the ungraded feedback and graded assessment methods that you will use to evaluate students’ grasp of the key concepts (e.g., questions in class, future test questions, etc.). Feel free to alter the column headings, but do carefully consider how your teaching and learning activities support your course goals, provide the students with feedback on their learning and prepare them for assessment.

Resources

  • Prégent, R. (1994). Charting Your Course: How to Prepare to Teach More Effectively. Madison: Magna Publications, Inc.
  • Newble, D. and Cannon, R. (1995). A Handbook for Teachers in Universities and Colleges, third edition. London: Kogan Page Limited.

Class Planning Template

Course Learning Goals Related to This Class: ________________________
Class Date(s): _________________________

** include pre-class and post-class student work

Time
Topics/Key Concepts
Teaching & Learning Activities
Resources
Feedback & Assessment