Lesson Planning

Key concepts and skills for teachers

Jonathan Savage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317656524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Lesson planning is an essential component of every teacher's practice. It is part of a three-tiered, integrated pedagogy: planning, teaching and evaluation. Drawing on the work of skilful teachers and the latest research, this book provides a rationale for lesson planning as an integral part of a teacher's work. It introduces the key concepts and skills of lesson planning and provides a practical framework for their development.

The book helps the reader to make an informed choice about the approaches they use to plan lessons, taking into account their subject area and the requirements of individual learners. Covering all aspects of short, medium and long-term planning, chapters include:

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• Writing Appropriate Learning Objectives and Outcomes

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• Designing and Structuring Engaging Teaching Activities

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• Resourcing the Lesson

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• Assessing Students' Learning

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• Strategies for Personalised Learning

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• Evaluating Your Lesson

The book also includes practical and reflective activities to help the reader apply the ideas discussed to their own work and key questions to encourage the development of their skilful pedagogy. This highly practical book is essential reading for trainee and practising teachers.

1	Introduction

Welcome to this book on lesson planning! I hope you find it an informative and useful read. Lesson planning can be an enjoyable process that forms the bedrock of effective teaching in any classroom. Although much of this planning process should be done prior to the actual lesson being delivered, I will argue throughout this book that lesson planning is just one part of a three-tiered process of work that you will need to engage with in order to become a skilful teacher. It is intrinsically linked to other key activities such as the actual act of teaching itself and your ability to reflect on and evaluate your work. Together, these three interrelated cognitive and practical activities form a core part of what I am going to call your ‘pedagogy’.

Lesson planning itself is a highly creative activity. It is underpinned by certain skills that you will need to develop. I have sequenced these skills throughout the main chapters of this book. For this reason, I would encourage you to read this book in a linear way and avoid the temptation to miss out chapters. In particular, I can anticipate that you might be keen to find out more about the lesson planning template that I am going to recommend you use. You will have to wait until Chapter 7 to find that (but please do not turn there now). I have deliberately put the documentation chapter towards the end of the book because there are so many other vital things that you need to think about before you get preoccupied with form-filling!

Done rigorously and conscientiously, lesson planning will challenge your thinking about your subject(s) and how you are going to teach effectively. Throughout this book, I have included a number of practical and reflective tasks for you to undertake. These activities are designed to help you think through the key issues that we will be considering and make links to your own teaching practice. If you are just starting out in teaching, perhaps by studying for a PGCE or working within a school-centred programme of initial teacher education, I hope that these activities will assist you in developing your teaching practice at this formative stage. If you are a more experienced teacher, I hope that these activities will help you reconsider the established ways of thinking and acting that your pedagogy already contains. Clearly, whether or not you do the activities is entirely up to you, but they all come from exercises and techniques that I have asked my own students to do over the years.

REFLECTIVE TASK

■ What are the effective planning skills that a teacher needs?

■ How will the skills of planning relate to the physical act of teaching and the process of reflecting on and evaluating that act?

Some basic questions

What are the big questions about lesson planning that we need to explore right at the beginning of this book? These are the ten most frequent questions I get asked:

■ What is ‘lesson planning’?

■ What does a lesson plan contain?

■ Does lesson planning always result in a written document, that is, a lesson plan?

■ Do all my lessons have to be planned in the same way?

■ Should my lesson plans look like those completed by other teachers?

■ If two teachers are teaching the same class the same lesson, will their plans be identical?

■ What about if I am teaching the same lesson to four different Year 7 classes? Can I use the same lesson plan each time?

■ Is lesson planning something I have to do for my whole teaching career?

■ Does a lesson plan have to have timings in it?

■ Does a lesson have to be written on a particular lesson plan template?

I suspect that these are some of the basic questions that you may be asking. All these questions are entirely legitimate ones to ask but they do not have simple answers. Before you read on, why don’t you ask yourself how you would answer these ten questions.

The purpose of this introductory chapter is twofold: first, to explore some of the above questions and provide some basic initial responses to them; second, to introduce the main content of this book which will explore these and other questions in greater detail.

So, here we go. Let’s cut to the chase and try to address some of these basic and most frequently asked questions about lesson planning head on.

Q1:What is ‘lesson planning’?

Lesson planning, for me, is ‘the process of thinking through and writing down a plan for the teaching of, and learning within, a lesson that I will be teaching to a specific group of students in a specific place at a specific time’.

This is my standard definition for lesson planning. It means that my lesson plans will not be the same year by year. Why? Because the students I am teaching will change, as may the space I am working within, or the time that I am teaching them at. So, can you do lesson planning in your head? Is the writing down optional? No! For me, it is important that there is a written document. Why? See questions 2 and 3 below.

Q2:What does a lesson plan contain?

A lesson plan is a written document that outlines the key features of the sequence of teaching that will result in you teaching something and your students learning something. It needs to have the following elements as a minimum: learning objectives, learning outcomes, teaching activities, resources, a differentiation strategy and an assessment strategy. Is that it? No, but these are the essential elements in my view.

Q3: Does lesson planning always result in a written document, that is, a lesson plan?

Yes. The process of writing the lesson plan is an integral part of its formal development. The process of writing something down takes an idea out of your head and externalises it in a new way and in a new form. It allows you to perceive it differently and situate it alongside other ideas in ways that are difficult to achieve through mental juggling. By the way, I do not fully understand how this works but know that it does and my basic understanding of our neurology tells me that this is the case.

Q4: Do all my lessons have to be planned in the same way?

