Lesson planning is one of the first teaching skills most people learn — but let’s face it, horseback riding instructors are pretty good at winging it. You have to be, when your business partner is a 1000 lb. prey animal! If you’ve been teaching for a while, your skills have probably been honed to the point where you can improvise lessons for several weeks and your students are none the wiser.
But constantly making lessons up as you go isn’t the most sustainable business practice.
Your students have goals, and they need faith in your plan for achieving them. Over the long term, unplanned lessons can lack focus and make it difficult to measure progress.
Think of each lesson as a stepping stone that takes your student to their goal. While side quests are occasionally necessary, and can be a lot of fun, you need to make sure there is always a stepping stone path heading in the right direction. Otherwise, you may fail to deliver on the promise that led your students to sign up for lessons, leaving them frustrated and dissatisfied.
That’s a pretty important reason to lesson plan — and this practice also benefits YOU.
Consistent lesson planning reduces arena resets, helps you balance school horse workload, and cuts down on time spent recordkeeping
Even better, it takes a BIG load off your brain. You can do your best creative thinking ONCE, allowing your future self to relax and focus on adapting to current circumstances. We all have bad days, and when you are tired/sick/overwhelmed/cranky it can be a tremendous relief knowing that your past self already did the planning and set you up for success.
That’s why you NEED to schedule uninterrupted thinking time for both lesson planning and pre-lesson reflection.
(You can do this at any time — but there’s no better time than the beginning of a new year!)
Learn the rules so you can break them
When we talk about lesson planning, we’re actually talking about two separate and very different practices:
#1 - Creating a complete outline of a single lesson
This is the most common way to use the term “lesson plan” and it’s a very important skill to have.
A formal plan includes, at a minimum:
- the lesson objective
- pre-lesson preparation and arena setup
- a warm-up sequence and review of previous skills
- an introduction to new material
- practice and application of the new skill
- an opportunity for review
You might find it helpful to include notes on horse use, mid-lesson break and the timing of each section of the lesson.
The structure of these lesson plans encourages creativity and ensures that you are delivering thoughtful, quality lessons without skipping important steps. Unfortunately, they can be pretty time-consuming to create.
If you teach with a levels-based curriculum, a good goal is to develop and test lesson plans for every objective and every Level. Over time, you’ll have a collection of tried-and-true lessons that can be used and adapted by any instructor, allowing you to teach each Level with a cohesive, streamlined system.
But getting to that point is not a quick process.
This is why we created our library of lesson plans for you!
As of Nov 2025, our Resource Center includes almost 400 detailed lesson plans for our mounted Horsemanship and HorseCentered groundwork lessons. These are proven lessons we’ve used for years and contain additional games, teaching tips and suggestions for modification, making them easy for you to adapt to your unique lesson program.
For actual, practical, day-to-day lesson planning, we recommend you practice an alternative method:
#2 - Creating one-sentence prompts in a checklist format
Checklists are quick, easy, portable, and double as a record of the lessons you ACTUALLY teach.
They allow you to create your stepping stone path in just a few minutes, with each simple sentence prompting your brain to fill in the blanks. If you’re teaching solo, or with a experienced team who is familiar with your curriculum, lists are probably all you need to stay on track.
This practice has allowed us to plot out 8-16 weeks of lessons for up to 50 students in a single scheduled admin day. We can’t even begin to tell you how good it feels to achieve that level of organization!
The secret to lesson planning success
You aren’t going to do any of this planning unless you make it a priority.
And you’re a LOT more likely to make it a priority if you make it fun!
We turn lesson planning into a special occasion. It gets a regular spot on the schedule, the phone goes on Do Not Disturb, and we get a decadent coffee shop treat. Since we do big quarterly planning sessions — cutting down on the amount of time we have to spend on pre-lesson preparation week to week — the process is actually something we look forward to for months.
This starts with a mindset shift: understanding that as an instructor, thoughtful lesson planning is PART OF YOUR JOB.
Your students are counting on your knowledge, experience and creativity. And that starts with giving your brain the time and space to do its best work.
Power up your planning
Over 20 (!) years of teaching horsemanship, we’ve developed a lot of tricks for making lesson planning an efficient process.
