Here is a question that every English teacher in India eventually confronts: How do you teach a language that most of your students speak only inside your classroom?
In a country with 22 officially recognized languages and hundreds of regional dialects, English sits in a peculiar position in CBSE and NCERT classrooms. It is simultaneously a subject, a medium of instruction, and a gateway to higher education. The pressure on teachers to deliver outcomes is real. So is the gap between what policy documents promise and what a 45-minute period in a crowded classroom can actually accomplish.
The good news is that NCERT's revised framework, accelerated by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, gives English teachers a clearer pedagogical roadmap than they have had in decades. A well-structured lesson plan for English is no longer just a compliance form—it is the practical blueprint for that shift. This guide walks through exactly how to build one.
Why Structured English Lesson Planning Matters Now
NEP 2020 formally ended the primacy of rote memorization in Indian classrooms. The policy mandates a move toward competency-based education: learning that is measured by what students can do with language, not just what they can recall.
For English teachers, this is a meaningful change. The old model rewarded students who memorized grammar rules and reproduced model essays. The new model asks them to read critically, write for real audiences, listen actively, and speak with confidence. Lesson plans must now reflect those higher-order goals.
The British Council's Competency-Based Education Project, developed in partnership with CBSE, has been one of the key vehicles for this shift. It provides teachers with frameworks to redesign their English lessons around observable skills rather than content checkboxes—a practical implementation of what NEP 2020 sets out in theory.
Research consistently shows that curriculum reform documents outpace classroom reality. Many CBSE English teachers report still working with assessment formats that reward memorization even as new lesson frameworks ask them to teach for competency. Awareness of this tension is the first step toward working within it productively.
Core Components of a CBSE English Lesson Plan
Whether you are writing a B. Ed practicum plan or preparing a daily classroom session, a standard CBSE lesson plan for English includes six essential elements. Skipping any one of them creates predictable problems.
General Learning Objectives (GLOs) and Specific Learning Outcomes (SL Os)
GLOs describe what the lesson contributes to over the long arc of a unit or term—for example, "Students will develop the ability to read literary prose with comprehension and critical awareness." SLOs narrow this to what students will demonstrate by the end of today's class: "Students will identify three character traits of Golu in Golu Grows a Nose using textual evidence."
The distinction matters because teachers often write SLOs that are actually GLOs in disguise. If you cannot observe the outcome in one class period, classify it as a GLO rather than an SLO.
Previous Knowledge Testing (PKT)
PKT is the bridge between what students already know and what you are about to teach. In English, this might mean asking students to recall vocabulary from a previous chapter, demonstrate prior reading of an unseen passage type, or share what they know about a poem's historical context. Good PKT reveals gaps before they become barriers.
Teaching Aids
List every resource you will use: textbook pages, audio clips, illustrated cards, digital slides, writing prompts, or drama scripts. For NCERT-aligned classes, specify the exact Marigold, Honeycomb, or Flamingo unit. The more specific you are here, the easier the lesson is to replicate and improve.
Assessment Strategy
Every lesson plan needs a closing assessment—not a test, but a mechanism to check whether the SLO was met. Exit slips, paired reading, or one oral sentence per student all qualify. This is where many plans fall short: they plan the teaching but not the checking.
The 5E Model for English Classrooms
The 5E instructional model, developed by Roger Bybee at the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study in the 1980s, has since been adopted widely across subjects. In English, it gives teachers a reliable structure that works for literature analysis, grammar instruction, and creative writing alike.
Engage (5–10 minutes)
Activate curiosity before you introduce content. For a Grade 8 prose lesson, you might show three photographs related to the story's setting and ask students to predict the plot. For a grammar lesson on reported speech, play a short audio clip and ask students what they notice about how the speaker references what someone else said. The goal is cognitive activation, not content delivery.
Explore (10–15 minutes)
Students work with the primary material before you explain it. They read a passage independently, annotate a poem in pairs, or sort sentences into grammatical categories. This phase generates the questions that make your explanation land. It also surfaces misconceptions early, when they are easier to address.