No. There are numerous ways that you can plan lessons. However, experience has taught me that there is a good way to start students in their engagement with lesson planning and this is what is outlined in this book. At a certain point (and this varies from person to person), you will begin to forge your own way ahead on the bedrock of skills and approaches that you have explored here. I am sure that over time you will become much more proficient than I am at planning fantastic and engaging lessons.

Q5: Should my lesson plans look like those completed by other teachers?

Maybe, at least to start with. But, as I said in my response to question 4, you will find your own approach in this process and at that point you only need to justify your planning approach to yourself (and perhaps to your headteacher or Ofsted on occasions too!).

Q6: If two teachers are teaching the same class the same lesson, will their plans be identical?

No. A good rule of thumb is never to teach a lesson using someone else’s lesson plan. Why? Your own identity as a teacher is too important to sacrifice on the altar of someone else’s planning. Isn’t that a bit dramatic? No, I don’t think it is. Read the rest of this book to find out why.

Q7:What about if I am teaching the same lesson to four different Year 7 classes? Can I use the same lesson plan each time?

No. Revise the answer to question 1 and look at my key definition again. Just like your own identity as a teacher, this is too important to be taken for granted (see question 6); your students as individuals and as a class are too important to be lumped together and treated the same. Every class you teach will be different. You must plan for their individual needs and requirements if you want to become a brilliant teacher.

Q8: Is lesson planning something I have to do for my whole teaching career?

Yes and no. I suspect that at a certain point in your career the lesson planning process will become almost second nature. It will become a mental process that you will still engage with but by then it is probably ok to stop writing so much stuff down. Until then, refer to my answer to question 3.

Q9: Does a lesson plan have to have timings in it?

Timings are helpful to assist you in planning for a good and steady flow in a lesson. The process of planning the times for particular steps of the lesson, and then teaching that lesson in light of that plan, will help you develop a perception for the flow of learning that you will not get if you do not think about the timings of teaching activities. So, short answer, yes!

Q10: Does a lesson have to be written on a particular lesson plan template?

No. There is no golden template that you must use. I am going to introduce a couple of examples in Chapter 7. But before then, we have some important groundwork to do first. So no sneaky looking ahead!

PRACTICAL TASK

Review the answers to the ten questions above. Were any of the answers surprising? When you get the opportunity, sit down with an experienced teacher and ask them the same ten questions. Compare and contrast their answers with yours and mine.

The structure of this book

Following this introduction, this book is structured in eight chapters. As I have mentioned already, please avoid the temptation to dip in and out of the chapters. They have been written in sequence and with a sense of structuring the cognitive and conceptual work you need to undertake to plan for effective teaching and learning in mind.

Chapter 2 begins this process by focusing on learning objectives and learning outcomes. Establishing clear learning objectives and outcomes is an essential part of effective lesson planning. This chapter will introduce the key skills needed to make informed choices about learning objectives and outcomes, as well as sequence these appropriately across lessons. It will target ‘learning’, rather than ‘activities’, and show how it is vital that you think clearly about the key learning that you want to include within your lesson. Teaching activities will not be the primary focus at this stage. The chapter will conclude with a presentation of a simple approach designed to help you construct learning outcomes in a three-tiered way. This will be explored in more detail in Chapter 6.

Following the formation of appropriate learning objectives and outcomes, Chapter 3 will explore the next stage of the lesson planning process: the design of engaging teaching activities. These activities will be drawn from a range of sources. However, it is your responsibility to structure them in an appropriate way for your lesson. The key test here is to focus the teaching activities in such a way as to engage students and facilitate the key learning objectives and outcomes that have been identified. This chapter will examine a range of common types of activities, drawn from numerous subject areas and phases of education. It will also show how key elements such as student curiosity and motivation can be fostered through the design of these teaching activities. Finally, the chapter will examine how teaching activities can be structured within the lesson.

Teaching does not take place in a vacuum. The resources that you choose and use have a major part to play in facilitating effective teaching and learning. Chapter 4 will explore a framework for the analysis and evaluation of common resources that you might use and will promote the idea that students’ interest can be captured by the uses of unfamiliar objects too. Ultimately, as with every area of lesson planning, you will need to make informed choices about the resources you use within your teaching. Being able to justify these choices pedagogically is a key skill.

Having a strategy for assessing students’ learning is an integral part of the lesson plan. Whilst broad strategies for summative assessment (e.g. end of unit assessments) have their place, Chapter 5 will emphasise the importance of what has commonly been referred to as ‘assessment for learning’ techniques. This chapter will introduce a range of these techniques. As with every element of lesson planning, informed choices that can be justified to others are better than uninformed choices made in an arbitrary fashion. Therefore, in this chapter I will be emphasising how the strategies chosen to assess students’ learning in an individual lesson need to be related closely to the learning objectives and outcomes that have been established earlier in the lesson plan. I will also consider how you can build a positive environment for assessment in your classroom before concluding the chapter with a strong argument for assessment being embedded within the core activities of planning, teaching and reflection.

However students are grouped within the school, it is my strong belief that any teacher who is teaching more than one student at a time is teaching a mixed-ability class. Personalisation, and the closely related pedagogical strategy of differentiation, should be key elements of every lesson plan. The individual needs of specific students, or groups of students, will not be met by accident. As with assessment, teachers need to make deliberate choice...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Writing appropriate learning objectives and outcomes
• 3 The building blocks of a lesson
• 4 Resourcing the lesson
• 5 Assessing students’ learning
• 6 Differentiation and personalisation
• 7 Documenting your planning
• 8 The ‘performance’ of teaching
• 9 Evaluating your lesson
• Index