Lesson

“At last! A plain speaking book on effective lesson

planning.”

Lesson Planning for Effective Learning

Andrew R. Mackereth, Headteacher, Heart of England School, Coventry, UK

Planning
“This book gives fantastic insight and practical strategies
for teachers at all points within their career in order to
encourage and embed reflective practice. A ‘must have’
resource for any school library.”

for
Hayley McDonagh, Senior Leader, Golden Hillock School, Birmingham, UK

Lesson planning is the essential component of every teacher’s

practice and the development of a teacher’s skill is built explicitly

Effective
on a rigorous approach to planning. This goes beyond just written
plans and includes a process of mental preparation, anticipation,
rehearsal and performance - all essential elements of the craft of
teaching. This book offers heaps of useful advice and key ideas

Learning
related to planning an effective lesson.
With clear links between the preparation of writing a lesson plan,
McGr aw - Hill Education

and the delivery of that lesson plan through your teaching, this
book explores:
• Common components of lesson planning including learning
objectives, learning outcomes, starters, teaching activities and
plenaries
• The lesson plan document: what it can and can’t do
• Teaching ‘style’ and your role in bringing lesson plans to life
within your classroom
• Common pitfalls, including time management, over- and under-
running, optimum learning time, and activity sequencing

FaUTLEy & SavagE

• Broader strategies such as differentiation, personalization and
assessment
• Sample lesson planning documents from real teachers
Whatever age of pupils you are teaching, or whatever subject you
are teaching, this book helps you develop a clear and concise
approach to lesson planning that is an essential and integral part of
becoming an effective teacher.

Martin Fautley is Professor of Education at Birmingham City

University, UK. Jonathan Savage is Reader in Education and
Enterprise Fellow at the Institute of Education, Manchester
Metropolitan University, UK.

MaRTIn FaUTLEy &

Cover design Hybert Design • www.hybertdesign.com JonaThan SavagE
www.openup.co.uk
 Lesson planning for
effective learning

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25655.indb ii 30/08/2013 12:07
 Lesson planning for
effective learning

Martin Fautley and Jonathan Savage

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 Open University Press
McGraw-Hill Education
McGraw-Hill House
Shoppenhangers Road
Maidenhead
Berkshire
England
SL6 2QL

email: enquiries@openup.co.uk
world wide web: www.openup.co.uk

and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121–2289, USA

First published 2013

Copyright © Martin Fautley and Jonathan Savage, 2013

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose
of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency
Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be
obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of Saffron House, 6–10
Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN–13: 978–0–33–524690–8 (pb)

ISBN–10: 0–33–524690–7 (pb)
eISBN: 978–0–33–524691–5

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Typesetting and e-book compilations by

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Fictitious names of companies, products, people, characters and/or data that

may be used herein (in case studies or in examples) are not intended to
represent any real individual, company, product or event.

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 Praise for this book

“This is essential reading for all teachers, teacher educators and policy
makers. For new entrants to the profession, it offers the opportunity to think
beyond the notion of folk pedagogies and to consider how a more powerful
theoretical framework might underpin lesson planning. It presents essential
analysis as to why common approaches to teaching and learning have
emerged and become embedded – this provides a great opportunity for more
experienced teachers to develop a deeper critical understanding of their prac-
tice. Punctuated with reflective questions, it enables the reader to reconcep-
tualise planning and pedagogy and to engage in theorised reflection on
practice.”
Kate Laurence, Institute of Education, University of London, UK

“At last! A plain speaking book on effective lesson planning.

Lesson Planning for Effective Learning by Martin Fautley and Jonathan
Savage combines theoretical perspectives with really useful, instantly useable
examples from everyday practice. Despite the scholarly approach, the 200
pages of this little book retain an essentially conversational quality ensuring
that it is equally accessible to students, academics and learning enthusiasts
alike.”
Andrew R. Mackereth, Headteacher, Heart of England School

