Why don’t Indian teachers write lesson plans? What’s actually eating the time to do it

The law protects classroom time for exactly three reasons: census work, disaster relief, and elections. A government child-rights body’s own study found teachers losing four working days out of five to just one of those three during an election year.

Ananya Deshmukh | Specialist in curriculum, pedagogy, and school leadership

The case for planning a lesson before teaching it isn’t a matter of professional preference. Barak Rosenshine, drawing on three independent strands of evidence, cognitive science research on working memory, direct observation of teachers whose students made the largest gains on achievement tests, and research on cognitive scaffolding, published his Principles of Instruction in 2010: begin with a review of prior learning, present new material in small steps, model it, question students, guide practice before independent work, and revisit the material daily, weekly and monthly. None of that happens by accident inside a 40-minute period. It happens because a teacher decided, in advance, what the small steps would be.

The children who benefit most from that decision are the ones with the least structure to fall back on outside school. A 2006 paper by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark, reviewing decades of research comparing minimally guided, discovery-based teaching against explicit instruction, found that novice learners in particular do worse when left to construct understanding on their own, and do measurably better when a teacher has planned exactly what to explain, in what order, and how to check it landed. A child from a home with educated parents, books, and someone available to fill gaps in the evening can sometimes survive an unplanned lesson. A first-generation learner from a Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, or migrant family, the exact children the original evidence on this problem keeps pointing to, usually cannot. For that child, the teacher’s plan is often the only structure in the room.

Does Indian teacher training already teach this?

It does, in some detail. B.Ed programmes across India require trainee teachers to submit lesson plans as part of a mandatory school internship, typically at least 20 weeks long under NCTE norms, and teacher educators evaluate the plans on whether the objectives are measurable and the teaching methods match them. NCF 2023 pushed this further, asking lesson plans to reflect competency-based outcomes and experiential learning rather than rote content delivery, and formats like the 5E model, engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate, are now taught explicitly during training. The habit exists somewhere in almost every Indian teacher’s professional history. The question worth asking isn’t whether teachers were ever taught to plan a lesson. It’s what happens to that habit once the teacher is standing in front of a real class with a real timetable and no teacher educator checking the file.

What’s actually eating the time teachers would use to plan?

A government child-rights body’s own study found teachers on election duty spent 81 percent of their working time on that single assignment, not the specific exceptions the law was written to protect.

Section 27 of the Right to Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, is unambiguous about how far outside the classroom a teacher can legally be pulled: population census, disaster relief, and election duties, and nothing else. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights studied what actually happens during an election year and found that teachers deployed as Booth Level Officers spent 81 percent of their working time on that single task, enough that the RTE Act’s own mandated minimum of 220 academic days went unmet. That is one exception among three, consuming most of a working year by itself. The other exceptions and the duties that have grown up around them tell a similar story. In October 2025, close to two lakh government school teachers across Karnataka were pulled out of their classrooms over the Dussehra break to conduct a door-to-door caste census running to 60 questions per household. Maharashtra’s official academic calendar for 2025-26 lists around 15 separate non-teaching tasks a month, from uploading student data to coordinating government schemes, on top of regular teaching. One researcher’s tally, cited in reporting on the issue, put the total number of distinct non-academic duties Indian government teachers are routinely asked to perform at 23. In 2026, the Delhi High Court, hearing a case about teachers deployed for the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, directed the Commission to remain conscious of the physical and mental toll on teachers already working six to eight hours a day in school, citing both Section 27 and the Supreme Court’s own precedent in Election Commission of India vs St. Mary’s School. Courts keep having to say this because it keeps happening anyway.

What to do

Count your school’s actual lost teaching days from the last academic term against the RTE Act’s 220-day minimum, and put the gap in writing rather than absorbing it as background noise.

Use a minimum lesson structure, even a simple version of Rosenshine’s small-steps-plus-guided-practice model, as the floor for every lesson rather than none at all, since the children who most need that structure are usually the ones a school can least afford to teach on improvisation.

Protect one fixed block of time each week specifically for planning, and defend it with the same seriousness a school already gives to exam duty or inspection visits, since unprotected time reliably loses to whatever duty shows up first.

Check whether the lesson-planning habit built during B.Ed training, the 5E model or its equivalent, is actually still in use in your own classroom, or whether it quietly stopped the day the internship file was submitted.

Document the pattern rather than the single incident. A single day pulled for election duty is unavoidable under the law; a specific number of weeks lost every year to duties the RTE Act never authorised is the kind of pattern NCPCR only found because someone measured it, and a headmaster or education office can only act on numbers that get written down.

Sources: Barak Rosenshine, “Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know,” American Educator (2012) · Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work,” Educational Psychologist (2006) · Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, Section 27 · National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, “Involvement of Teachers in Non-Teaching Activities and its Effect on Education” · National Council for Teacher Education, B.Ed programme norms and internship requirements · National Curriculum Framework 2023 · Maharashtra Department of School Education, academic calendar 2025-26 · Delhi High Court, order on teacher deployment for Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls (2026) · Election Commission of India vs St. Mary’s School, Supreme Court of India