How the Lesson Types Screen Defines What Your School Sells and Who Can Teach It
Published September 24, 2026
How the Lesson Types Screen Defines What Your School Sells and Who Can Teach It
Before a customer can book a lesson, before your calendar fills up, before an instructor teaches anything, someone has to answer five questions: what are you selling, how long does it take, how much does it cost, who can teach it, and who is it for? Those five answers turn into a line in your lesson types catalog, and that catalog is what your booking widget shows, what your kiosk offers, what your instructors schedule, and what your reports track.
A kiteboarding school might sell beginner privates, group lessons, foil sessions, and wingfoiling. A sailing center might offer adult keelboat, junior dinghy, racing clinics, and sunset cruises. Every one of those is a different lesson type. Same school, different product, different instructor requirements, different prices.
The lesson types screen is where that catalog gets built. It is also where you decide which instructors are allowed to teach which lessons, and whether certain lessons require certifications your team has to hold. Get the catalog wrong and you end up with a schedule full of sessions your instructors cannot actually teach, or prices that do not cover your costs, or a booking widget offering lessons you stopped running six months ago.
This piece walks through the lesson types screen: creating a new lesson type, setting fixed or hourly pricing, assigning instructors, and adding certification requirements when your school tracks credentials.
Table of Contents
What a Lesson Type Actually Defines
A lesson type is not just a name on a menu. It is the complete specification for a service your school offers, and every field on the lesson types screen controls something downstream: what the booking widget shows, what the instructor can teach, what the customer pays, and what your reports track.
Here is what gets defined on a single lesson type:
Name — what the customer sees and what shows up on the schedule
Duration — fixed length or hourly with customer choice
Base price — the starting cost for one student
Additional student pricing — flat or per-hour add-on when more than one person books
Max students — capacity cap for group lessons
Instructor eligibility — the list of instructors who can teach this lesson
Required certifications — credentials the instructor must hold, if your school tracks them
Kiosk visibility — whether this lesson appears on the walk-in catalog
Change any one of those fields and the rest of the product adjusts immediately. Set a certification requirement and only instructors who hold that credential show up as available in the booking widget. Archive the lesson type and it disappears from the public catalog. Adjust the price and every new booking uses the new number.
That means the lesson types screen is not just catalog setup. It is the control panel for what your school actually offers and who can deliver it.
Create a New Lesson Type
When your school is new, the lesson types list is empty. When you add a service, a location, or a certification path, you come back here and add a row.
From the lesson types screen, click the button to create a new type. The form asks for the basics: name, description, and whether the lesson runs for a fixed duration or bills by the hour. That choice controls what the pricing section looks like next.
Give the lesson type a name customers will recognize. "Beginner Kiteboarding Lesson" is clear. "Level 1 Introduction to Powered Flight on Water" is not. The name appears in booking confirmations, on the schedule, in reports, and on the public booking widget. If an instructor cannot tell what it is from the name alone, rewrite it.
The description is optional but useful when you have multiple similar lesson types. It shows up on the booking widget and helps customers pick the right one. A school offering both "Private Kiteboarding Lesson" and "Semi-Private Kiteboarding Lesson" should describe the difference: one instructor per student versus one instructor for two students.
Choose Fixed Duration or Custom Hourly Pricing
Lesson types come in two duration modes: fixed and custom. The choice controls how long the lesson runs, how much it costs, and what the booking widget lets the customer pick.
Fixed duration: The lesson is always the same length. A two-hour beginner kite lesson costs the same every time. You set the duration in minutes and the price as a flat amount. The booking widget does not offer duration choices; the customer books the lesson as-is.
Fixed lessons work when the service takes a predictable amount of time and the pricing does not change with length. Group classes, introductory sessions, certifications, and short experiences are usually fixed. A sailing school might offer a three-hour adult keelboat lesson for $180. That lesson is always three hours, always $180.
Custom hourly pricing: The customer picks how long they want the lesson to run, within a range you set. You define the minimum duration, the maximum duration, the interval step, and the price per hour. The booking widget shows a duration picker. A private coaching session might run anywhere from one to four hours, billed at $120 per hour. A customer booking two hours pays $240.