“Lesson planning is one of the most fundamental duties of teachers no

matter what their subject, age phase or experience. In their latest book,
Martin Fautley and Jonathan Savage start with practice and, in decon-
structing what teachers do every day, apply their deep thinking and reasoned
consideration. They are adept at weaving a wide range of thoughts, experi-
ences and theory into the mix, making this readily accessible and ultimately
a very helpful book.
Martin and Jonathan make much of the novice-expert continuum. I’m not
sure where I fit but I certainly experienced a number of ‘penny-dropping’
moments that immediately led me to reflect and sharpen up my own plan-
ning. I’ve been reminded of the huge complexities that there are in planning
effective lessons, both the “private preparation and the public performance”
elements. It is impossible to read very far into this book without realising
that planning for effective learning has little to do with the administrative
task of completing a planning pro forma, important and necessary though

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 that is. This book makes it abundantly clear that pedagogy and pedagogical
content knowledge underpin planning for effective learning. Although, as the
authors point out, much lesson planning is invisible, what they do so well
here, in the words of Russell and Loughran*, is to “make the tacit explicit”.
Above all, this book articulates something of what it is to be professional for
teachers of all types. I heartily recommend this book.”
Simon Spencer, Birmingham City University, UK

* Russell, T. & Loughran, J. (2007) Enacting a Pedagogy of Teacher Education:

Values, Relationships and Practices, London: Routledge

“This book gives fantastic insight and practical strategies for teachers at all
points within their career in order to encourage and embed reflective prac-
tice. For outstanding practitioners and senior leaders, it provides case studies
and examples which will stimulate discussion and provide starting points
from which to develop policy at whole school level, and influence and develop
practice at an individual teacher level. A ‘must have’ resource for any school
Teaching and Learning Group library.”
Hayley McDonagh, Senior Leader, Golden Hillock School,
Birmingham. Former LA senior adviser working
with Schools in Ofsted Category

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 Contents

List of figures ix
List of tables xi
Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1

PART 1

1 Common components of a lesson 7

2 Lesson planning itself 23

3 Pedagogy and the plan: bringing it to life 37

4 Resources for learning 52

5 Differentiation and personalization: valuing your pupils 67

PART 2

6 Metaphors for lesson planning and pedagogy 81

7 Learning 94

8 Assessment and lesson planning 109

9 Lesson, medium- and long-term planning 126

10 Differences in planning in the primary and secondary school 145

11 Lesson planning documentation 156

12 Conclusion 172

References 175
Index 181

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25655.indb viii 30/08/2013 12:07
 Figures

1.1 Simple lesson outline 7

1.2 The three-part lesson 8
1.3 Lesson planning and chess 17
1.4 Planning for sequencing section 18
1.5 Bloom’s taxonomy and Anderson et al.’s revision 19
2.1 Shift from teaching to learning 26
2.2 Outline lesson plan with timings 28
2.3 Novice and experienced teachers’ foci of attention 30
2.4 Initial lesson plan template 35
4.1 Activity theory triangle 53
4.2 AT pedagogy of tool use 56
8.1 Formative and summative assessment 112
8.2 Assessment data and feedback 115
8.3 Who is the assessment for? 123
9.1 Exemplar curriculum map overview (primary) 134
9.2 Exemplar planning form for music (secondary) 135
9.3 Exemplar unit map (secondary) 138
9.4 Exemplar unit of work (primary) 140
11.1 University plan for PGCE secondary student teachers 158
11.2 Simple lesson plan blank 161
11.3 Another simple lesson planning pro-forma 162
11.4 Slightly more complex planning 163
11.5 A more complex lesson plan 164
11.6 Planning for differentiation 167

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25655.indb x 30/08/2013 12:07
 Tables

1.1 Typical learning episodes 14

1.2 Mosston and Ashworth taxonomy 15
1.3 Knowledge types 19
1.4 Bloom revision and knowledge types 20
1.5 Bloom-derived question stems 21
7.1 Knowledge 96
8.1 Assessment data 116
8.2 Assessment evidence 117
8.3 Success criteria characteristics 119
8.4 Assessments in tick-box format 120
11.1 Common lesson planning documentation elements 169

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25655.indb xii 30/08/2013 12:07
 Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our thanks to our families, friends and colleagues at
both Birmingham City University and Manchester Metropolitan University,
who have supported our work and read various extracts for this book as it has
been prepared. We are also grateful to all our colleagues teaching in schools,
who have given their time and shared their thinking with us as we worked on
this book. We are very grateful to all of you for your help and assistance.
We would also like to thank Simon Spencer of BCU, for his thinking
concerning lesson planning, and on being able to include a BCU plan as an
example. Our thanks too go to Hayley McDonagh and Suzanne Jerkins, who
have helped with providing examples of documentation, and of sharing with
us ways in which schools approach lesson planning.
And finally thanks to all of our students, who continually challenge our
thinking (in a good way!), and whose search for ever-improving lesson plans
has helped us shape our own thinking.

