The pre-service teachers are people, who teach in the class, but they are trained to become real teachers in designing and implementing the lesson plan. The focus of this research was to find out the challenges faced by pre-service teachers in designing lesson plan and the strategies to overcome the challenges in teaching and learning process. This research was conducted at English Language Education Department of a private university in Yogyakarta. This research employed qualitative method and used descriptive qualitative research as research design to present the research finding. The participants of this research were three students of batch 2014 at one of private university in Yogyakarta. Besides, the researcher used interview to collect the information. The finding of this research showed the challenges in designing lesson plan and strategies to overcome the challenges in designing lesson plan that pre-service teachers faced in teaching process. Therefore, there were five challenges in designing lesson plan namely deciding learning method, not knowing the classroom situation, developing learning materials, managing the time allocation, and developing lesson plan. Additionally, there were also four strategies in designing the lesson plan based on the interview such as finding the material from many resources, rechecking the lesson plan, predicting the time allocation, and asking other people.