Lesson planning

 This blog is response to a request from a colleague who is new to teaching - how do you cope with lesson planning?!

For me, this is my favourite part of the job. I love planning lessons as it is the one time I get to be creative rather than encouraging creativity in others. But I still get into the position of overwhelm very easily, and that is with a lot of years of teaching. There are so many elements to a good lesson, that it’s hard to codify exactly what you should do, and it is certainly a skill you develop over time. Your lesson plans become reflective of you as a teacher, but it is pure experience that gets you to that point. So what follows is designed to be a starting point, not a definitive list.

Step 1: What is the purpose of this lesson?

This has to be the key starting point. It is easy to get swept up in great ideas that will be fun and engaging to do, but it they don’t actually support the things they need to learn then you are entertaining and not teaching! 

So start with the aims of the overall Scheme of Work or the specification from the examination board. Personally I like to use knowledge organisers as my starting point. It helps me to simplify right down exactly what the student needs to know. 

If we take, for example, the new GCSE Music schemes of work I’ve been writing recently, I have 2 sources of information - Appendix C in my specification provides me with a list of every term the students will have to know for the majority of the exam. The knowledge organisers provided by them simplifies the subjects right down. So in a module on Popular Music (which lets be honest is a vast subject) the knowledge organisers and specification tell me not only which genres of popular music they need to know, but what terms. Looking at Rock Music for example, I can see they need to know generic rock, but not every sub-genre. They need to know about amplification and distortion, but not every guitar technique and manipulation used.

So start with a list of the knowledge they must know by the end of the lesson. 

Look back to a lesson from last week and one from the previous term too - are there any other things they have learnt that would link to what you are doing today? Is there a chance here for active recall?

Step 2: Resources 

Being a teacher does not mean you have to constantly reinvent the wheel. For most topics you teach there will be a large number of other teachers delivering the same topic. What is already available that you could adapt to fit your students and your teaching style?

Places you can look are:

• General google search - look for interactive websites, games etc that link to your topic
• TES resources (there are still a great number that are free, despite the recent push towards monetising it - if there’s a resource that is great and you can jump through your school’s financial policies to get it purchased that is great - in my experience I’ve left it too late to have this opportunity, so free ones are my only option!)
• Teacher groups - there’s a wealth of teacher groups on facebook for example, where in the files section people generously put up resources they have created.
• Other school’s subject websites - these often come up through a google search
• School electronic storage area - other teachers in your department have often created resources
• Exam board’s website - some exam boards (like Eduqas) post a lot of free resources for use
• Department resources like textbooks. 

Whilst you are exploring these places you may well come across other ideas for future lessons you don’t want to forget. For this I use Wakelet as a quick storing option so that I can find it later without holding it in my brain. For more on Wakelet - see this post.

A word of warning - don’t spend for ever trying to find the ‘perfect’ resource - it is unlikely to exist and you can spend a long time looking. Find something that is good enough and you can adapt to suit you! 

Step 3: How are your students going to learn?

It is well known in education that students only retain about 20/30% of what they hear. So try to avoid having them sit through presentations that you have to deliver. It is exhausting for you and not productive. In any lesson your students should be doing the majority of the work. You need to make it easy enough to access, but challenging enough they don’t get bored. This is often a case of trail and error, particularly as you get to know your classes. 

Can you reduce the textbook down (where writers get paid by the amount of content) to a simple graphic and text that makes it easy to access? Can you then use some questions to help check they’ve understood it? Is there a chance to link in an exam style question (maybe in disguise for nervous classes) so they have a chance to apply it to what they are going to face? Or to a real life situation so they can see its relevance?

Step 4: How are you going to check understanding?

This does not necessarily mean ‘what marking are you going to do?’ Not every lesson has to generate marking (in fact, for your well-being it really shouldn’t!) There are lots of ways to check for understanding that do not add to your workload. 

1. A set of 3/4 questions at the end of the lesson that they answer in a notebook and are peer marked.

2. Exit cards - write down the meaning of these 3 words we’ve encountered today on a slip of paper, hand it in as you leave. You can quickly sort those pieces of paper into ‘Got it’,  and ‘misconceptions’ which you can go over next lesson. 