Martin Fautley
Jonathan Savage

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25655.indb xiv 30/08/2013 12:07
 Introduction

Welcome to this book on lesson planning! We trust that you will find it a
useful exploration of the key ideas related to planning an effective lesson.
Whatever age of pupils you are teaching, or whatever subject you are teaching,
learning to write clear and concise lesson planning is an essential and integral
part of being an effective teacher. Throughout this book we will be arguing
that there is a clear link between the mainly private mental and physical prepa-
ration of writing a lesson plan, and the public delivery of that plan through
your teaching of a particular class. The essential link between that private prep-
aration and public performance is your pedagogy. Therefore, much of our time
in this book will be spent defining and exploring this link.
This book is designed in two parts. Part 1 contains a general exploration of
the main elements of lesson planning and how they relate to your classroom
pedagogy. In Part 2 we will explore some more general themes and ideas and
relate these to the key issues discussed in Part 1.
Following this introduction, Chapter 1 introduces the common compo-
nents of lesson planning. These include discrete elements such as learning objec-
tives, learning outcomes, starters, teaching activities and plenaries as well as
broader strategies such as those associated with differentiation, personalization
and assessment. Right at the outset, we will be considering aspects of teaching
‘style’ and your role in bringing these basic elements to life within your teaching.
Chapter 2 focuses in on the lesson plan document itself, asking key
questions about what it can and cannot do. There is a myth that the perfect
lesson plan will ensure good lessons. We want to show that the thinking
behind a lesson plan is more important than the lesson plan itself. We discuss
what lessons plans will and will not do. A common misconception, for
example, is that lesson plans need to involve hours of planning details down
to the last minute. We will point out that reflexive teaching cannot by its very
nature be that prescriptive. We will deal with common pitfalls faced by both
novice and experienced teachers alike, including time management, over- and
under-running, optimum learning time and activity sequencing.

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 2 INTRODUCTION

Chapter 3 continues this theme by considering a range of practical peda-

gogical strategies by which your lesson plan can be ‘brought to life’ through
your teaching. It introduces a simple triangle of interrelated activities (plan-
ning, pedagogy and reflective practice) through which your work as a teacher
will develop. Drawing on key ideas from the work of Stenhouse and others, it
asserts the notion that there is no meaningful curriculum development
without teacher development. In other words, the quality of your lesson plan-
ning processes will have a direct influence on your own development as a
teacher. The two are intrinsically linked.
Chapter 4 focuses on resources. It starts with ideas drawn from the concept
of activity theory through which a discussion about how you choose and use
specific resources will be framed. We will consider how positive approaches to
the use of common resources such as interactive whiteboards and other pieces
of technology can be developed before moving onto a broader exploration of
different models of learning and how these are facilitated through the resources
that teachers choose to adopt.
Chapter 5 turns our attention away from resources to individual pupils
themselves. It explores how you can use the pedagogical strategies of differen-
tiation and personalization to provide for educational needs of individual
pupils. We will argue that all teachers teach ‘mixed ability’ classes and need
focused strategies to turn broad lesson planning statements into meaningful
classroom interactions with pupils, including those with challenging educa-
tional needs.
This chapter marks the end of the first part of this book, and Part 2 goes on
to examine some broader themes and ideas and relate these to the key points
raised throughout Part 1.
Chapter 6 opens Part 2 with a broad investigation into metaphors for
lesson planning that draws on the work of Robin Alexander and others. Within
it, we will be considering the notion of teaching as performance through a
metaphorical reflection on the work of artists, musicians and footballers! This
chapter will frame some of the broader ideas that we will discuss in the later
chapters of the book including, in Chapter 7, those associated with learning.
As we know, learning is a complex process. Knowledge is often seen as the
outcome of learning, and yet knowledge itself is not unproblematic either.
We know about a number of different types of knowledge, and this chapter
deals with different types of knowledge that the teacher will meet, including
the obvious types (declarative, procedural, acquisitive and participatory) as
well as more complex types, such as tacit knowledge and pedagogical content
knowledge.
Chapter 8 focuses on assessment. We will explore the differing purposes
and uses of summative and formative assessment, and will emphasize that true
assessment for learning (AfL) is an interactive process. Planning for AfL needs
to be reflexive (and reflective – a point picked up in the next chapter) and

