Making a Lesson plan for my Club

I want to help the people at my club get better, so I'm making a powerpoint to teach people chess. However we only meet 36 times a year, and we only have ~50 minutes, so I don't want to take up more than 10 minutes each meeting giving my lesson. The members of my club have a huge range in skill (ranging from <600-2100). So what I'm wondering is, what should my 36 lessons be, assuming I want the lessons to be useful to most members?

Right now I have

1. The Rules

2. Basic Opening Principles

3. Basic Endgames

4. Forks, Pins, X-Rays

Why you have only 50 minutes should be looked at.  That is not enough time to play.  You could have a 2pm or so start on the weekend and whoever shows up shows up.  If some come at 5pm, then they play and anyone else there could play too.  They could finish one game and then take a break for a new group to be formed.

Since you mentioned a rating range of 600 and 2100, I would put them into into different groups of under 1000, under 1700 and then I guess under 2300.  This way you aren't explaining the rules to 1500+ players who already know.  They can use the 10 minutes for something else.

So this is what I have now. Does it look good?

1. The Rules

2. Basic Opening Principles

3. Basic Endgames

4. Forks, Pins, X-Rays

5. Pawn Structure

6. Basic Mating Patterns

7. Basic Attacking

8. Basic Defending

9-12. Various Openings

13. Zwischenzug

14. Desperados

15. Endgame Tactics

16. The Center (Attacking and Controlling)

17. Windmill

18. Double Attacks

19. Counterattacks

20. Forcing Attacks

21-36. Tactic Puzzles

(Not Necessarily in this Order)

I'm an officer in a college chess club, and we have decided to take the following approach:

We focus on one "theme" for the entire semester and and we try to tie everything back to that one theme. Our them last semester was piece development/mobility.

We do something instructional every other week, usually for about half an hour (10 mins is really not much time). 

Some of our exercises include playing a random opening from a hat (and discussing which pieces were more likely to be "better" or "worse" out of the opening by context of mobility), tactics day, team chess, chess960, and the like. Team chess was usually the most popular learning experience, but of course that takes up the entire meeting so we don't do it that often.

What you seem to be trying to do is just like a 10 minute "theory" lesson. Since these tend to be very general, elementary, and brief, they don't usually help anyone over 1000-1200. Formatting the lessons as practice allows everyone to work at their own level.

Just my two cents. 

Sounds good if you want to cover each in 16.5 seconds or less (assuming you are going for that 10 minute cram session). 

Why not just pick a weekend and people come anytime they can, like it is a library.  Put up stations, one station has openings, another pawn structure, another tactics, etc...

Then people can choose what to spend time on.  Instead of using 10 minutes to lecture (snooze alert) have people point out things they learned at one of the stations.  This could be at the end of the day or in the middle so others can go to a station after hearing about it.

It's a high school chess club so we can't meet outside of school and school policy prevents us from meeting more than once a week. And learnthegoodmoves, it is 36 lessons over the course of 36 weeks, 10 minutes each week. Also, 9thEagle, thanks, lots of helpful info

Ok, now that you have clarified this isn't a public event but a school event, isn't there an adult supervisor?  Maybe not a coach, but someone willing to look after the group?  Normally school ends around 3-3:30 and students have after school events.  You could have a room with boards and students can come when they have time.

To try to get people to come 36 times for 10 minutes is a lot to expect.  Why not pre-record a 10 minute lesson and students can access that at home, then they come to a room with boards to practice what they saw.  This might be more effective.  You only need 2 people to play, but if you make everyone come at the same time, they are likely to quit due to scheduling conflicts.

Recording the lessons is an interesting idea, but I don't think many people in my club are dedicated enough to learn outside of the club, which is why I want to do the lessons at the club (There are much better lessons online than the ones I can provide). Unfortunately we set the club up in a math classroom after school, so we are strictly limited to after school.

Well first, congratulations on having a 2100 high school player.

Second, have you tried meeting outside of school? When I ran my high school chess club, I definately remember those times when we couldn't really meet because of school (Standardized Testing week, finals week, holidays...) so what we would do was meet at a local pizza place after standard lunch hours. The owners were cool with it because it's not like we're taking up tables that other customers want to use, and we could stay from 2:30 to about 5:30. As long as everyone bought a drink, or someone bought a large pizza and we all split it, the owners were just glad to get a few extra customers.

We even meet there a couple times during the summer (not every week, because then nobody would come).

You might try finding a place like that? You might also try to convince your administration to let you have a chess tournament over the weekend.

My last comment is this: sometimes people just want to play to have fun. They don't want to have organized learning. Of course, it's always helpful to come by and offer a little specific advice on the game they're playing, and team chess is both fun and instructive. Just remember that if people aren't learning on their own outside of the club, it's probably because they don't care that much. Which is perfectly fine.

Alright, those are all really good ideas. I'll run them by the rest of the officers and see what they think. Thanks!