3. Self-marking homework - there are many online revision sites that create and do this for you - in our school for History we use Clever Lili, for Music we use Teaching Gadget and Focus on Sound - ask your HoD if they have a subscription you can use. All else fails make a quick multiple-choice google form that self-marks. Remember, once you’ve made this once you can use it multiple times for revision. Just don’t make it too easy - putting some of those misconceptions in as an answer can be a great way to check they have understood it!

4. Get them to create a resource (often I do this for homework) on how to explain this key concept. Give them a range of options like, rewrite the lyrics of a chorus of a song, draw a diagram/cartoon, or create an infographic. 

5. Teach someone else - get your students to teach someone in their family or a friend - then give them a quiz to test that family member on. Although the quiz data will not be that useful to you, we remember about 90% of what we teach.

6. Discussion - have a no hands up discussion about the topic. Check students have understood. Get someone to give an answer and get another student to challenge it - can you they add to it, or disprove it?

Step 5: When are you going to recall this information?

As we all know, the best learnt information can be lost out of a students mind very soon after a lesson. If we don’t revise it at all it will become obsolete. Don’t expect your students to find time to do this beyond their lesson and homework time - they’re kids who have interests beyond school. So plan this in for them. What future lessons could link to this that you could do a starter recall task? Is there a gap in the homework schedule in a few weeks that you could put this to?

Step 6: Working out your timings

This is quite probably one of the hardest parts of lesson planning - how long will it take them to do each task. As a rule of thumb I usually try and do the task myself and then multiple the time it took x3 for KS3 classes and x2 for GCSE classes. This allows for different levels of brain development and all the distractions in a classroom (needing to get equipment, friend talking, disruptions etc). In reality you don’t want any task that you cannot do in about 10 minutes if you are planning for KS4. You can have at the ready extension tasks for those who do it quickly. Remember to factor in time for your students who get extra time in exams - if they need 25% in an exam to be able to process, read and write, you should be factoring in something like that in lesson to make it accessible. So what will you have others doing at the same time? 

To help with this I usually have my tasks on the board set up as:

• Tasks everyone must have done by the end of the time given - the key things that will help them get a pass or above if it is a GCSE/A-Level lesson
• Tasks that most will do but not all, (has some sort of consolidation/repetition task in it)
• Tasks that only my most able will do (Skills that would help them aspire to the highest marks). 

Once you’ve got all that you have your lesson plan done. For each of these steps you can spend a long time - sometimes I will spend an entire day planning a lesson during the holidays. But that is not a healthy work/home life relationship! So below I’ve put some rough timings to help you keep it to a slightly more achievable time frame. Do remember, as you go through you will have to do less and less searching for resources, you will have a gut instinct on how long it takes your class to do things etc, so you won’t need to time how long it takes you to do it! 

• Step 1: Purpose of lesson (2/3 mins writing down the key vocabulary/concepts)
• Step 2: Resources (max of 10 mins - this is where you can lose a lot of time!)
• Step 3: How are students going to learn? (Max of 10 mins - look at what resource you’ve got, how can you make it student led?)
• Step 4: Checking understanding - 2 mins, what will you do to ensure you know what they know
• Step 5: Recall - (1 minute) pencil on your scheme of work when it will be good to do another 5 minute activity based on this
• Step 6: Timings - 10/15 minutes at first, though you won’t need to do this step after a while. 

When you get experience you can often do all of the above in under 15 minutes, but this is because you build up your bank of resources, you know how long it will take your students to do something, and you will have a set of ideas on how to check understanding that you can rotate through. 

Remember, it is tough when you start out, but that is why early on in your career you have a smaller timetable than your more experienced colleagues - you will get faster and find it easier. And always feel free to adapt on the fly - if it is taking them much longer to do something, what could you cut out/move to a later lesson? If they’re learning quickly, get them to make a google form quiz and share and test each other.

Good luck, and if you have nay ideas or questions, do add them in the comments below.