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 INTRODUCTION 3

involves a series of ‘feedback loops’; pedagogy, within this model, can be help-
fully conceptualized as a spiral with elements of feedback and ‘feed-forward’
informing it throughout. Assessment of learning (A of L) is also discussed here.
Chapter 9 examines some similar themes within the context of medium- and
longer-term curriculum planning. Recent legislation, and the rise of academies
and free schools, have released many teachers from what some saw as the stric-
tures of the National Curriculum. For all teachers there is considerable latitude,
especially in Key Stages 1–3, concerning the content and organization of what
is taught. The notion of curriculum mapping is important here, so in this
chapter we consider how the teacher’s broader planning can link with that
across the school in a joined-up fashion, with topics and content planned
for across subject domains with cross-curricular learning as an integral part of
the overall planning routine.
Chapters 10 and 11 present a range of lesson planning documentation and
materials drawn from the work of various teachers within primary and
secondary schools. While it is not the purpose of this book to present a single
document that you should use in your own planning, there are important
lessons to be drawn from the work of other teachers. These chapters will
present some common approaches with an accompanying narrative that
reflects on these plans in light of the ideas discussed throughout the book. Our
final chapter, Chapter 12, draws together key themes from throughout the
book and, hopefully, sets you on your way towards a more skilful and informed
approach to planning exciting, interactive and meaningful lessons for your
pupils.

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25655.indb 4 30/08/2013 12:07
 PART 1

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25655.indb 6 30/08/2013 12:07
 1 Common components
of a lesson

When discussing lesson planning it has become customary to talk about the
component parts of a lesson. You will probably be familiar with many, if not
all of these terminologies. To begin this chapter we need to spend some time
deconstructing these component parts in order to be very precise in the
language we are using, as there is not necessarily clarity of the terms employed
across all users. Phrases such as ‘the three-part lesson’, ‘aims and objectives’,
‘starters’, ‘plenaries’, and ‘mini-plenaries’ are to be found throughout both the
literature and the discourse concerning lesson planning, and knowing precisely
what is meant by each can be challenging for novice and experienced teachers
alike. This chapter discusses these alongside a number of other common
components of a lesson, and explains not only what the terminologies mean,
but why they are of use to teachers in both planning for learning and bringing
that learning to life in the reality of the taught lesson in the classroom.
Let us begin by considering the format of the lesson itself. At its simplest,
a lesson probably looks something like that shown in Figure 1.1. This simple
lesson outline consisting of a beginning, a middle and an end may seem obvious,
but let us consider what this means from both teaching and learning perspec-
tives. The start of a lesson in many schools often involves a change: of rooms,
of teacher, of subject, possibly of buildings. The opening of the lesson needs to
take account of these, all of which can be considered as variables. You will

Figure 1.1 Simple lesson outline.

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 8 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

know whether the lesson happens, say, directly after break or lunchtime. These
may well cause issues; if learners are coming in from outside, they may not
all arrive together, they may be excited, wet, hot, cold, or many other things!
This affects how you begin the lesson. Often there are routine admin matters
to attend to, maybe you are required to take a register, or there might be notices
to give out. From here you proceed to the main body of the lesson when
the main teaching and learning activities will take place. The lesson ends with
some form of summing-up, and of packing away, ready for an orderly end and
dismissal.
This simple description of a lesson forms the basis of what has become
known as the ‘three-part lesson’. A three-part lesson follows the plan as
described above, but with the constituent parts relabelled, as shown in
Figure 1.2. Here the opening part of the lesson has been renamed ‘starter’ and
there then follows the main body of the lesson as before. The final part of the
lesson is now the ‘plenary’. In this renamed version, the outside edges, the
starter and plenary, assume a somewhat greater significance than in Figure 1.1.
They are more than mechanistic ‘get ready’ or ‘pack away’ moments; they now
form part of an integrated teaching and learning system in their own right. Let
us consider each in turn.

