Designing Lessons – The Process

Knowing what makes a lesson effective is different from knowing how to build one. This page outlines how to move from a module topic and a set of outcomes to actual lesson content that teaches something. 

Start with the Assessment, Not the Topic 

The most common mistake in lesson design is starting with the topic—“this lesson is about supply chain risk management”—and building outward from there. The result is a lesson that covers the topic but may not prepare students for what they are actually being asked to do. 

Start with the assessment. What will students be asked to do in this module? What do they need to understand, be able to do, or be able to analyze to do it well? Work backward from there. A lesson designed with the assignment in view will almost always be more focused and more useful than one designed from the topic outward. 

Think Like a Teacher, Not a Writer 

The most useful questions to ask when designing a lesson are teaching questions, not writing questions. Before drafting anything, sit with these: 

• If you were standing in front of this class, how would you talk about this topic? What would you say that the textbook does not? 
• What would a student most likely get wrong or be confused by? Where do people typically get stuck with this material? 
• What is the one thing a student absolutely must understand from this lesson—the idea they cannot leave without? 
• How does this lesson connect to what came before it? How does it set up what comes next? 
• Is there a moment in your professional experience when this concept clicked for you? Can you share that? 

Answers to these questions are the raw material for a lesson—almost always more useful than starting with a topic outline. 

Find Resources Before Writing

Before writing a single word of original content, look for what already exists. Good resources are often more engaging and authoritative than text written from scratch, and they free up the SME’s writing effort for what only they can provide. See the tiered resource guidance on the Lessons page for where to look and in what order. 

Evaluate resources against a simple standard: is this credible, current, and genuinely useful to a student preparing for this module’s assessment? If a resource is close but needs framing—a short paragraph explaining what to pay attention to and why—that framing is a better use of writing time than recreating the content from scratch. 

Avoid resources behind paywalls students cannot access, resources that will go stale quickly, and resources that assume significant prior knowledge students do not yet have. 

Decide What the Lesson Actually Needs 

Once you know what the lesson needs to teach and what resources you have, decide which elements to use and in what combination. A lesson built around a strong existing video might need only brief instructor framing, a guiding question, and a connection to the assessment. A lesson introducing a complex procedural concept might need a worked example, an analogy, and an explicit misconception address. 

Ask: what does a student need from me specifically that they cannot get from the resources I’ve assigned? Build original content around that answer. 

Write for a Time-Constrained Reader

Our students are often reading course content after a full day of work and family. They read to get what they need, not to absorb everything on the page. Lead with what matters. Put the key idea at the front, not buried in paragraph three. Use headings so students can navigate. Keep paragraphs short. If a passage could be cut without any student being worse off, cut it. 

Write in plain language. Field-specific jargon should be introduced and explained, not assumed. Passive voice, nominalized verbs, and long sentences with multiple subordinate clauses add reading load without adding meaning. Write the way a knowledgeable person would explain something to a capable colleague who is new to the topic.  

Using AI in Lesson Development

AI tools can be useful in the design process: generating a first draft to react to, suggesting examples or analogies, identifying gaps in an outline, or proposing resource types to look for. Used that way, AI accelerates the process without replacing the thinking. 

Where it fails is as a source of finished lesson content. AI-generated text tends to be comprehensive without being deep—it covers a topic at a level that sounds thorough but rarely gets specific enough to actually teach anything. It lacks the expertise, the real-world experience, and the particular perspective that makes instructor-voice content worth reading. Students increasingly recognize it: the sentence structures, the hedging language, the way it over-explains the obvious while skimming past what actually needs unpacking. When content reads that way, it undermines trust in the course. 

If you use AI to generate a draft, treat it as raw material to be substantially revised, not a finished product to lightly edit. The SME’s voice, perspective, and expertise are the point.

A Simple Design Sequence

Working through these steps in order will produce a better lesson faster than starting with a blank page:

Examples

We’ve selected several example lessons that we consider exemplary models. Please review these lessons and the accompanying annotations, which highlight the key elements that make them effective and demonstrate best practices in lesson design.