Hourly pricing works when customers have different goals and budgets, and the service scales cleanly by time. Private lessons, coaching, guided outings, and charters are often hourly. A fishing charter might offer trips from four to eight hours, billed at $150 per hour. A four-hour trip costs $600; an eight-hour trip costs $1,200.
The pricing mode is not something you change often. Pick the one that matches how your school actually sells the lesson, then build the rest of the catalog around it.
Set Prices for Additional Students
Most private lessons are priced for one person. When a second or third person joins, the school charges more, because the instructor is teaching more students at the same time.
The additional student pricing section controls what happens when someone books a lesson for more than one person. You set the base price for the first student, then choose how to charge for extras: a flat fee per additional person or a per-hour add-on.
Flat additional pricing: Each extra student costs a fixed amount, regardless of the lesson length. A two-hour private kite lesson costs $200 for one person. The second student adds $50. The total for two students is $250.
Per-hour additional pricing: Each extra student adds a per-hour charge. A four-hour fishing charter costs $600 for one person ($150 per hour). The second person adds $50 per hour, so the total for two people is $600 plus $200, or $800.
If the lesson type is single-student only, leave the max students field at one. The booking widget will not offer party-size options, and the additional pricing section does not matter.
When you set a max students number higher than one, the booking widget asks how many people are attending. It calculates the price using your additional student rule and shows the total before the customer confirms.
Assign Instructors to the Lesson Type
Not every instructor teaches every lesson. A kiteboarding school might have three instructors: one teaches only beginners, one teaches intermediate and advanced, and one teaches foiling and wingfoiling. The lesson types screen is where you assign instructors to the lessons they are qualified and willing to teach.
When you create a lesson type, the instructor eligibility list starts empty. An empty list means any instructor in your school can teach it. That works fine when you have one instructor or when everyone teaches everything. When your team grows or specializes, you start assigning instructors lesson by lesson.
Open the lesson type, find the instructor eligibility section, and add the instructors who should be allowed to teach it. Only those instructors will appear as available options when someone tries to book that lesson type through the widget or when an admin schedules it from the calendar.
Instructor eligibility is a yes-or-no assignment. If an instructor is on the list, they can teach the lesson. If they are not, they cannot. There is no "preferred" or "backup" status. Eligibility does not check certifications or skill level; it only filters the roster to the people you chose.
When your school tracks instructor certifications, eligibility and certification requirements work together. An instructor must be on the eligibility list and hold any required certifications to be offered for the lesson. How to Assign Instructors to Outdoor Lessons Without Guessing Who's Free covers the assignment workflow after the lesson type catalog is built.
Add Certification Requirements
Some schools track instructor certifications: credentials that prove an instructor completed a training program, passed a test, or earned a qualification from an outside organization. When your school turns on certification tracking, the lesson types screen adds a section for required certifications.
A certification requirement means the instructor must hold a current credential to teach that lesson. A kiteboarding school might require IKO Level 2 for advanced lessons. A rock climbing school might require a single-pitch instructor certification for intro climbs and a multi-pitch cert for backcountry guiding. A sailing school might require a US Sailing Basic Keelboat Instructor cert for adult lessons and a separate cert for teaching kids.
When you add a certification requirement to a lesson type, only instructors who currently hold that credential will appear as eligible in the booking widget and the admin assignment picker. An instructor who holds an expired certification or who never earned it in the first place will be filtered out, even if they are on the instructor eligibility list.
The certification catalog starts empty. Your school defines which certifications it recognizes, and instructors add their credentials to their profiles. Then you come to the lesson types screen and choose which lessons require which credentials. How Kiteboarding Schools Handle Instructor Certification and Lesson Types walks through the full certification workflow for kite schools. How Rock Climbing Schools Assign Guides Based on Certification and Route Type covers the same system for climbing guides.
When a certification expires, the instructor stops appearing as available for lessons that require it. The school gets a notification 30 days before expiration and again when it lapses. The admin can still assign the instructor manually; Seshana asks for confirmation and records the override. But the automated booking paths will not offer that instructor until the credential is renewed.
Certification requirements are optional. If your school does not track credentials, the required certifications section does not appear. If you track certifications but a lesson type does not require any, leave the requirements list empty. Zero requirements means any instructor on the eligibility list can teach it, regardless of what credentials they hold.