Starters

The idea of a starter section is that it should be more than the routine admin-
based procedure described above. A good starter should normally involve
active learning and is designed to be an essential component of the lesson. As
with the description of the beginning of a lesson in the simple lesson outlined
above, it is important for the teacher to know whether all the pupils will be
arriving simultaneously or whether there will be a staggered start if learners are
coming from different preceding lessons, or from a break. The type of starter
planned needs to take account of this, as a planned activity for all will be held
up if the teacher and those pupils who have arrived are having to wait. This
means that we can immediately categorize starters into two essential types:

Figure 1.2 The three-part lesson.

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 COMMON COMPONENTS OF A LESSON 9

1 starters for all, where the whole class is involved from the outset;
2 staggered starters, which allow for participation from late arrivals.

Knowing the type of starter required is the first stage in planning for it. From
this follows planning for the content of the starter. It may be a stand-alone
activity, it may act as a warm-up for the main body of teaching and learning to
follow, or it may be a way of preparing the learners for what is to follow. It can
also be appropriate at times to think of the starter as a behaviour management
tool, as it may be needed to stimulate or calm down the learners from whatever
they have been doing previously. Experienced teachers not only plan starters
specific to the lesson they will be teaching, but also have a range of starters to
use on special occasions when there is an unforeseen need not to do what was
planned. These can be ‘calm-down’ starters, ‘wake-up’ starters, or very long
staggered starters. It is worth the beginning teacher spending some time plan-
ning for these ‘emergency’ starters too.

Plenaries

The word ‘plenary’ comes from Latin, and means ‘full’. The plenary can be
viewed, therefore, as the part of the lesson which completes the teaching and
learning experience for that session. The plenary is an important part of the
lesson, but is one which many new and beginning teachers sometimes struggle
to fit into the taught lesson (as opposed to the planned one!). There is an
important bit of staffroom lore to the effect of ‘pupils learn nothing once the
bell has gone’. There is more than a grain of truth in this. Not only do they
learn little, but there is also a professional responsibility to colleagues who
do not want pupils to be late to their lesson any more than you do. Neither
will you want your next class to be waiting if you over-run. But most impor-
tantly, you, the teacher, are in charge of your lesson and you should not let
things get so out of hand that you allow the lesson to over-run and are taken
by surprise when the bell goes. We will have more to say about the differences
between the planned lesson and the delivered lesson throughout this book, but
for the moment let us emphasize the importance of timekeeping!
The role of the plenary, then, is to bring to a conclusion the learning that
has taken place during the lesson. This could take the form of a question and
answer session, it could involve a reprise of key learning items, it could entail
a sharing of work or activity that has been undertaken, it might involve a
performance or a demonstration by selected learners, or it could involve
learners recapping on what has been done. Allowing time for a plenary is
clearly important, as it enables reflection and consolidation to occur.
Although we have described the plenary as happening at the end of the
lesson here, it is important to note that this is not the only point at which it can

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 10 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

occur. It can also be located at points during the lesson where reflection and
consolidation would be appropriate. These plenaries can be referred to as within-
lesson, mini-plenaries or ongoing plenaries. They are used to ‘complete’ (from
the Latin!) the learning and activity that have taken place up to that point.

Aims and objectives

So far we have been considering the nature of teaching and learning from the
perspective of the structure of the lesson. Before we continue any further, though,
it is appropriate to think about what it is that you, the teacher, are going to be
teaching, and importantly, why you are going to be teaching it. In order to begin
to address these issues, we will now turn to a consideration of aims and objec-
tives. These are often bundled together, as we have done here, but are rather
different in both character and style, and should really be considered separately.

Aims

A lesson aim is concerned with the intentionality of the lesson. The aim of a
lesson can therefore also be thought of as its purpose, and as the teacher plan-
ning the lesson it can be helpful to ask yourself ‘why am I teaching this lesson?’.
The aim, therefore, is a general statement of intent. Here are some examples:

• The aim of this lesson is to introduce the learners to the concept of

pointillism in art.
• Aim: To learn about Venn diagrams.
• Aim: To discuss the significance of the storm scene in Chapter 37 of
Far from the Madding Crowd.
• The aim of the lesson is to improve accuracy when taking ‘free kicks’
in football.

All of these work as aims for the lessons in question. What they lack, however,
is specificity concerning the teaching and learning that will be taking place in
the lesson. This is the role of the objective.

