How to plan a 60-minute online lesson (a structure you can reuse)

Most online lessons fail for the same reason: they are planned as a list of content rather than a sequence of student activity. You end up with forty minutes of material, a student who has been listening rather than doing, and no idea what they actually absorbed.

This is a structure you can reuse for almost any subject and level. It takes about fifteen minutes to fill in once you know it, and it survives contact with a real student.

The five parts of a working lesson

1. Warm-up (5 minutes)

The warm-up exists to get the student talking or thinking before you introduce anything new — not to review everything you have ever taught.

Pick one thing. A question about last lesson's topic, three vocabulary items to recall, one problem of the type they struggled with. If the warm-up takes longer than five minutes, it has become the lesson.

A useful test: the warm-up should be something the student can do without your help. If they need you to explain it, it belongs later.

2. Presentation (10–12 minutes)

This is the only part where you do most of the talking, and it should be shorter than feels comfortable.

Two rules that make a large difference:

• Show before you tell. An example first, the rule second. Students infer patterns faster than they absorb explanations.
• Stop at the first checkpoint. After one concept, ask the student to do something with it. If you present three concepts and then check, you cannot tell which one broke.

Screen-sharing a slide deck is the weakest option here. A shared surface the student can also write on is far better, because you can see their thinking rather than their conclusion. Diagrams, worked examples and sentence structures all benefit from being built in front of the student rather than revealed.

3. Guided practice (15 minutes)

The student works, you watch. This is where the lesson is actually won.

The mistake is jumping in too early. Give them a task, then genuinely wait. Ten seconds of silence feels enormous on a video call and is almost always productive.

Vary the task type rather than repeating the same exercise with new content. A student who has just done a gap-fill learns more from sorting items into categories than from another gap-fill, because the second task forces them to hold the concept differently.

4. Independent production (10–15 minutes)

Now they use it without scaffolding: write the paragraph, solve the full problem, explain the process back to you.

This part is uncomfortable to teach because it looks like nothing is happening. Resist filling the silence. If they cannot produce anything at all, the presentation was too fast, not the task too hard.

5. Wrap-up and homework (5 minutes)

Two questions, always the same two:

1. What was the main thing today?
2. What is still unclear?

The second question needs asking directly, and it needs a pause. Students rarely volunteer confusion.

Set the homework before the lesson ends, not afterwards in a message. Homework assigned in the room gets done far more often than homework sent later.

Realistic timings

| Segment | Time | Who is working | | --- | --- | --- | | Warm-up | 5 min | Student | | Presentation | 10–12 min | You | | Guided practice | 15 min | Student, you watching | | Independent production | 10–15 min | Student | | Wrap-up and homework | 5 min | Both |

Notice the balance: you are actively presenting for about a fifth of the lesson. If your ratio is inverted, that is usually the single highest-value change you can make.

What to cut when you run short

You will run short. The order to cut in:

1. Cut the warm-up, not the practice. Start with the new material and fold the review into the wrap-up.
2. Cut presentation depth, not practice time. Teach one thing properly rather than three things partially.
3. Never cut the wrap-up. A lesson that ends abruptly at the moment the student ran out of time is a lesson they will remember as confusing.

Independent production is the last thing to sacrifice. It is the part that tells you whether anything worked.

Stop planning every lesson from scratch

Here is the thing that actually saves hours: most of your lessons are variations on perhaps fifteen underlying structures. "Introduce a tense", "practise a problem type", "read and discuss a text" — the shape stays the same and only the content changes.

Build each structure once, properly, and treat it as a template. When you teach the past perfect for the ninth time, you should be adjusting a lesson, not writing one.

This is also why the planning tool matters less than the planning habit. Whether you use a document, a folder of files, or a lesson builder that keeps materials reusable, the win comes from not rebuilding the same scaffolding every week.

If you want a starting point, take your next lesson and force it into the five parts above with the timings written next to each. The first time it will feel constraining. By the third lesson it will feel like less work than what you were doing before.

A note on what students actually remember

Students remember what they did, not what you said. Every decision in this structure follows from that: the short presentation, the long practice, the production stage, the two closing questions.

When a lesson feels flat, the diagnosis is nearly always the same — the student spent too much of it listening. Move ten minutes from your side of the lesson to theirs and most of the problem disappears.