Do You Need to Make Your Own CFI Lesson Plans?

Somewhere between the commercial checkride and the start of CFI training, somebody breaks the news: you need a binder full of lesson plans, one for every task you might be asked to teach. Then you price out the hours and your stomach drops. So it is worth asking the question most applicants only ask themselves. Do you actually need to make your own?

No. You do not. What you need is to teach well from a lesson plan you understand. Those are different skills, and the checkride grades the second one.

The checkride tests teaching, not arts and crafts

The CFI ACS is a teaching test. The examiner wants to see whether you can explain a maneuver to someone who has never flown it and catch the mistakes a student is about to make. A lesson plan is the tool that keeps that lesson on the rails, from objective to completion standards. Nobody is grading the font.

We covered what the ACS actually requires from a lesson plan in a separate post. The short version: a plan needs certain elements, and your instruction has to follow it. Where the plan came from is not on the list.

In practice, applicants land on one of three approaches, and the tradeoffs are real.

Option 1: Build every plan yourself

The purist route. You sit down with the handbooks and the ACS and write every lesson from scratch.

Here is the honest case for it: nothing teaches you the material, and the flow of the material, like building it by hand. You know exactly why each element is there because you put it there. In a perfect world, every instructor would do this.

Here is the honest case against it: flight instruction is a seniority business. The sooner you hold the certificate, the sooner you start instructing and logging the hours that move you up whatever list you are trying to climb. Hundreds of hours spent polishing slides is time most applicants simply do not have. Perfect world, meet real world.

Option 2: Buy good plans and make them your own

This is the hybrid route, and it is the one we actually recommend.

Start with a set from a trusted source that tracks the ACS exactly, so the required elements and completion standards are already right. Then make the plans yours. Swap in your own photos. Reorder slides until each lesson flows the way you actually explain it, and cut anything you would never say out loud.

You save the hundreds of hours, and you still walk into the checkride with plans you know inside and out, because you rebuilt every one of them around your own personality and teaching style. That editing pass is where most of the learning from Option 1 happens anyway, at a fraction of the cost.

Our Lesson Plan Library was built for exactly this: a complete ACS-aligned set you are meant to mark up and rearrange until it teaches like you, not a museum piece.

Option 3: Teach straight from bought plans

Some people take a purchased set and change nothing. That can work. It is fine as long as you know your material extremely well and can teach at a very high level from a structure someone else designed.

The catch is that the structure is not yours. If a lesson unfolds in an order you would not naturally teach, you will feel it mid-lesson, and so will the examiner. Take this route only if you are genuinely confident in your teaching, not as a shortcut around weak knowledge.

Make one anyway

Whichever option you pick, build at least one complete lesson plan from scratch, start to finish.

Lesson planning is not just prep work. It sits inside the fundamentals of instruction, which means it is subject matter you can be asked to teach on the checkride. That conversation goes very differently when you have actually done the thing. Build one, keep it in the front of the binder, and let it be the worked example you teach from when the topic comes up.

The bottom line

You do not need to hand-build a full set of lesson plans to pass the CFI checkride, and the examiner is not grading your graphic design. Build them all if you have the time and want the depth. Buy a quality set and make it your own if you want the balance most applicants need. Teach from them untouched only if your knowledge can carry it. And whatever you choose, make one yourself.

If the hybrid route sounds like your speed, the Lesson Plan Library lives in our course lineup, and the free demo shows how the rest of the program teaches before you spend a dollar.