Explain (10–12 minutes)
Now you teach. Use the vocabulary, concepts, or literary devices the lesson requires. Keep explanations direct and anchor them to what students just encountered in the Explore phase. A student who has already puzzled over why a poet uses present tense in a historical poem is far more receptive to your explanation of narrative perspective than one who receives the concept cold.
Elaborate (10–12 minutes)
Students apply the concept to a new context. In a Grade 10 poetry lesson on figurative language, Elaborate might mean writing two original metaphors using a provided topic, or identifying figurative language in a song lyric. This is where transfer happens.
Evaluate (5–8 minutes)
Close the loop. Ask students to complete a written reflection, answer two targeted questions, or read one sentence aloud that demonstrates the day's learning objective. Feed this directly into the next day's PKT.
If your lesson consistently runs out of time at Elaborate, your Explain phase is probably too long. Most English teachers over-explain and under-practice. Aim to spend more than half your class time in Explore, Elaborate, and Evaluate.
Grade-wise Lesson Plan Strategies
Grades 1–5: Phonics, Oral Language, and Storytelling
At the primary level, a lesson plan for English should be grounded in oral work and structured literacy. Young learners need frequent, explicit phonics instruction. NCERT's Marigold series provides the core texts, but the lesson plan should sequence phonemic activities before reading—not after.
Storytelling works particularly well here. Structured story maps (setting, character, problem, solution) give students a predictable framework that reduces anxiety and builds reading comprehension simultaneously. Pair reading with drama, puppetry, or illustration so that language production stays multimodal.
One practical structure for primary lessons: five minutes of phonics warm-up, ten minutes of shared reading, ten minutes of guided response (drawing, labeling, oral retelling), and five minutes of independent writing or dictation.
Grades 6–8: Grammar in Context and Prose Analysis
The shift from primary to middle school is where many students disengage from English. Grammar instruction is often the culprit. Teaching parts of speech in isolation, divorced from reading and writing, produces students who can label a noun but cannot write a coherent paragraph.
The more effective approach, supported by decades of language acquisition research, is grammar in context. When students encounter a mentor sentence from their NCERT Honeycomb prose (Ruskin Bond's The Blue Umbrella, for example) and then manipulate its structure, they learn grammar by doing, not by memorizing rules.
Lesson plans at this level should include at least one analytical writing task per unit, even if it is a short paragraph. Build in peer review as a standard component, not an occasional activity.
Grades 9–12: Analytical Writing and Poetry Interpretation
By the time students reach secondary level, the lesson plan for English must prioritize close reading and extended writing. NCERT's Flamingo and Vistas texts include challenging literary material—poems by Adrienne Rich and W. H. Auden, prose by writers like Anees Jung—that reward careful, evidence-based analysis.
Teach students to read with a pencil. Annotation of poems before class discussion prevents the common pattern where two or three confident students carry the conversation while others coast. Structured annotation tasks (underline one image, circle one word that surprised you, write one question in the margin) give every student something to bring to discussion.
For analytical essays, scaffold with reverse outlines: students write first, then generate an outline from what they produced, then compare it to the argument they intended to make. The gap between the two reveals where thinking broke down.
Inclusive Planning: Strategies for Neurodivergent Students
A well-designed lesson plan for English should work for students with dyslexia, ADHD, and other learning differences without requiring a completely separate plan. Most accommodations that help neurodivergent learners improve learning for everyone.
For students with dyslexia: Use a readable font (Arial or Verdana, minimum 14pt) for printed materials. Break reading tasks into shorter segments with explicit check-ins. Allow audio versions of texts where possible. Avoid cold reading aloud—it creates anxiety without improving comprehension.
For students with ADHD: Build movement into the lesson. Partner reading, rotating discussion groups, and standing vocabulary activities all keep working memory engaged. Use visual timers so students know how long each phase lasts. Short, varied tasks outperform long, undifferentiated ones.