Objectives

A lesson objective places the more philosophical aim of the lesson into a specific
context. Objectives refer directly to what will be taught and learned in the lesson.
Objectives are often encountered in groups rather than singly; whereas it is the
case that a lesson will often have only one aim, it is entirely normal for the same
lesson to have multiple objectives. Many schools still use the examples for
learning objectives provided by the then DfES back in 2004 for this purpose:

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 COMMON COMPONENTS OF A LESSON 11

By the end of the lesson pupils will:

• know that . . . (knowledge: factual information, e.g. names,
places, symbols, formulae, events)
• develop/be able to . . . (skills: using knowledge, applying tech-
niques, analysing information, etc.)
• understand how/why . . . (understanding: concepts, reasons,
effects, principles, processes, etc.)
• develop/be aware of . . . (attitudes and values: empathy, caring,
sensitivity towards social issues, feelings, moral issues, etc.)
(DfES/QCA 2004: 28)

These examples can be used as stems from which to construct objectives that
focus attention onto the key reason for the lesson, namely learning. Objectives
for learning can also be referred to as ‘intended learning statements’, ‘planned
learning’, ‘lesson objectives’ or a variety of other titles. The important thing
about them all, though, is that they refer to learning; this is learning, as opposed
to doing. It is much simpler to write task objectives than learning objectives so
this needs to be central in your mind as you think about the lesson. It should not
be about what the pupils will do, but what they will learn. Certainly pupils will
need activities in order to put their learning into action, but the lesson should
not start from an activity with the learning tacked on as an afterthought, instead
learning should be the very central purpose of the lesson in the first place.
It is for this reason, the difference between doing and learning, that it can
be helpful for the teacher to differentiate for themselves the intended learning
that they have planned for, and the way that this can be communicated to the
pupils. Many schools require learning objectives to be shared with pupils at the
start of a lesson, often written up on the board. Whether or not this is always
good practice is open to debate, but given that so many schools seem to require
it, distinguishing between ‘grown-up’ intended learning statements that
you will have planned for, and child-friendly objective statements that you
share with the pupils can be appropriate. Indeed, writing the text for those
to share with the pupils can enable you to legitimately convert intended
learning statements into task statements in ways that the pupils will under-
stand. Doing this requires a little bit of extra thought on your part, but it does
mean that you can be more effective in the way you plan for learning and
activity to take place in your classroom.

Teaching and learning objectives

Although we have said that the principal purpose of the lesson is learning, it is
clearly the case that in order for learning to flourish, teaching has to be appro-
priate to the subject matter in hand, and to the type and nature of the pupils
in the class for the lesson. For these reasons, among many others, it is logical

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 12 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

for you to think about the sort of teaching you will be doing in order to facili-
tate the learning you are devising in the lesson plan.
Learning objectives will detail learning, but it is highly likely that within
the class there will be a range of abilities, of prior knowledge, of prior experi-
ences and of understanding. This will be the case in all classes, even those
which are ostensibly streamed or setted, and will be even more so in mixed-
ability groupings, as we discuss later in the book. So teaching objectives could
include ways of ensuring that all pupils in the class participate in the learning
activities of the lesson in ways which are appropriate to their own personalized
requirements. Such general objectives may well be common to a variety
of lessons, but it is also desirable to think about detailed ones for individual
lessons. This means that teaching objectives, based on the specific learning
objectives illustrated above, might include such areas as:

• involving all the class in question and answer sessions, not just those
with their hands up;
• ensuring that all pupils get a go at taking a free kick, not just the keen
ones;
• choosing random pupils to demonstrate on the whiteboard what an
overlapping Venn diagram entails;
• ensuring all pupils produce a piece of work which demonstrates their
understanding of pointillist techniques.

These are specific teaching objectives, as we have said, other more general ones
will be included too.
This discussion of learning and teaching objectives takes us into thinking
not only about the content, but also the execution of the main body section of
the lesson, and so let us now turn our attention to that area.