Interestingly, these time-saving strategies seem to help us create lessons that are effective, creative, and keep our students coming back for more. We’ve had multiple students leave for other barns, then return to our program a few months later, saying that the other lessons were “so boring” and that they looked forward to our lessons because they knew the exercises would be fun, fresh and challenging. No higher compliment!
Here are just three of our favorite ways to craft connected, meaningful and enjoyable lessons:
1
Divide and conquer
Rather than trying to teach Levels objectives on a case-by-case basis, with every student working on different tasks, we divide each Level into four sections and just focus on those objectives in each quarter.
This prevents instructor overwhelm and ensures that committed students will make steady, consistent progress through the curriculum.
Sure, opportunities to check off other skills will come up organically, and occasional exceptions might be necessary for students who are leaving your program mid-year or trying to Level Up at an accelerated pace. But generally, we find this process rewards our consistent students and makes lesson planning SO much simpler!
Teaching Levels skills at a slower pace also allows us to work with the seasons instead of against them, focusing on skills that work best for the weather and footing. It makes space for necessary repetition— and some fun seasonal or holiday-themed games!
2
Build around a theme
One of our favorite tricks is to assign each month a loose theme. Themes can take place entirely in the arena, where you might teach several weeks of lessons based around position, riding patterns or dressage tests, polework, coursework, bending, lateral steps or riding in the open. Breaking each skill into small, digestible pieces improves retention and allows your students to gain valuable repetition. Several weeks of progressive lessons can culminate in a fun game that puts their skills to the test!
You can also use themes to direct unmounted lessons and clinics, with monthly topics such as Pony Parts & Anatomy, Nutrition, Preventative Health Care and more. This makes it easy to prepare lesson materials and to teach big topics such as nutrition or hoof care in depth. Working unmounted knowledge into mounted lessons? You can still use themes to effectively teach HorseSense topics in cohesive, bite-sized pieces that take just five minutes of an hour-long lesson.
More reasons why themes work for us:
- They allow us to set the arena each week and use it for every lesson with minimal adjustment. Someday we’re going to invent a robot that builds and breaks down arena setups, but in the meantime, we’re all for reducing the amount of precious time spent dragging around heavy equipment.
- They cut down on planning time. If we already know what the main goal and exercise is each week, all we have to do is tweak it to suit the individual student or class. This can be particularly valuable if you have multiple instructors working for you and you want everyone on the same page.
- They give students of all levels a common goal and shared experience. We like to hear barn chatter about how each rider tackled the Snowman Poles, or what their horse did during the Tournament of Chivalry.
- They improve attendance. Students eagerly anticipate the reveal for each month’s theme. And your students may be less likely to skip weeks if you’re teaching lessons in a series or a sequence leading up to a fun challenge.
3
Crowdsource your lessons
Frequently ask your students what they would like to see happen in their lessons. We might be the “Authority with a Plan” in the arena, but at the end of the day, our job is really just to help our students achieve their horsey dreams. This means the more often we check in with their plans and dreams, the better!
During regularly-scheduled goal setting sessions, we ask our students to list their long-term goals, their intentions for the next year, and the activities they enjoy the most. These sheets give us valuable insight into what interests and motivates our students — and they occasionally contain some surprises!
If you’re teaching a group lesson, you might choose one lesson a month and allow students to take turns choosing the topic. More advanced students can outline a progressive lesson span covering several months, with your promise that you’ll incorporate their ideas as much as possible.
Thoughtful lesson planning can take a bit of time and some creative effort
But it saves time in the long run, and will help you walk into the arena confident that you’ve done everything you can to help your students succeed.
Yes, you might revise your lesson plans a dozen times over the course of a year — but they will keep you moving in the right direction!
Would you like a book with over a hundred student-approved mounted games… with arena diagrams, equipment checklists and variations for private lessons? You’re in luck: THE BIG BOOK OF GAMES ON HORSEBACK is available in paperback through Amazon, or you can purchase a PDF version directly from us!
Amazon reviewers say it’s an “amazing resource,” “an absolutely brilliant book” and “a 10 out of 10,” among other really nice things.
