Most teachers don't suffer from a shortage of planning time because they're disorganized. They suffer because the planning systems schools ask them to use are badly designed. When Ross Morrison McGill published a single-page 5 minute lesson plan template in the early 2010s, tens of thousands of teachers shared it within days. That response wasn't enthusiasm for a gimmick. It was relief.
But does the framework actually improve instruction? And what does it ask you to give up in exchange for that speed?
What is a Five-Minute Lesson Plan?
The 5 minute lesson plan is a one-page planning template designed to capture the essential elements of a lesson in a single, focused sitting: the learning objective, success criteria, prior knowledge, starter activity, main task, differentiation strategies, and a quick assessment. McGill, who writes under the handle @TeacherToolkit and is one of the most-followed educators on social media, built it specifically to reduce the bureaucratic burden of lesson planning, the multi-page pro-forma documents that eat evenings and return little instructional value.
The name is partly provocative. McGill's argument was never that a teacher should spend exactly five minutes planning. The point was that the document itself should not consume hours that belong to actual teaching. Teachers who have adopted it across dozens of countries use it as a cognitive shortcut before class, not as an administrative submission.
That distinction is the whole game. McGill designed the tool as a framework for a teacher's thought process. Teachers who treat it as another box-ticking exercise miss the point, and probably miss better lessons too.
The 5 minute lesson plan works when you treat it as a thinking scaffold, a way to interrogate your lesson design quickly. As soon as it becomes paperwork, it stops working.
The Cognitive Science Behind Rapid Planning
The appeal of fast planning isn't purely about convenience. There's a genuine cognitive argument for it.
When teachers complete lengthy, multi-page planning documents, cognitive load shifts from instructional thinking to form-filling. John Sweller at the University of New South Wales, who developed cognitive load theory, distinguishes between intrinsic load (the complexity of the content itself), extraneous load (irrelevant demands on working memory), and germane load (the mental effort that produces learning and professional judgment). A bloated planning template creates extraneous load: it demands attention without producing better instruction.
Lesson planning grounded in cognitive science, specifically focusing on what students should know and be able to do and sequencing activities to build understanding progressively, produces better instructional decisions than template compliance does. The 5 minute format, when used correctly, aligns with these principles by forcing teachers to name one clear objective before anything else.
The alignment is mostly theoretical, though. As Harry Fletcher-Wood's analysis of planning through a cognitive load lens makes clear, the hard question isn't whether the template is short. It's whether the thinking it prompts is the right thinking. A five-minute plan written on autopilot helps no one.
No independent peer-reviewed study has measured the impact of the 5 minute lesson plan on student outcomes or teaching quality. Its adoption is wide; its evidence base is thin. Use it as a thinking aid, not a validated instructional system.
How to Structure Your Plan Using Backward Design
The most reliable approach to any condensed lesson plan is backward design, developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in Understanding by Design.Start with the end: what should students know or be able to do by the close of the lesson, then determine how you'll know they've achieved it, then plan the activities that will get them there.
Here's how that plays out in five focused minutes:
Step 1: Name one learning objective. Not three, not a cluster. One. "Students will be able to identify the main argument in a persuasive text" is an objective. "Students will understand persuasion" is not.
Step 2: Define your success criteria. What does mastery look like? Write two or three observable behaviors: "Student can underline the thesis," "Student can explain one supporting example." These become your assessment checkpoints.
Step 3: Choose a starter activity. What prior knowledge will you activate? A quick recall question, a brief discussion prompt, or a low-stakes retrieval task. Something that takes three to five minutes and prepares students' working memory for the new content.
Step 4: Plan your main activity. What is the core learning task? Keep it singular. One well-designed activity beats three shallow ones.
Step 5: Design your exit check. How will you know whether each student met the criteria before they leave? An exit ticket, a one-sentence summary, a thumbs-up/thumbs-down signal. Something low-stakes but diagnostic.
Differentiation for SEN Students
The differentiation field in the template is one of its most valuable prompts, and one of the most frequently skipped. For students with special educational needs, two questions are worth answering before any lesson:
- What barrier might prevent this student from accessing the core task?
- What modification removes that barrier without changing the learning objective?
A student with working memory difficulties might need the success criteria printed on their desk. A student with reading challenges might need the same text available in audio format. Neither adaptation changes what you're teaching. They change how you've made it accessible.
5 Minute Lesson Plan Templates for Every Subject
The standard template was built with academic subjects in mind: English, maths, history, science.Teachers in PE, Music, and Art often dismiss it because the language ("learning objective," "success criteria," "written assessment") doesn't map naturally to their disciplines. That's a solvable problem.
