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uh really excited to be here for this event and today I want to talk about planning and no not about any more planning adding things to planning please nobody needs that. I'm here to talk about planning smarter. And because if you're anything like me, you've probably spent hours writing a lesson plan that felt more like a tax form than a teaching tool. And at the end, the only thing that you learned was how much coffee you can drink in one sitting. So, let's get on with it. Here's the deal.

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Planning is valuable. It gives us as teachers structures. It gives students a sense of progress. But somewhere along the way, planning and ELT got messy. It got overloaded and we started trying to throw everything in. Every new method, every trendy activity, every shiny new app, and the results lessons felt cluttered instead of clear. So in the chat box, if you will, I see you all are very active in the chat box. How do you feel on a scale of 1 to 10 about planning a lesson? Oh my goodness, everybody's responding.

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Seven. Okay. Usually fine. Sometimes it feels heavy. I'm with you. I'm with all of you on these feelings. All right. So, here's the problem. Teachers don't struggle because we don't plan. The issue is how we plan. And too often planning turns into paperwork. Filling in templates, ticking boxes, writing documents that no students will ever see. And that's not teaching. That's admin. And when we try to plan for everything, grammar, skills, personalization, the latest tech trends,

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we end up with a plan that's crowded and confusing. Our purpose gets lost. But real lessons, they're messy. Students don't follow a script and which means our perfect little plans need to have fewer extras, more focus, and built-in flex flexibility. Real time consuming, boring. Okay, I love that comment. Sorry, I'm with the chat open here too, trying to keep up with you guys. So, that's where the med filter comes in. Med is an acronym for and it stands for minimum effective dose and I borrowed it

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from medicine. It means the smallest dose of anything that actually works. Too little of a medication or a treatment, it doesn't really help. And too much can actually hurt the patient. So I decided, let's apply that to teaching. It works the same way. Too little planning and the lesson feels very flat. Too much planning and the lesson becomes heavy and confusing for both you and for the students. So, the med filter is that sweet spot. It's not a brand new method. It's not another box

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to tick. It's a filter. It's a way to cut through all the noise and only keep the things that are really driving learning forward. Here's the important part, and there's only three of them. Aim, task, and pivot. It's not the only pieces of your lesson. Of course, you still have other activities. You have materials and you warm up and you even can include some tech tools as we saw today. But these three are the bones, the foundation. And once you've got your aim very clear,

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your task and a pivot, which we'll discuss, everything else has to pass that filter. Does this support my aim? Does this strengthen my task? Does this fit within the pivot that I've thought about? And if the answer is no, does it make the cut? Get rid of it. So these are the three concepts. Your aim, what will my students actually do by the end? And it has to be observable and it has to be measurable. Task. What's the engine of the lesson? What gets them there? What shows me my aim? And pivot. Where can I pause,

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check, and adapt? Because you're teaching humans, not a script. And when these three things are clear, everything else falls in place. So let's dig into it. I'm going to throw this one to you. And this is the first step, the aim. And oftent times our aim feels very broad or too vague. So on a scale of 1 to five, write in the chat, how clear do you usually feel about your lesson aims? Got some fours, threes. I I put clearish because awesome. Okay, we're kind of a little mixed here

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in our feelings. It's good. So, step one, clear aim. Because without a clear aim, a lesson is just a mix of random activities. And here's the problem. Most aims that I see when I'm doing teacher training or I'm consulting, they're too big. They're too vague because one lesson is 60 maybe 90 minutes. Hey, maybe you have a two-hour lesson. So, for example, improve speaking skills. I get this a lot, especially on SELTAS. Okay, but what does that mean? speaking where, speaking

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how, speaking about what the aim doesn't help you as a teacher. It it has to give you and very definitely define what you want your students to do so that you can help your students get somewhere because if they don't see progress, they're not going to be engaged. So, if we compare that first one to give two pieces of advice to a co-worker using modal verbs of obligation and suggestion, for example, that's very specific. I can see it. I can hear it. And I know exactly what student success looks like. And

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here's why this matters. Because a clear aim does three things. It helps the teacher stay focused. You know what to check for. It helps the students see their progress. they can feel, oh, I did it. And it stops you from overplanning because you don't need 20 activities. You just need ones that deliver on that aim. So, here's my quick test. If you can't picture it in your mind, students doing it in the class, actually saying the words or doing the skill, whatever you have as an aim, then the aim isn't

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clear enough. Because if the aim is just a sentence at the top of a lesson plan, it's a direction that lead it it leads the whole lesson. So you've got to be very clear on what you want to do. 35 to 50 minute lesson time. So you have to have a very clear aim there, Michelle. Step two is the task. The task is this is the engine of the lesson. It's what actually drives the aim forward. Now let me be clear. There is nothing wrong with traditional tasks. a gap fill, a matching exercise, a quick

