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Airman
If your not doing the flying your a passenger, not a student pilot. From your intro flight on you will be doing all the work... Perhaps a few minutes will be of the instructor demonstrating things, but other than that, you will be doing the flying. Generally speaking each lesson is broken into three phases: briefing, flight, de-briefing. Cockpits don't make good classrooms, so much of the new information will be introduced during the briefing covering concepts such as flight procedures, radio coms, aircraft performance, aeromedical factors, etc. Then you go out and apply what you learned on the ground. Finally, you finish with a thorough de-brief which will review all aspects of the flight (good, bad, and ugly), and usually wrap up with a review of what will happen next lesson and information you need to study as part of your ground school.
Chances are that you will be provided with a very detailed syllabus so that you know fully what to expect and how to pace your bookwork. Depending on your instructor if you don't keep up with the book work you will spend a lot more money with him/her teaching the stuff you can learn yourself with the provided study material. I've had some that just cancel the flight if I'm behind ball on the bookwork.
All your study material may be purchased as a kit, including a textbook or two, plus FAA written study guides with the entire question bank that the FAA may use. The written isn't too bad, especially considering the previous sentence I wrote. Once you get that done and have met all other requirements, you will have to take a check-ride which consists of two parts: oral exam, and practical test. The oral exam consists of the designated examiner asking you all sorts of questions which may include ANY topic within PPL certificate. He/she will look over your flight plan, aircraft/pilot documents, weather information, and anything else they may deem significant. May range from one hour up to five. Once that is done the real fun begins and you get to demonstrate that you're a safe and competent pilot by demonstrating all of the private pilot maneuvers. It may be comforting to know that as long as you're still going through the test you're passing. He/she will stop it when you've made a mistake and need to come back later.
Examiners may be intimidating but are generally pretty pleasant folks. The SE I had for my private pilot check ride was a former Sled Driver with some 400 hours above Mach 3. I kind of botched my short field landing demonstration on an 8,000 foot runway but since he knew I did almost all of my training out of a 1,700 foot strip gave me the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, not too bad of an experience. Now the real nail biter was my instrument check ride.
Best of luck on your new endeavor. Keep us posted on how things work out.