Lesson Planning Made Easy

Planning is arguably the most misunderstood skill in schools. Perhaps this is because it is paper based, and can consequently be monitored. In most schools it is a tyrannous checklist of everything you have to cram into the lesson to get an outstanding grade.

Differentiation? Check. Personalised resources? Check. Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic learning? Double check. Engaging starter? Check again. Plenary (which will probably be cut short anyway) check. Variety of activities? Check. How many cheques can you write before the bank account runs dry? No wonder planning seems so hard.

Worse, all of that is a distraction. It overwhelms us and makes us feel inadequate.

So let’s start again.

Rationale

Planning is simply making sure that students are learning.

To do that, start with something they don’t know. You’ll find that in the success criteria of your scheme of work, or the exam board’s requirements. Some teachers call this endpoint planning – working backwards from where you want the students to end up. Don’t confuse this with an exam factory. The skills and knowledge required for a student to gain an A or A*, or an 8 or 9 grade have been fought over by senior examiners who are passionate about your subject. To start here is not to sell out to the system, but to make the system work for your students.

There is also a teaching sequence that never fails, which we met in the chapter on differentiation.

        See

        Try

        Apply

        Secure

This sequence covers all the things that may be in your school’s impossible planning sheet. So:

Differentiation

• You make the success criteria explicit in your modelling.

• Students support each other in pairs, correcting at least 50% of their misconceptions (according to Hattie, you will recall).

• They try the skill, and apply their knowledge a second time, having already worked out where the gaps are in their knowledge.

• Then they try it again, aiming to master it.

• Some, of course, will not do so, but you have maximized the chances that they will.

Personalised Resources –

• You modelled something that they did not know.

• They individually found out what they still needed to master and had another go at mastery.

• I include learning styles not to promote them (because we know there is little evidence for them) but to acknowledge that you may teach in a school that still values learning styles in its lesson planning.

Visual? Yes, you’ve made the model explicit. Auditory? Students have taught each other. Kinaesthetic? You may be teaching a practical subject - easy. Working in books? Swap partners for the ‘apply’ stage. Get another pair to write theirs at the computer. Get another pair to come up to the board and assess it.

Engaging starter?

• Get students to memorise the model, and reconstruct it.

• Use the reveal tool of your Interactive White Board to get them to guess what is in the model. 

• Present the model as a cloze, and students have to work out what is missing. 

• Demonstrate the skill in the wrong sequence and get students to rework the sequence directly.

• Do the model physically and get the students to provide a commentary. Etc. You get the idea. What you mustn’t do is go out and find something engaging to grip their attention – I’ve lost count of the starters I’ve seen that have nothing to do with the learning in the lesson.

Plenary

1.      Yes, once after the ‘try’ phase.

2.      Another after the ‘apply’ phase.

3.      And then another after they have tried individually. Count them – three plenaries. If that doesn’t give you progress, nothing will.

4.      (By the way, this isn’t a whole class, let’s hold up everyone’s learning, while I, as your teacher, try to find out what you all know plenary. In pairs, or on their own, students will keep finding that out for themselves. Your sample of three or four students will be enough to give you an idea of what they don’t know, and decide where to go next).

Variety of Activities

Well, there are at least 4 – see, try, apply, secure.

And of course, this is a teaching sequence. It does not have to begin and end in one lesson. This is why, in my plan below, the lesson begins by securing learning from previous lessons.

What This Means for Planning

The most popular planning tool on the internet is the 5 Minute Lesson Plan from Ross McGill, @TeacherTookit. It is very useful as a way of hitting all the buzzwords you might think of as being required in an ‘outstanding’ lesson: objectives, engagement, AfL, differentiation. Of these, only AfL will prove to have significant impact as we look at the research.

The buzzwords I have included above: differentiation, personalised, engaging starter, plenary, are also simply Ofsted words – they are not something that appear in my planning at all. I’ve included them to show you that simply planning the students’ learning journey – See, Try, Apply, Secure, will automatically hit all the buzzwords you need. The buzzwords themselves are not the learning journey – they are a distraction from it.

The other buzzwords in the 5 Minute Lesson Plan are: the big picture, and stickability. These two are not what I would classify as Ofsted words – they are backed up by research. The big picture looks at goal setting and context. Both of these will be apparent in the ‘see’ stage. Stickability happens with the process of review, which is built in to ‘apply’ and ‘secure’.

My point here is not that I have a form of lesson planning that will take you all of 5 minutes. My point is that if you focus on this very simple learning journey - see, try, apply, secure, - your students will always make progress, and your lesson will always hit all of the buzzwords that Ofsted, SLT or a head of department might throw at you.

