Targeted Teaching

Strategies for secondary teaching

Tremaine Baker, Gareth Evers, Richard Brock

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526412089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Sekundarschulbildung

There is no single best approach in teaching. This new text challenges the idea that there is a ?best way? to teach. Instead, the authors explain, a more pragmatic approach is required. Teachers need a range of skills and strategies to select from, work with and adapt. Every school, cohort, class and child is different. Beyond that, strategies that worked well with a class one week, may prove ineffective the next. This book:

• presents a range of strategies, well grounded in research, for trainees and beginning teachers to use in their own classroom settings and contexts
• presents a model of teaching that views teaching not as a profession in which there is always a single correct answer, but as a complex interaction between teacher and students
• addresses common issues that beginning teachers face when developing their practice

If you are a teacher wanting to find out what works best for your class, in your school, right now, this text will show you how to harness the power of small or large scale research to help you find the answer.

1 Lesson Planning

Teachers' Standard 4 – Plan and Teach Well-structured Lessons

This section aims to support you in establishing strategies to plan lessons that encourage learning. However, the overarching nature of planning does mean that targets can overlap with other standards, such as those relevant to the following.

• Planning for progress (TS2).
• Developing your subject knowledge for teaching (TS3).
• Planning for differentiation (TS5), assessment (TS6), or behaviour (TS7).

Introduction

Planning a lesson is rather like planning a journey, which starts by establishing where you want to go. Invariably, there will be a number of routes you could take to arrive at your final destination and there are a range of different modes of transport to help you get there. Sometimes you might take the shortest route, at other times you might choose a more leisurely route allowing your passengers to soak up the countryside. Alternatively, you might take a detour to a place of significant interest, allowing the lesson to drift into unplanned but fascinating territory. Essentially, your aim is to always ensure that passengers arrive at their final destination but, given the range of options available, you need to know your passengers very well and work on planning the best route for them, so you don't lose any on the way.

Seen in this way, planning is fundamental to all aspects of teaching, learning and assessment. This might seem daunting, and will no doubt raise a number of questions: How will I know what to teach my students? What are the best activities to support learning? How can I ensure that all students are suitably challenged and supported in the lesson? However, lesson planning is the means by which you will be able to address these questions, and thereby allay any fears you may have. Time spent on planning (though quite substantial in the first few months of your training year) is time well spent in the long term. Proper classroom planning will act as a tool to help you organise yourself, plan for the unexpected and ensure that your lessons are clearly focused on learning.

You will find that planning is a constantly evolving process and, although it is cognitively challenging, by beginning in a very structured way you will soon develop the confidence and ability to deal with the more complex aspects of lesson planning. The quick wins below will help you on this journey and support you in beginning to develop your practice, and the slow burners will allow you to become an expert practitioner who uses planning to support all aspect of teaching, learning and assessment in your classroom.

Targets

What targets does this chapter cover?

• Plan lessons with a clear learning aim.
• Order and structure your planned learning activities more effectively, to ensure there is a clear sequence and flow to the lesson.
• Widen the range of teaching strategies and resources you use to support learners.
• Expand the range of approaches you use for starters and plenaries to ensure lessons begin and end effectively.
• Ensure you appropriately plan the timing of activities to maximise learning.
• Plan appropriate homework activities, which are designed to sustain learners' progress and consolidate their learning.
• Develop your longer-term planning to ensure progress and learning over time.

Issues in Planning

I will always remember my earliest attempts at planning. As a trainee teacher I would spend hours trying to think through the lesson plan and searching for exciting and engaging activities. I would look on enviously at my fellow trainees, who all seemed to have a creative knack (which I lacked) for designing exciting lessons with ease. For me, the important shift was to move my focus away from myself as the teacher and on to the students and their learning; I began to think of ‘they’ rather than ‘I’ when planning lessons. Indeed, since then, I have observed countless lessons where the teacher puts on a great show; where there is a lively buzz around the classroom; where students are busy completing worksheets or undertaking tasks which the trainee has clearly spent hours designing. Yet, on reflection, I am unable to pinpoint the concrete learning which has taken place as a result of the lesson. By concrete learning I mean the learning that is planned, so that students are able to walk out of a lesson knowing or being able to do something new; what Trevor Wright (2010, p13) refers to as a small, valuable, solid object. Instead, the trainee has become so focused on keeping students busy and putting on a show for the observer, by trying to cram in evidence for all the standards in one lesson, that they miss the point: planning is first and foremost about helping students to learn, not about you as the teacher.

