YMTP²
Lesson Planning Strategies

  • Create dedicated time and space for class design where you can relax without distraction.

  • To help center yourself in your own experience of yoga & mindfulness, consider preparing for the planning process by doing some of the practices you most enjoy.

  • Visualize how you would like to feel at the end of your class. What are your personal teaching goals at this point in the process? Where does your teaching feel confident, well-established and easy to access? What areas are you looking to reach and grow into?

  • Visualize how you would like your students to feel as the end of your class. What are your aims for this particular lesson?

  • Consider what postures and practices might best support both your growth and process as a teacher, and also your aims for the students.

  • Practice the postures you’ve chosen to teach. Use your own experiences to highlight the aspects of the posture you feel are most essential and want to emphasize - sensations, principles of alignment, points of adjustment, etc.

  • Start with the most accessible and supported ways of doing the pose, breaking each posture and transition down into simple, clear, sequential instructions. Build variations and challenges from these foundations.

  • Decide which warm-ups best suit the postures you’ve chosen and where to place them - at the beginning of the posture flow, between poses, or within the experience of a posture.

  • Arrange postures and warm-ups so that it is easy and logical to transition from one to the next. Experiment with several different ways of arranging and transitioning.

  • Do the mindfulness and breathing practices you want to teach. Use your own experience to highlight the aspects of the posture you feel as most essential and want to emphasize - sensations, principles of alignment, points of adjustment, etc.

  • Consider where to best place mindfulness and breathing practices to support your teaching aims and the overall experience.

  • Review your materials. Create notes and key points that will help you navigate through your lesson while staying present with the students in the room.