For multilingual learners: India's classrooms are among the most linguistically complex in the world. Students translating between their home language and English are not confused—they are doing sophisticated cognitive work. Brief, structured opportunities for students to discuss ideas in their first language before expressing them in English (a technique called structured translanguaging) consistently improve written output.
NCERT's own position documents now encourage teachers to treat students' home languages as an asset in English acquisition. A student who can explain a poem's theme in Telugu before writing about it in English is demonstrating stronger comprehension than one who skips straight to English and produces a surface-level response.
Leveraging AI for Rapid Lesson Generation
One of the practical bottlenecks in English lesson planning is time. Writing differentiated comprehension passages, grammar exercises, and discussion prompts for a class of 40 takes hours. AI tools have changed this calculus significantly.
Flip Education's lesson planning tools let teachers generate reading comprehension passages calibrated to a specific grade level and NCERT unit, produce grammar exercise sets with an answer key, and create discussion prompts aligned to Bloom's Taxonomy levels—all within a few minutes. Teachers input the learning objective and grade, and the tool produces usable materials that can be edited, not just accepted.
The key discipline here is editorial judgment. AI-generated materials need a teacher's eye for cultural accuracy, appropriate reading level, and alignment to the specific NCERT text. Use AI to handle the scaffolding work; keep the pedagogical decisions with the teacher.
Write your SLO first. Then use an AI tool to generate three comprehension questions at literal, inferential, and evaluative levels. Review them, revise any that miss the mark, and you have your Evaluate phase done in under ten minutes. Spend the time you saved on your Explore activity design.
English Lesson Plan Template (Standard B. Ed / CBSE Format)
The following structure reflects the standard format expected in B. Ed practicums and used in many CBSE schools. Adapt column widths and time allocations to your class period.
| Component | Details |
|---|---|
| School / Class / Section | e.g., Class 7 / Section B |
| Subject | English (Literature / Language) |
| Chapter / Unit | e.g., A Gift of Chappals — Honeycomb |
| Date / Duration | e.g., February 20, 2026 / 45 minutes |
| General Learning Objective (GLO) | e.g., Students will develop comprehension of character motivation in prose fiction. |
| Specific Learning Outcomes (SLOs) | 1. Students will identify two character traits of Mridu with textual evidence. 2. Students will write one inference sentence about the family's economic situation. |
| Previous Knowledge Testing (PKT) | Ask students to recall the last chapter's setting and key events (oral Q&A, 5 minutes). |
| Teaching Aids | NCERT Honeycomb (Chapter 2), whiteboard, printed character map worksheet |
| Engage | Show a photograph of an old Indian house; ask students: "What do you think life is like for the children here?" (5 min) |
| Explore | Students read pages independently, annotate one line that reveals character. (10 min) |
| Explain | Discuss character inference: how authors show, not tell. (10 min) |
| Elaborate | Pairs complete character map with textual evidence. (10 min) |
| Evaluate | Each student writes one sentence: "I know Mridu is _____ because the text says _____." (5 min) |
| Homework / Extension | Write a short paragraph from Mridu's point of view about one scene. |
| Board Work Plan | Central concept (Character inference), key vocabulary, two model sentences |
| Reflection / Self-evaluation | Were SLOs met? What would I change? |
What This Means for Your Practice
The shift NEP 2020 demands is real, and it asks something significant of English teachers: move from being content deliverers to being learning designers. That means planning lessons around what students will do with language, not around what pages of the textbook you will cover.
A structured lesson plan for English aligned with CBSE and NCERT expectations is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is the thinking that happens before teaching—the place where you decide whether today's class will produce passive listeners or active language users.
Three concrete steps to start: Write your SLO before anything else. Design your Evaluate phase second, so you know exactly what success looks like. Then build the Engage, Explore, Explain, and Elaborate activities backward from that outcome.
The policy environment supports this approach. The research supports it. What it needs now is teachers with the training, time, and tools to make it real in classrooms across India—an open challenge that no lesson plan template, however good, can solve alone. But a well-designed plan is where the work begins.