Key Learning Point

When planning lessons, ensure you are focused on the students and their learning, rather than on your own actions and behaviour. Although it might help you to consider your own role in the classroom, this should always be secondary to two key questions.

1. What are the students going to do?
2. How will this support their learning?

For many of you who are just starting out on your journey into teaching, the easiest starting point is to focus on the objectives of the lesson. For each and every activity in the lesson you should be clear on why you are doing it, and how it will develop student learning, with regard to the objective.

In the examples below, a video clip is introduced in very different ways. In itself, a video is an effective way to introduce new concepts, reinforce existing learning or just re-engage and motivate students. However, too often I see lessons where the trainee has not really considered the purpose of showing the clip, or clearly articulated this to students, as with Scenario A. The outcome: students see a nice video clip, but an opportunity is missed to support concrete learning. In contrast, the teacher in Scenario B has been clear to clarify what is expected from students and the purpose of the activity.

Real Life Scenario

Scenario A

Teacher: Here is a short video about the Ford car company and how they operate.

Scenario B

Teacher: I am going to show you a short video and I want you to note down as many methods as you can that the company adopts to ensure that the quality of its cars are maintained. This should give us a good idea of the quality control methods that some businesses use when producing their products.

Planning therefore enables you to consider and share with students the purpose of an activity and how it will help their learning, relevant to the objectives. It will also help you to weigh up alternative activities or resources to meet a learning objective. I often ask trainees, ‘Why did you choose to do that activity, and what was the purpose?’, or the more loaded question, ‘What would have been a better activity for that objective?’ In planning, you should be prepared to answer these questions yourself, because a key part of your early development is to acquire a pedagogical rationale for the routes you take when planning a lesson.

Planning, in its simplest sense, can be broken down into four stages (Butt, 2008; John, 1995) which begins with the purpose of the lesson, in setting out clear learning objectives (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 You should be aware of the four key stages and the cyclical process of planning (based on John, 2006, p486)

In planning your learning journey, there are many pro-forma lesson plans which are available to you. Pro-formas will help provide a clear rational-linear framework for planning lessons (Tyler, 1950), either through your training institute or on the Internet. Carefully completing these in the early stages of your planning will undoubtedly give you support, and provide a crutch to help you to take the first few steps in mastering the basics of lesson planning. However, like all crutches, you will soon need to put these aside and try to walk on your own. This does not mean binning the pro-forma or disregarding planning altogether. Instead, once you have got to grips with the simplicity of planning lessons around a clear learning objective, it will allow you to engage with the more intellectually and creatively challenging aspects of planning, which considers deeper aspects of subject pedagogy.

Therefore, while it is important not to overly complicate things in the early stages of your teaching career, it is also important not to underestimate the conceptual complexity of planning. Some of you may regard planning as a mere procedural process, which is focused on the organisation of teaching, and the management of learning in a classroom (Rusznyak and Walton, 2011). Indeed, you might see planning as a laborious and long-winded practice in which you are asked to meticulously record the context to the lesson, assessment opportunities, the needs of students in your class, or behavioural issues, to name but a few. However, it is important for you to understand that planning, at least in your early years of teaching, is a combination of both practicalities, in organising the logistics of the lesson, and pedagogy, in deciding how best to teach the subject matter of the lesson. This will help you to see it as a pedagogical construction, which emphasises not just ‘what students are going to do’ but also ‘why they are going to do it’.

Key Learning Point

You should be clear that it is the process of planning, rather than the plan itself, which is important.

It is rather like learning to swim. Being pushed off the 4m board and expecting you to confidently swim, or even keep your head above water, is unlikely to work. Instead, you will need to start with a range of floating aids, and expert guidance, in helping you to negotiate the paddling pool. While this might restrict your movement and freedom, it will give you the confidence to hone your planning skills before you are ready to take th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 Lesson Planning
• 2 Behaviour Management
• 3 Pace
• 4 Teaching and Modelling
• 5 Questioning
• 6 Assessment
• 7 Feedback
• 8 Differentiation
• Index