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comprehension check. They all have their place and they can be useful tools. But the problem is that the activities themselves when it's when the whole lesson turns into this chain of them. I mean, how many times can students fill in blanks or match words before they actually get to use the language? So, that's when planning slips into busy work. We have a lot of accuracy, but we have no real communication. That's why we learn languages to communicate. So, if students never move past isolated

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practice, they miss the chance to apply the language in context. A really strong task is intentional. It moves beyond recognition and it pushes students to do something meaningful. So, I've got some examples here so you can feel the reality for a language aim. Instead of stopping at fill in the blanks of modals, make it let's write 90 secondond pitch uh using persuasive adjectives and modals because that's application. I work with business English so a lot of people are selling things. This is what

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came to mind. But for a skills aim, instead of just answering comprehension questions, we can try read an editorial, an article, something online, pick out two main arguments and summarize them in one sentence as if you were talking to a friend because that's real world communication. So here's my quick check. If I remove this task, this activity, would the aim still be achieved? If yes, that's a filler. And if no, then that's your essential intentional task. So the message here is not never use gap fills,

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please. That's not the message. It's use them wisely. Don't let them be the destination. The task has to carry the aim. Back to you again in the chat. On a scale of one to five, how flexible do you feel when the task doesn't go as planned? Ooh, we've got a lot of confidence in this group. I love it. Great job. Okay, so step three is the pivot point. And this often gets confused with the feedback stage, and it's not the same thing. So feedback usually comes after the test, right? We correct the answers,

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highlight some errors, move on. A pivot is different. It's a plan pause in the middle of the lesson where you stop, observe what's happening, what the students are producing, and decide whether to push, adapt, or recycle. Now sometimes when I do observations I can see that this step is often neglected or maybe oversimplified by teachers and they plan one straight path, one moment to check in and hope that it all flows perfectly from there. But if you've taught for more than 5 minutes, you know that's not what

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happens in the classroom. Sometimes your task will flop. Sometimes students get stuck early. Sometimes they finish way faster than you expected. So the pivot isn't about scrapping your plan or adding more things onto it. It's all about designing flexibility into your planning. So here's the key shift. Stop planning for one version of success. Start planning for at least two possibilities. And we have to add pivot points where you can pause, check in, and shift slightly based on what your

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learners show you. Not what you think they're doing. What are they showing you? For example, in a business English class, a student um I had a group of students that were recording these 90 elevator pitches, sales pitches. They were going to fairs around the world. They had the structure, the language was fine, but the recording sounded really flat. They were really robotic. And I had already thought about different possibilities. I said, "Okay, what's going to be my pivot point here?"

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And I had a short list of what am I going to do? So in this moment when I saw, okay, it's not being delivered as I intended them to. I could here are the options. I could stop and give them direct feedback. I could run a very quick pronunciation intonation drill or I could let them notice it themselves. Now, I had already thought about these even before the lesson started. So, I chose the third one. I had in my bank of materials two contrasting samples of an elevator pitch. One very stiff and the

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other one confident and effective. And I asked them which one works better and why. That sparked a whole discussion that I needed for the students to then pick up on tone, rhythm, pacing, and then they started re-recording with this actual presence and conviction of trying to convince somebody to hire them or to buy their products. So, the pivot here isn't about fixing mistakes at the end. It's all about building flexibility into the plan because these aren't big detours. They're just course corrections

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and when they're done well, they make lessons feel really responsive, really focused and real for the students. So, let's bring it back together. The med filter, it's simple. We have one clear aim, one intentional task, and one pivot point. These are not the only parts of the lesson. Let me make this very, very clear. Not these, just only these. These are the filter. These are the bones. These are your foundation. And everything else, warm-ups, worksheets, pair work, what tech tools

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you're going to integrate has to earn its place by supporting these three. And if it doesn't, you need to cut it out because it's fluff. So, the med filter helps you focus on lessons, cut through the fluff, and make sure that your energy is spent where it matters most because teaching isn't about ticking every box and running through a perfect strip script. And it's about clarity and presence and making smart decisions in the moment. And before I wrap up, I want to say a big thank you to McMillan for hosting

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this event. And I'm so glad that I got to share it with the wonderful ladies this morning and giving us a chance to really share uh our our ideas and have this space. I want to thank all of you for joining us today. If you'd like Will mentioned it if you'd like some more practical ideas, my podcast Real Talk on ELT is on YouTube and you can I share tips and daily teacher life on my Instagram. But I want to leave you with this. Please, please, please enjoy the rest of the event and go teach something

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powerful.