Mark a Lesson Type for Kiosk Walk-Ins
If your school uses the kiosk for walk-in customers, you can mark certain lesson types as kiosk-visible. Those lessons appear on the walk-in catalog screen, and staff can book them on the spot without switching to the full admin schedule.
The kiosk walk-in flow only works with fixed-duration lesson types. Hourly lessons do not appear in the kiosk catalog, even if you mark them as visible. That is because the kiosk is designed for fast, standardized bookings: a customer walks up, picks a lesson from a short list, signs a waiver, and pays. Custom duration selection slows that process down.
Not every lesson type belongs on the kiosk. A fishing charter that requires a captain, a boat, advance provisioning, and a four-hour minimum is not a walk-in product. A 30-minute intro kiteboarding lesson on a calm beach with a dedicated teaching setup might be. Mark the lesson types that make sense for same-day, no-advance-booking sales, and leave the rest off the kiosk catalog.
Archive a Lesson Type You No Longer Offer
When your school stops offering a lesson, archive the lesson type instead of deleting it. Archived lesson types disappear from the booking widget, the kiosk catalog, and the list of options when creating a new session. But they stay in the system, so old bookings, reports, and payment records still make sense.
A sailing school that offered sunset cruises last summer but decided not to run them this year should archive "Sunset Cruise" instead of deleting it. Last season's completed lessons still show up in reports with the correct lesson type name. If the school decides to bring the lesson back next year, unarchive it and the catalog entry reappears with all the same settings.
Deleting a lesson type is permanent and breaks historical records. Archive instead.
How Lesson Types Flow Into Booking and Scheduling
The lesson types screen is setup. Everything downstream depends on what you built here.
When a customer opens the booking widget, they see the list of active, non-archived lesson types. When they pick one, the widget checks instructor eligibility and certification requirements to figure out who is available. When they choose a date and time, the widget searches for instructors who are free, assigned to that lesson type, and hold any required certifications. How the Booking Widget Lets Customers Choose a Lesson, Instructor, and Time Without Calling the School explains that flow in full.
When an admin creates a lesson from the schedule, they pick the lesson type first. The duration, price, and max students fields pre-fill from the lesson type settings. The instructor picker shows everyone eligible for that lesson type, sorted by availability and certification status.
When an instructor opens their own schedule, they only see lessons they were assigned to. The lesson type name appears on every session card, so they know what they are teaching without clicking in.
When you run a revenue report, lesson types become the category breakdown. You can see how much the school made from beginner lessons versus advanced lessons, or from privates versus groups. When you run an instructor pay report, the system uses the lesson type to look up the correct pay rate if you have different rates for different services.
The lesson types screen is not the most exciting part of the product. It is also not optional. If the catalog is wrong, everything else that depends on it breaks or confuses someone. Build it carefully, keep it current, and archive anything you are not actively selling.
FAQ
Can I change a lesson type after customers have already booked it? Yes. Changes to the lesson type apply to new bookings. Existing sessions keep the settings they were created with, so adjusting a price or duration will not retroactively change completed or upcoming lessons.
What happens if I archive a lesson type that has upcoming sessions on the schedule? The lessons stay on the schedule. Archiving only removes the lesson type from the booking catalog and the admin create-session picker. It does not cancel or delete existing bookings.
Can I set different prices for the same lesson type depending on the location or the instructor? Not directly on the lesson type. The price is the same regardless of who teaches it or where it happens. If a lesson genuinely costs more at one location, create a separate lesson type with a location-specific name and price.
Do I have to assign instructors to every lesson type, or can I leave the eligibility list empty? An empty eligibility list means any instructor can teach it. That works when everyone on your team teaches everything. When you have specialists or certification requirements, assign instructors explicitly so only qualified people are offered for that lesson.
What is the difference between instructor eligibility and certification requirements? Eligibility is a manual yes-or-no list you maintain: these instructors can teach this lesson. Certification requirements are automatic filters based on credentials: only instructors who currently hold this certification can teach this lesson. Both filters apply together when they are both set.
Can a customer book a lesson type that has no available instructors? No. The booking widget only offers lesson types when at least one eligible, certified, and available instructor exists for the requested date and time. If nobody qualifies, that lesson type does not appear as an option.
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