PE
In physical education, the learning objective is a physical skill or tactical understanding. "Students will demonstrate correct technique when performing a forearm pass in volleyball" is a valid, specific objective. Success criteria become observable movements: "elbow angle consistent," "platform formed before contact," "weight transferred to the front foot." Your exit check doesn't need to be written. A coach-style observation during the final five minutes of class, with brief verbal feedback, serves the same diagnostic purpose.
Music
In music, success criteria are sonic. "Student produces a consistent tone across the middle register" and "Student maintains a steady 4/4 pulse for 16 bars" are measurable, teachable standards. Your main activity is practice structured around a specific technical or expressive challenge. Assessment can be a thirty-second recording on a phone, a peer-listening exercise, or a straightforward ears-on evaluation during a final run-through.
Art
Art lessons often resist objective-setting because creativity feels prescriptive when pinned to a criteria grid. The practical workaround: separate technique objectives from creative objectives. "Students will use hatching to suggest shadow" is a technique objective any student can meet without compromising their creative choices. Creativity becomes the expression; technique becomes the standard you assess.
If your subject doesn't fit the standard academic frame, change the assessment column, not the structure. Keep the objective-criteria-activity spine, and replace "written response" with whatever evidence is appropriate to your discipline.
Manual Planning vs. AI Generation
A growing number of teachers now draft their 5 minute plans using AI tools, entering a topic, a year group, and a curriculum standard, then letting the model produce a first draft. The output is often structurally sound. The question is whether that usefulness comes at a cognitive cost.
Manual planning, even brief planning, forces teachers to retrieve what they know about their students' current understanding, their class dynamics, and the likely sticking points in the content. That retrieval is professionally valuable. A teacher who genuinely thinks through "what misconceptions might arise here?" before class is better prepared to respond when they do appear.
AI-generated plans shortcut that retrieval. The structure might be reasonable, but the teacher hasn't done the diagnostic thinking that makes them responsive in the room. For experienced teachers, AI works well as a time-saver on familiar content because they hold the contextual knowledge and can quickly adapt what the model produces. For early-career teachers, relying on AI generation is a real risk: you can end up delivering someone else's lesson without understanding why it was structured that way.
A middle path works well in practice: use AI to generate a starting structure, then spend two minutes interrogating it. Does this objective match what my class needs next? Does this activity address the likely misconceptions? Is there differentiation built in? Those two minutes of critical editing are where the professional learning actually happens.
Preparing for the 5-Minute Interview Sample Lesson
Teaching candidates are frequently asked to deliver a short sample lesson, sometimes as brief as ten minutes, and the 5 minute lesson plan format is well-suited to preparing for exactly that. The structure keeps your thinking visible to observers: a candidate who begins with a clear, stated objective and closes with a quick assessment check is demonstrating to the panel that they understand how learning works, even under compressed time.
A few tactical points:
Lead with the objective, out loud. Start by telling students (or the interview panel playing the role of students) exactly what they'll be able to do by the end. This signals intentionality before you've said anything else.
Choose one high-engagement starter. You have ten minutes; you cannot afford a slow opening. A quick retrieval question, a visual prompt, or a paired discussion gets students thinking within sixty seconds.
Don't try to cover everything. Panels are not looking for encyclopedic content delivery. They want to see evidence of responsive teaching: can you read the room? Can you adjust? A lesson that runs slightly short and ends with a genuine exchange demonstrates more skill than one that rushes through material.
Name your differentiation thinking. Even if all students are doing the same task, say what you would modify for different learners. "If a student were struggling with this, I'd offer..." signals professional awareness and planning depth.
Most school interview observers weight teacher-student interaction over content coverage. Use your 5 minute plan to structure your thinking, but be willing to pause, respond, and adapt during delivery. That responsiveness is what they're hiring for.
What This Means for Your Practice
The 5 minute lesson plan works best as a daily cognitive discipline rather than an occasional time-saver. Teachers who use it consistently report that it sharpens their ability to identify the core of a lesson quickly, a skill that generalizes to longer planning, curriculum mapping, and assessment design.
What it doesn't do, in any evidence-based sense, is guarantee better student outcomes. The honest position is this: there is no independent empirical research specifically measuring whether the 5 minute lesson plan improves teaching quality or academic achievement. Its wide adoption reflects genuine demand for planning tools that reduce bureaucratic burden, and that demand is entirely legitimate, and the tool is genuinely useful. But treat it as one thinking scaffold among many, not as a system with proven instructional outcomes.
The planning tool that works best is the one that gets you thinking clearly about your students before class. If five minutes with a single-page template does that for you, use it every day. If complex content demands something more elaborate, use that instead. The objective is never the plan. It's what happens in the room because of it.
