Start every lesson with the student producing something, before you present anything. Two or three minutes of them talking tells you where they are this week, which is different from where they were last week, and it spends the freshest attention in the hour on the only activity that is hard for them.
Most lessons open the other way round, with the teacher explaining what today is about. That order feels organised and it puts the teacher's easiest work first and the student's hardest work last, when both of you are tired.
Eight parts of a plan that survives contact
- a clear aim, written as a can do. By the end students can order food in a restaurant, not students will learn the present perfect.
- present, practise, produce, the standard shape: meet the language, drill it, then use it for something real.
- stage the lesson in timed blocks, with minutes written beside each, because the second half is what gets cut when the first overruns.
- plan the instructions word for word. Unclear instructions waste more class time than anything else, and rehearsing them takes a minute.
- concept check with questions, not do you understand. Ask is it finished or is this now or before, because everybody says yes to the first question.
- plan an extra activity. Every teacher finishes early sometimes and an unplanned ten minutes is a lost ten minutes.
- plan the board, deciding in advance what stays up and where, so the record of the lesson is legible at the end.
- write the aim on the board, in student language, so the class knows what it is for.
The shape, and why the last minute matters most
Four parts, and they fit any level and any group size. Two or three minutes of unprepared production. The thing you brought, presented as briefly as it can be. The same thing used by the student, for most of the remaining time. And one minute at the end deciding what next week's preparation is.
That final minute is the part that turns the shape into a loop. If you leave the lesson without it, next week's preparation starts from nothing and takes an hour; if you spend it, next week's preparation is ten minutes of selection because the decision was already made while the evidence was in front of you.
Count the minutes they speak, not the things you cover
In a one-to-one lesson the student should be speaking for most of it. That is not a target, it is the definition of the product: a student can read an explanation on their own for nothing, and what they are paying for is somebody to talk to who is paying attention.
Coverage is the wrong measure and it is a seductive one, because it can be planned in advance and ticked off. Speaking time cannot be planned, only protected, and the way it gets lost is in explanations that ran long, examples that turned into a monologue, and a warm-up that the teacher performed.
Where it stops: planning content instead of talking time
The stall is a well-prepared lesson in which the teacher does most of the talking. It looks like diligence, the material is good, and the student leaves having heard a great deal of correct English and produced four sentences.
Nothing corrects it because both parties are satisfied. The student felt taught, the teacher felt prepared, and the thing that did not happen leaves no trace in the room. Over a term the student's comprehension improves and their speech does not, and neither of them can point at what went wrong.
The measurement takes no effort: glance at the clock when you start talking and when you stop. Doing that twice in a lesson is usually enough to change the lesson permanently.
A document both of you can see
Keep a shared document open during the lesson and type into it as you go: the corrected version of what they said, the word they reached for and missed, the sentence they got right that they had been getting wrong for a month.
It does three jobs at once. The student leaves with a record rather than a memory, the correction is visible rather than interrupting, and next week's preparation is already written by the time the call ends. It replaced writing corrections in your own notebook, which the student never sees, or typing them into a chat window that closes with the call.
Its limitation is pace. Typing while listening costs attention, so it works for short corrections and it cannot capture everything, and a teacher trying to record the whole lesson has stopped teaching. Two or three lines a lesson is the right amount.
What it looks like when it goes wrong
The recognisable failure is a lesson that runs out of time before the student uses anything. The presentation went long, the practice was the last item, and the part the lesson existed for is the part that got cut.
The second is a warm-up that is a warm-up for the teacher. A question about the weekend, answered in one sentence, and then the teacher talking about theirs. It uses the opening minutes on the wrong person.
What the shape is worth in money rather than in teaching, and why preparation time is what actually sets an hourly rate, is turning your own English into something you are paid for, and the version of all this with no shared language to explain in is the first lessons, with no language in common.
The open question is where a student's own goal fits, because a shape that works every week can still be aimed at nothing, and placing somebody honestly in the first twenty minutes is a different skill from teaching them: placing yourself honestly without paying for an exam, read from the other side of the table.