What Might Lesson Planning Look Like?

Let’s imagine you are a maths teacher – (I’m doing this because maths teachers I train have a lot of difficulty in applying anything that involves writing to their own teaching, even though the ‘writing’ here is just a signifier for what you are teaching).

Most of the planning for a maths teacher has already been done by the textbook. This is not an attack, it is a celebration of a well designed resource. Here, students will see a worked example. There will typically be twenty easy, twenty moderate, twenty hard and ten very hard progression questions. Remember that, with high expectations, you are trying to get to learning the quickest way possible.

So, See would involve us going through the model on the board. Then in pairs students would Try two of the easy questions. One pair at random would show one of these on the board – if it is right, we can probably move on. If it is wrong, can they work out why?

Your job is to patrol the room while they work on each question – because there are only two, you can instantly assess whether it is safe to move on. Doug Lemov calls this standardizing the format. Then pairs will Apply learning to a more difficult question, or two.

Again, because you are patrolling, and have only two questions to focus on, you can constantly assess what the students do and don’t know. If there are many mistakes, pick on a pair who are wrong in ways that are common to the class – get their work on the board and use it to teach from. If many are right, you can afford to pick at random.

You can Apply again, if they were struggling, or move to individual work for the Secure stage. In each case, choose two more difficult questions.

In the Secure phase you want students to think as mathematicians, rather than simply following a method. Anyone with a good memory can follow a method in a single lesson and achieve apparent mastery. But once a problem that looks slightly different arrives, such students panic – the method no longer suffices. It is a significant reason, I feel, why many otherwise academic students are convinced that they are no good at maths – it is because they have learned a method, but have not been made to secure knowledge.

The key to the secure stage is finding ways to test your students’ understanding of the concept, rather than just what has happened in the lesson. To do this, you want to alter the context.

How Does Altering the Context Create High Expectations?

1.      Your high expectations are communicated here in the secure stage, by asking for learning to be applied in a new context.

2.      In order to make this possible, your expectations also had to be apparent in the model you chose at the beginning.

3.      You also modeled each increased level of difficulty, but getting students to show their work at the board.

4.      You communicated that everyone had to participate, with the pairing of students. You also achieved this because at each stage students know it could be them that are called to demonstrate.

5.      Your questioning has not just been about knowledge, the method, but about understanding: why does the method work, what happens to it when problems become more difficult or less familiar?

Crucially, you did not have to think about his in your planning. You didn’t have to ask yourself, “am I setting high enough expectations?” in the same way that you did not have to ask, “am I hitting the right buzzwords for this year’s checklist of what should be in the lesson?”

This is important, because those questions introduce complexity into your thinking. Complexity takes time, and invites mistakes, and inconsistency.

Instead I am offering simplicity. Simplicity is always sustainable. It is also precise, and will consequently deliver high expectations, whatever you are teaching.

What Might An Individual Lesson Plan Look Like?

This is just a normal lesson I taught to my year 10 English class. There is nothing flashy in it, and nothing that would take more than 5 minutes to prepare – 10 if I dictated the students’ work on my iPad, rather than just photographing it. I’ve never asked myself how will I differentiate or engage, because the See, Try, Apply, Secure structure does that for me.

AHFASTERCROCH is a mnemonic I use for remembering persuasive writing rhetorical devices, and students learn them in this order: alliteration, hyperbole, facts, anecdote, statistics, three (rule of), emotive language, rhetorical question, creating an enemy, repetition, opinion, contrasting pairs, humour. This itself communicates high expectations to the students.

Most schools teach AFOREST, alliteration, facts, opinons, rhetorical questions, emotive language, statistics, three (rule of), and some push the boat out with DAFOREST, where D = direct address to the reader.

Hopefully, you can see how much more interesting the piece of writing will be using AHFASTERCROCH – look at the techniques in bold italic, which are missing from DAFOREST.

The model you choose to set out from determines your high expectations. DAFOREST will help you analyse a persuasive speech by David Cameron. But it won’t also help you write like Stephen Fry or Alison Pearson or even Jeremy Clarkeson, which AHFASTERCROCH will.

So, when selecting your model, pitch it the very highest you can for the class. Most teachers claim they do this, because they believe they do, but the prevalence of AFOREST and PEE should be a reality check.

The Lesson Plan

Year 10 – Target grades in the class B to A*

Objective:

Understand how paragraphs can be linked together using key words, topic sentences and a developing argument.

(There is much more than this that I will teach them, or that they might learn in the lesson – but I share only one objective, because that is the learning I really want to focus on in the lesson).

