The one about planning and preparation

Here's to classroom teachers!

The post above received quite a reaction - largely positive I hasten to add. I wasn't intending to blow my own trumpet or make a martyr of myself. I am just particularly conscious as an external speaker of trying to do everything as well as I can so that each session adds value.

Of course, that is no different to what a teacher tries to do each day without the luxury of the time that I am able to put in. As a teacher, I was conscious of having to be a little more pragmatic in my planning than I would have liked. If there was a decent textbook or some worksheets that covered the area reasonably well then I would take that option as one of the key things about teaching well is managing your energy. I remember a colleague who prepared the world's best interview lesson to within an inch of its life finishing somewhere after 3am only for it to fall apart early the next (same?) day, he didn't get the job. So, any time that a real life teacher can save is valuable.

3 stages of planning and preparation

When I plan as a teacher, I think there are 3 phases I go through

1. Scoping/sketching: First, and some time in advance, I would scope out the topic/series in rough, how many lessons have I got/do I need? What materials have I got already? Which bits do I not really understand? This would give me a sense of how much time I might need to put in. I cannot overstate the importance at this stage of aiming to use/adapt what others have produced. If a textbook page does something 75-80% as well as I could, then why am I not using it? I now probably have a rough scheme of work for the topic on a rough piece of paper.

2. Material production and general preparation: Potentially the lengthy stage of planning. I now need to produce any materials and put together an outline plan (usually on ppt) of activities. If it is something I am not that familiar with then I might need to allocate a few half term hours or block an evening. I will collate the key sheets for the topic into a booklet for students which if I am sufficiently organised (5 working days) will be photocopied for me. Once this is done hopefully it will stay in place for future cohorts with a few minor tweaks. I will think about opportunities to build in checks on learning. These could be paired recaps, quizzes, retrieval boxes. My biggest weakness as a younger teacher was not doing this enough. I will add these to my ppt. So armed with booklet, ppt and a few textbooks, I am good to go.

Another weakness was that I tended to think of a topic as 6 or 7 lessons and I would plan them without much relationship with each other; but real teaching is messy so I moved away from this as I went on, so...

3. Finally, lesson 'planning': before each lesson on the new topic. In the quiet of the classroom before the day begins, a few minutes thinking through the context, which students in my group missed the last session, where did we get up to? how does what happened last lesson affect what I want to do today? Slides are tweaked and notes written into my planner that only make sense to me. I don't do detailed lesson plans  because things happen that mean you end up rewriting them; they would change every time as groups and other variables change.

This takes me back to my current freelance work. When I have produced resources for A level RS and Philosophy, it is with the aim of speeding up stage 1 and 2. I cannot do stage 3 as I don’t know your class and where they are at. That’s why I struggle to know how to answer a teacher who asks whether someone can ‘send them a lesson.’ That’s also why I am more cautious/pessimistic about AI. I hope it saves us all loads of preparation time but I don’t think it can completely plan our lessons for us. It might help us with stage 1 and 2 but probably not stage 3.

We probably all approach the process of planning differently. I think I tended to be on the more efficient/pragmatic side rather than painstaking/perfectionist. I wonder how do you approach planning?