This guide is not meant to be the only way to develop a lesson plan; however, it provides at least some good methods to start with. Below is a list of steps that are usually involved in developing a quality lesson plan.

1. Decide what you want to teach. This should be developed based upon your state or local school standards.

2. Be aware of what grade level you are developing the lesson plan for. Grade level affects everything from the content to acceptable resources to the numbers of activities compared to the amount of time lecturing.

3. If you didn't use the state standards to help in developing the topic, refer to them now to see what specific standards your lesson plan can fulfill. Having your lesson plan properly set up with state standards helps to prove its worthiness and necessity later. It also helps to assure that your students are being taught what the state requires.

4. If you're lesson is not based on state standards, address the local school standards to try and find spots where you can link your lesson plans and the standards together.

5. Develop clear, specific objectives to be sure that your lesson plan will teach exactly what you want it to. These objectives should not be activities that will be used in the lesson plan. Rather, they should be the learning outcomes of those activities. As an example, if you are teaching how to add 1 + 3, the objective may be that, “The students will know how to add 1 + 3” or more specifically, “The students will demonstrate how to add 1 + 3.” You can certainly have more than one objective for a lesson plan if you feel that this would be more useful.

6. In order to make objectives more meaningful, include both wide and narrow objectives. The wide objectives are more like ambitions and include the overall goal of the lesson plan. Based on the previous example, a wide objective would be, "In order for students to gain familiarity with adding two single-digit numbers together."

7. Your objectives should also be measurable, so make sure that you will be able to tell whether these objectives were met or not. Make note of how you are going to measure them.

8. Begin choosing how to teach the topic. Will there be lectures or self-exploration? What activities will you include?

9. Assemble any activities that are necessary for the activity.

10. Record a time estimate for your lesson plan to help you to better budget your time.