Student activity

Learning Points

Matt and Mark to rehearse Charmain and Adnan in AHFASTERCROCH

Secure (from previous lessons)

As Matt and Mark were experts and Charmain and Adnan were weakest. Other students test each other in pairs.

Students rehearse the rhetorical techniques that Boris Johnson uses, and consolidate/learn to recognise them themselves for their own writing. Use of time limits secures memory, engages and therefore promotes learning.

Challenge to beat 15 seconds for reciting all of AHFASTERCROCH in the right order for a third of a stamp, merit, credit, housepoint, Vivo etc

Secure (from previous lessons)

Reward promotes challenge and establishes the class culture that standards are hard, tasks are challenging, though achievable. 15 second time limit does this also.

Students look at the homework Annabel wrote to identify the writing skills, which come from AHFASTERCORCH.

See

Randomly chosen students feed back so I can gauge what the class has retained. They will be practising these skills later in the lesson, so we rehearse them now. Crucially students see what the skills look like in writing.

Explore misconceptions

See

If students miss particular points, we will return to them with the next text, so that they can immediately measure their learning. Call on volunteers in the class to explain to those who have misconceptions.

Philomena’s homework, projected on the board – students identify what knits two paragraphs together

See

Students see how key words in the final sentence of one paragraph are picked up in the first sentence of the next paragraph. This is a vital skill in constructing an essay, and is part of the B/A grade skill.

Students in pairs decide how to link a paragraph to the one that preceded it. They do this with their own writing.

Try

Students immediately have the opportunity to test their learning from the previous activity. They are supported in pairs before having to try it themselves.

We watch a video of Boris Johnson on David Letterman’s show. We analyse quotations in class discussion to see what message Johnson aims at different audiences

Apply

Students consolidate their understanding that a single speech can have different aims for different audiences. This complexity is also at the A/A* grade, and this will be made explicit to them. Here I can allow volunteers, as we are developing new thinking and not looking for ‘right’ answers. Intersperse with random questioning so students can’t afford to opt out.

A scribe types notes for us during this class discussion, otherwise learning is easily ignored, or lost.

Apply

Students’ note taking skills are developed – they decide what key words are necessary to help later reconstruction in paragraphs. This also allows them to decide what is vital, and what is less important. Additionally, limiting word choice highlights the importance of the right vocabulary – the more precise a word, the more it conveys.

Students write individually – two paragraphs using the quotations we have found, and the class notes just taken on the class discussion. They must LINK the paragraphs.

Apply/Secure

This is an exit ticket, which will show me if they have learned this skill. The modeling of this will be achieved by having a student type theirs on the board. Hopefully, there will be a remote that allows me to hide this, until we are ready to reveal.

Pairs called at random to critique the paragraphs on the board: has the model met the learning objective? How far?

Apply/Secure

Students will be more likely to apply what they see to their own paragraphs – does theirs look right in the same ways, or wrong in the same ways as the student model?

How Else Does The Lesson Convey High Expectations?

As usual, modelling will teach students more than I have planned. Here, the student models will introduce new analyses of Boris Johnson’s language that each student can ‘steal’, or attack.  I’ve chosen Annabel’s and Philomena’s work, as near A* and A* respectively. Annabel’s work I’ve also chosen to motivate her – she has an SEN issue that demands 25% extra time, even though she is in a top set.

Students will meet new vocabulary in Annabel’s and Philomena’s work, and have it translated for them during class discussion, so they can ‘steal’ it.

They will notice that quotations are introduced with a comma before the opening speech marks. They will see how quotations are integrated into the sentence. They will realise integrated quotations are very short, even one word long.

They will notice how the point and example of PEE are conflated here, so that paragraphing is not mechanical and clunky. They will see how PEE has actually been dispensed with. They’ll find how a student links more than one explanation or interpretation around a single quotation.

They will find that using key words to link paragraphs is a planning tool, which may save time in an exam.

They will hear new interpretations from a new speech, and apply what they already know.

They will find out whether they have the skill to write connecting paragraphs, and whether they can achieve this in a typical exam time limit.

My job  is to be alert to these moments, and others that I have not anticipated.

And of course they will revise persuasive techniques from AHFASTERCROCH, and get better at both remembering them and spotting examples in others’ speech and writing.

It is a totally sustainable way of teaching, because it takes so little effort and time. Yes, I will have had to mark the previous lesson’s work – but that at least gives my marking a purpose. Similarly, I only have to read the work of five key students to identify two I want to use in the lesson – I can mark the books later if I choose.

In this way, the teaching sequence forces me to have high expectations, and forces me to motivate my students.

This was an extract from The Slightly Awesome Teacher.