We Are Asking Teachers to Write Instead of Teach -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.

A digital system also enables the collaboration that the Teachers Supporting Teachers Initiative is pointing toward but that a physical notebook system makes structurally impossible. When lesson plans are digital and shared on a platform accessible to all teachers in a school or a local government area, the biology teacher in Gombe who has designed an exceptional lesson plan for teaching the human cell does not need to keep that intelligence to herself while every other biology teacher in the LGA writes a less good version from scratch. The plan can be shared, adapted, and improved by every teacher who uses it. The collective intelligence of a teaching workforce that currently cannot exchange knowledge across the barrier of the physical notebook can begin to accumulate in ways that improve classroom quality for every student whose teacher has access to the shared pool.

AI-powered lesson plan tools represent the most ambitious version of this possibility and they are no longer hypothetical. Platforms like SchoolHub already offer AI lesson note generators that produce complete, curriculum-aligned lesson plans in thirty seconds from a topic input. The teacher’s role shifts from producing the document to evaluating and personalising it, which is a fundamentally more professional task than the current system demands. A teacher who uses an AI generator to produce the structural scaffolding of a lesson plan and then spends twenty minutes adapting it to the specific needs of her specific students is doing something more valuable than a teacher who spends four hours writing a structurally conforming document that she will not meaningfully use in the classroom. The twenty-minute version is better for the teacher, better for the students, and better for the system.

The objections to digitalisation in the Nigerian school context are real and they deserve honest engagement rather than dismissal. Many Nigerian public schools, particularly in rural areas and in the north, do not have reliable electricity, which makes any device-dependent system immediately problematic. Internet connectivity is inconsistent and expensive in the communities where the need is greatest. Teachers, particularly those of an older generation, vary significantly in their digital literacy and their comfort with technology-mediated workflows. These are not arguments against going digital. They are arguments for going digital in a way that accounts for the infrastructure reality, which means investing in the devices and the connectivity and the training that would make the digital system actually accessible to the teachers it is supposed to serve, rather than creating a digital system designed for Lagos that leaves out the teacher in rural Kebbi.

A phased approach that begins with urban and peri-urban schools, builds the evidence base for what digital lesson planning produces in terms of teaching quality and teacher time savings, and uses that evidence to make the case for the infrastructure investment required to extend the system to rural areas, is more realistic than a national mandate that outpaces the available infrastructure. But the phasing should be genuine and the commitment to extending access to rural teachers should be genuine, not the usual Nigerian policy pattern of urban implementation dressed as national reform.

There is a simpler and more immediate intervention that does not require any digital infrastructure at all, and that the Teachers Supporting Teachers Initiative is beginning to address: the shared lesson plan bank. If teachers within a school collaborate on lesson planning, dividing the subjects and classes between them and sharing the plans they produce, the individual burden is immediately reduced. A school with five biology teachers does not need five separate lesson plans for the same topic taught to the same level. It needs one excellent lesson plan, produced collaboratively, that each teacher can adapt to her class. SchoolHub’s own guidance notes that if three teachers of the same subject share the planning work, each writes four lesson plans per week instead of twelve. This is not a technology solution. It is a professional culture solution, a shift from the current model of isolated individual production to a collaborative model that treats the teaching workforce as a community of practice rather than a collection of individual craftspeople each reinventing the same wheel.

The school principal’s role in enabling this shift is critical and underacknowledged. The inspection culture that evaluates lesson notes for physical presence and format conformity rather than pedagogical quality is the inspection culture that the principal enforces or reforms. A principal who tells her staff that she will be evaluating lesson plans for the quality of the objectives and the appropriateness of the activities rather than for the neatness of the handwriting and the completeness of the headings is a principal who has changed the incentive structure of lesson planning in her school without waiting for a ministerial directive. These decisions are available to school leaders right now, without new funding and without new policy. They require only the professional judgment to prioritise what matters over what is merely required.

The teacher on Sunday evening who is writing instead of resting, instead of reading, instead of thinking about the student who has been struggling for three weeks and whose struggle she has not had time to analyse because she has been writing lesson notes, is a teacher who is being failed by a system that has confused the documentation of teaching with teaching itself. The document is not the lesson. The plan is not the learning. The notebook that the principal inspects on Monday morning is not the thing that determines whether the students in classroom three understand fractions or go home confused and fall further behind. The thing that determines that is the quality of the teacher’s attention, her knowledge, her responsiveness to what the class is showing her in real time. And quality attention, deep knowledge, and genuine responsiveness require time that the current lesson planning burden is consuming.

Give the teacher her Sunday back. Give her the digital tools or the collaborative structures that reduce the time she spends producing documents and increase the time she spends thinking about students. Give the principal the professional framework to evaluate teaching quality rather than notebook neatness. And give the system the honest reckoning it is overdue for: that a teacher who is writing from four to six hours a week is not a teacher who is spending four to six hours a week becoming better at teaching. She is a teacher who is spending four to six hours a week surviving an administrative demand that the students in her class will never benefit from and that the profession cannot continue to absorb without cost.

The lesson plan is a tool. It was never supposed to be the job.