Who Said a Good Lesson Needs So Many Activities?

First published on 22 October 2026 at https://sergiopantojaelt.substack.com/p/who-said-a-good-lesson-needs-so-many

By the end of a sixty-minute English lesson, students have completed a warmer, matched vocabulary, watched a video, answered comprehension questions, discussed the topic in pairs, and played a review game. Six activities. Everyone was busy. The teacher followed the plan. There was never a dull moment.

Sounds like a good lesson.

But what did students actually have time to learn?

I’m not suggesting that busy lessons are ineffective. Some are excellent. What interests me is the assumption behind so much lesson planning: that variety makes a lesson more productive, and that getting through everything we planned is somehow evidence of progress.

But neither is necessarily true.

When moving on means leaving something behind

Imagine a B1 class discussing ways to improve their school. Students exchange ideas, but several struggle to justify their opinions. Some agree with everything. Others disagree rather bluntly. A few rely on the same limited expressions.

After five minutes, the teacher stops the discussion, collects a couple of answers, and moves to the next slide.

The activity is finished. But has its potential been explored?

This is one of the concerns behind Scrivener and Underhill’s (2012) Demand High teaching: classroom activities can become routines we manage rather than opportunities we actively develop. The question isn’t merely whether learners completed the task. It’s what we asked them to do with the language that emerged.

Same task. Different demands.

Research on task repetition provides some support for this possibility. Bygate (2001) found that repeating oral tasks can affect aspects of language performance, although the benefits are not necessarily the same for fluency, accuracy, and complexity. Repetition alone doesn’t guarantee learning. But completing something once doesn’t mean we’ve exhausted its value.

More activities, or better opportunities?

Nation’s (2007) Four Strands framework calls for balanced opportunities for meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development. It is a framework for course design, not a checklist of four activities to squeeze into every lesson.

One activity may create opportunities to communicate, notice gaps, receive feedback, and try again. Six others may offer little beyond brief encounters with language. Counting activities tells us very little about their quality.

Of course, this isn’t an argument for making every activity longer. Some deserve three minutes; others warrant twenty. Variety can serve important purposes, and students can spend a long time doing something without learning much from it.

The real question is not how many activities we should plan, but how we decide when to move on.

Has the task revealed something worth exploring? Would another attempt allow students to do something differently? Are we continuing because there is more to learn, or changing activities simply because the lesson plan says it’s time?

A full lesson plan can be a sign of thoughtful preparation. It can also hide an uncomfortable possibility: we’ve planned so much for students to do, without giving enough thought to what they might actually learn.

Sometimes, good teaching means knowing when not to turn the page.

References

Bygate, M. (2001). Effects of task repetition on the structure and control of oral language. In M. Bygate, P. Skehan, & M. Swain (Eds.), Researching pedagogic tasks: Second language learning, teaching and testing (pp. 23–48). Longman.

Nation, I. S. P. (2007). The four strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 1(1), 2–13.

Scrivener, J., & Underhill, A. (2012). What do we mean by “Demand High” teaching?. Demand High ELT.