Matt McLain, Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education (Design and Technology), Liverpool John Moores University. m.n.mclain@ljmu.ac.uk

Learning how to plan lessons is an essential skill for beginning teachers. It is a skill that experience teachers often take for granted in themselves, which can make it difficult for student teachers when they see their mentors seeming to effortless plan lessons. It is also difficult for mentors, who sometimes forget how difficult they found it when starting to plan lessons. Dare I say it, some mentors have forgotten the benefits of using detailed lesson plans, designed for student teachers; encouraging or promoting truncated versions, such as the so-called 5-minute lesson plan. These forms of lesson planning are all-well-and-good for experienced and expert teachers, but I would argue that they rob beginning teachers of the value opportunity to learn the ‘nuts and bolts’ of lesson planning.

I often describe the training lesson plan as a (sort of) disruptive ‘technology’, which forces the student teacher to stop and really think about what they are doing. However, this only works where the student teacher understands that (a) completing a lesson plan pro forma is NOT the same as planning a lesson and (b) completing a lesson plan pro forma in the order the boxes are presented us unproductive (even idiotic!).

Also, contrary to what many student teachers believe, the schedule of activities is not the most important part of the lesson – although it does provide a handy ‘script’ if (when) their mind goes blank! To plan effective lessons (and sequences of lessons), you need to start at the end – typically with your learning intentions, including the learning outcome for each lesson and the success criteria indicating expected levels of progression. Click here to download out guide, and read more about the philosophy of lesson planning at LJMU and our pro formas.

Learning to plan lessons, and sequences of learning (be they ‘units’ or ‘schemes’ of work), is also an iterative process. So when we had a subject knowledge development focus with our D&T student teachers at LJMU in February, we included a collaborative unit of work (UoW) writing workshop. The focus of the UoW was design thinking, and the challenge was to design a sequence of 6 lessons for socially distanced and/or remote learning – not an easy task! To remind the students about effective learning outcomes and success criteria and model good practice, I planned the first lesson and the curriculum mapping. The students then worked in groups of about 3-4 to plan each lesson. Here’s what we learnt…

“Whilst remote learning has been challenging, I believe this activity engaged and brought something different to home learning… it reflected that of collaborative work in subject departments… I am currently working with other teachers to create new units of work in my placement school.”

Kal Richardson (PGDE D&T Student Teacher)

Firstly, writing effective learning outcomes and success criteria is difficult! Even using the scaffolding of frameworks, such as Bloom’s Taxonomy and the associated verbs, it is all too easy to slip into vague and difficult to measure terms like ‘know’, ‘understand’ or ‘learn’. There are alternative approaches to lesson planning and writing learning intentions, but learning outcomes is generally considered to be the most effective for beginning teachers. The added benefit being that well written success criteria can be used for formative teacher assessment, as well as for pupils to self-assess their progress. Secondly, working collaboratively with teams planning each lesson is great for planning the individual lesson’s learning intentions and activities.

However, whilst the activity facilitated the planning of individual lessons (learning episode to learning episode), it was difficult to plan for progression across the sequence of lessons (i.e. lesson to lesson across the unit). To address this, we gave opportunities within the morning workshop to touch base and share progress midway through, encouraging communication and collaboration across groups. This worked to a degree, but with 5 teams and about 18 participants there were some executive decisions made. So I took the role of editor to review each lesson and adjust the learning intentions and activities. This role could have been taken by one (or a small group) of the student teachers, but I took the view that this was an opportunity to model how to plan for progression; explaining that edits would be made on this basis, rather than to change the lesson activities per se.

“The use of technology in this activity allowed us greater access to complete the task whilst remote. However, communication between working groups for pre and post lessons seemed challenging but easily solved.”

Kal Richardson (PGDE D&T Student Teacher)

One of the barriers to working within the framework of a 6 lesson UoW focusing on design thinking, was the legacy of making in a defined material area. Whilst making and materials are really important elements of D&T, where student teachers are seeing every (or most) unit or scheme focusing on making skills and knowledge, it is difficult to break free from these constraints and embrace mainly designing approaches. Therefore, my role was to facilitate and steer some teams towards more expansive and open ended activities. And inevitably, this meant some editing of lesson foci after the activity. You can have a look at our collaborative unit (below) and see what you think. I think that it was timely and productive, leading to high level conversations with and between student teachers, as they prepare for the final phase of their training.