By Stephen Sunday Laabes
The lesson plan is supposed to be a tool for better teaching. In Nigeria, it has become a bureaucratic burden that consumes the time and energy that teaching actually requires.
Picture a teacher on a Sunday evening. Not resting. Not spending time with family. Not reading anything that would deepen her knowledge of the subject she teaches or the students she teaches it to. She is writing. She is writing the same document she wrote last Sunday and the Sunday before that, in the same format, for the same five classes she will teach this week that she taught last week, covering topics that are different but require the same painstaking structure: the subject, the class, the topic, the subtopic, the date, the duration, the behavioural objectives, the instructional materials, the entry behaviour, the set induction, the presentation steps, the evaluation, the summary, the assignment. Five classes. Five complete lesson notes. Written by hand, in most cases, in a dedicated notebook that the school principal will inspect on Monday morning to confirm that the teacher has done her administrative duty.
This is the reality of teaching in Nigeria. Not the romantic version of a dedicated professional igniting young minds, though those moments exist and matter. The daily, grinding, administratively intensive reality of a profession that has been buried under paperwork to the point where the paperwork has become the job and the teaching has become what you do in the time remaining. Research by SchoolHub, an education technology platform that works with Nigerian schools, found that Nigerian teachers spend between four and six hours every week on lesson plan preparation alone. For a teacher managing five classes, that is four to six hours of writing documents before she has marked a single book, attended a single meeting, prepared a single instructional material, or thought deeply about a student who is struggling and why. It is four to six hours consumed by the administrative performance of preparation rather than by preparation itself.
The lesson plan, in principle, is a genuinely useful thing. A teacher who has thought carefully about what she wants students to know by the end of a lesson, what prior knowledge they bring to it, how she will introduce the concept, how she will check whether they have understood it, and what she will do if they have not, is a more effective teacher than one who walks into the classroom with only the textbook and her experience. The research on lesson planning is clear and consistent: structured preparation improves teaching quality, particularly for less experienced teachers who are still developing the classroom instincts that veteran teachers carry automatically. The lesson plan is not the problem.
The problem is what the Nigerian school system has made of the lesson plan. It has transformed a tool for thinking into a tool for compliance. The lesson note in most Nigerian schools is not primarily evaluated for the quality of the pedagogical thinking it contains. It is evaluated for its physical presence, its format conformity, its neatness, and the regularity with which it has been produced. A principal conducting a lesson note inspection is, in most cases, checking that the correct headings are present, that the handwriting is legible, and that the pages are filled. Whether the lesson plan reflects genuine and useful pedagogical thinking, whether it is adapted to the specific needs of the specific students in the specific class it was written for, whether it would actually help a teacher teach better, these questions are rarely asked and rarely answerable from the inspection of the physical notebook.
The consequence of this inspection culture is entirely predictable. Teachers who understand that the lesson note is being evaluated for form rather than substance produce lesson notes optimised for form rather than substance. They learn the correct headings. They fill the correct sections. They produce documents that satisfy the inspector and bear minimal relationship to what they will actually do in the classroom. Teachers who have been teaching the same subjects for years, who know the curriculum deeply and can adapt their teaching instinctively to what the class needs on a given day, are spending Sunday evenings writing documents that capture none of that knowledge and serve none of their students’ needs. The document is being produced because the document is required. The teaching happens despite the document, not because of it.
The structural absurdity becomes most visible when you consider what a teacher with five classes is actually being asked to do. Five classes means five different groups of students, each at a different level, each with its own dynamics, each presenting its own specific challenges. Five lesson plans per week, written from scratch in the traditional format, would take even a fast and experienced writer four to six hours at minimum. But the teacher is not only writing lesson plans. She is also marking the assignments and exercises from those five classes, which is its own enormous time commitment in a system where class sizes regularly exceed fifty students. She is attending staff meetings. She is managing the administrative demands of the school system that do not begin and end with lesson notes. She is, in many cases, dealing with the specific logistical challenges of a poorly resourced school environment that requires improvisation and problem-solving that no lesson plan accommodates.
And she is doing all of this, in many cases, while not having been paid in two months. The teacher who has not been paid, who is managing her own household’s financial stress alongside the professional demands of five classes, is being asked to find four to six hours per week to write documents that the inspector will check and the students will never see. This is not a recipe for professional flourishing. It is a recipe for exactly the kind of burnout and disengagement that the Nigerian teaching profession is producing at scale, and the lesson plan burden is one of its most specific and most addressable contributors.
Last week, Nigeria’s Minister of Education moved to address exactly this problem through the Teachers Supporting Teachers Initiative, which aims to standardise lesson plans and reduce the burden on teachers by minimising the time spent on preparing daily lesson notes, allowing them to give a greater message with added interaction, learner engagement, creativity, and assessment. The minister stated that standardised lesson plans would promote equality by ensuring that learners, whether in urban centres or in the remotest communities, have access to comparable quality of instruction. This is the right direction. The acknowledgement that the lesson plan burden is a structural problem requiring a structural solution is itself an important step, because for too long the conversation has framed the problem as individual teacher capacity rather than as a system design failure.
But the standardised lesson plan initiative, as welcome as it is, addresses only one dimension of the problem, and not necessarily the most important one. A standardised lesson plan that is still a physical document, still written by hand, still inspected for format conformity, still produced weekly for each class by each individual teacher, has reduced the cognitive burden of designing the format without addressing the time burden of producing the document. The deeper solution requires going digital, not as a technology enthusiasm but as a genuine reimagining of how lesson planning works in a system that is trying to do more than its current resources make possible.
Going digital with lesson planning would produce specific and measurable benefits that address the specific and measurable problem the current system creates. A digital lesson plan can be created once and adapted rather than written from scratch each time a topic is repeated across classes or across academic years. A teacher who spent four hours creating a thorough digital lesson plan for JSS 2 mathematics in 2025 should, in 2026, be able to retrieve that plan, update it to reflect what she learned from teaching it, and deploy it in thirty minutes rather than four hours. The savings across a career are enormous. The quality of the plan, built and refined over years of teaching experience rather than recreated weekly under time pressure, would be immeasurably better.
Stephen Sunday Laabes is a Public Affairs Analyst.
