According to CDIO, the main goal of teaching is to help learners achieve expected learning outcomes after completing their courses. To accomplish this goal and meet CDIO standard 8, it is very important for teaching and learning to be based on active learning approaches and for teachers to develop appropriate lesson plans. The more elaborate a lesson plan is and the more clearly-defined goal-related activities are, the more successful the teaching process will be. In this paper, we introduce a model for designing lesson plans called CARD, which has four steps including Context, Activity, Reflection, and Documentation. This model enables learners to use personal knowledge and experience to connect with and reflect on new content and thus promotes active learning, participation in learning activities as well as learner creativity by encouraging them to generate new ideas and create new products. Therefore, CARD is very significant for teachers to design and arrange learning activities to help learners achieve expected learning outcomes. With the real experience of applying CARD in teaching at Thu Dau Mot University (TDMU), Vietnam, in this paper, we present and analyze the strengths of CARD, explain why this model helps learners to easily attain the expected learning outcomes, and demonstrate that the model is appropriate for developing learners’ creativity. Then, we illustrate with detailed examples to prove the effectiveness of the model in supporting CDIO standard 8.