Episodes within a lesson

We have so far in this chapter dealt with what might be termed the ‘edges’ of
the lesson, the starter and the plenary. The main body of the lesson will be
where the majority of learning takes place so we need to deconstruct this in
terms of what its common components might be, and of what planning for
this section should entail.
It is important for all teachers, whether beginning or more experienced,
to give considerable thought to the main section of the lesson. In order to
start to do this, it is useful to break this down into a series of episodes, each of
which has its own characteristics, but which when put together make up a
coherent whole. There is no single magic formula for this – it will depend on a
number of factors, including:

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 COMMON COMPONENTS OF A LESSON 13

• the constituency of the class: top set, bottom set, mixed ability;
• the nature of the topic being taught: practical, theoretical, concep-
tual, skills;
• the availability of specialist equipment;
• the day of the week: would a difficult new topic be best addressed early
in the week, rather than last thing on a Friday afternoon?
• the time of day: are mornings better peak learning time? Is the lesson
just after the post-lunch dip?
• the weather(!): have they just come in from walking to school in a
downpour? Is it windy? Is it snowing for the first time this year? (If so,
forget it, with some classes!)

All of these can have an effect on learning, and although some can be planned
for, as we say throughout this book, a good teacher is one who knows when to
go off-script with their lesson plans and react accordingly and appropriately to
whatever school life throws up that day.
But what can be addressed, and what should be planned for, is a sequence
of teaching and learning episodes in which the teacher has deconstructed the
required learning into a series of smaller steps. This is not just good practice in
terms of providing variety, it also accords with what we know about how the
brain learns:

During a learning episode, we remember best that which comes first,

second best that which comes last, and least that which comes just
past the middle . . . The first items of new information are within the
working memory’s functional capacity so they command our atten-
tion, and are likely to be retained in semantic memory. The later
information, however, exceeds the capacity and is lost. As the learning
episode concludes, items in working memory are sorted or chunked
to allow for additional processing of the arriving final items, which
are likely held in immediate memory unless further rehearsed.
(Sousa 2001: 88)

So, what should go into episodes within a lesson? Here there is a wide range of
potential learning activities, tasks, ways of organizing pupils, and of facili-
tating learning.

Planning for learning episodes

You may be wondering at this stage why we are not simply telling you what the
teaching and learning and learning episodes in your lesson should consist of.
We know that:

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 14 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

Many [beginning teachers] see teaching as an uncomplicated act of

telling students what to learn . . . Consequently beginning teachers
may enter pre-service programs with an expectation that they can be
told how to teach and therefore appear to be in search of a recipe for
teaching.
(Berry 2008: 64)

Sadly there is no such ‘recipe’! And in a similar vein there is no such thing as
the perfect lesson plan. We are instead concentrating on getting you to think
about what the components of your lesson should be and how to organize
thinking about them in a logical way. To recap on what we have said so far,
planning for learning episodes:

• needs to take into account a number of factors;

• should be class-/lesson-specific;
• should involve the teacher and pupils in different types of activity at
different stages;
• should emphasize learning, not activity;
• should be focused on learning which derives from teaching.

So what sort of learning episodes should you be planning for? Clearly the
answer to this question depends on the lesson! Typical activities undertaken
by pupils in the classroom include those shown in Table 1.1:
This is not meant to be exclusive; there are many more activities which
could be included. But it is meant to provide a basis upon which you can develop
your own planning. A useful task you can undertake is to consider which
learning episodes that would be appropriate for your context are not in this list.
Fitting all of these into a single lesson may prove demanding, but the
purpose of Table 1.1 is to make you think about the sorts of learning episodes
which you could include in a lesson. This means that you need to think about
what is to be learned, and the sequence in which it needs to be learned.

Table 1.1 Typical learning episodes

Problem-solving Discussing Thinking

Practising Rehearsing Performing
Skill acquisition Skill development Teamwork
Making things Creative work Divergent thinking
Drawing Remembering Worksheets
Writing Reading Listening
Speaking Communicating Valuing
Forming opinions Analysing Experimenting

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 COMMON COMPONENTS OF A LESSON 15

Teaching styles

The notion of episodes within the main body of the lesson takes us towards a
consideration of the role of the teacher, not only in planning for learning to
take place, but in what the teacher actually does during these episodes. One of
the common tools used to describe this is that of the Mosston and Ashworth
taxonomy of teaching styles (Mosston and Ashworth 2002; also in Leask 2009).
This delineates a range of approaches to teaching and learning viewed from
the perspective of the interaction and involvement of the teacher. It is shown
in Table 1.2.
As you move through different episodes within a lesson it is extremely
likely that you will also be moving between different teaching styles. This
taxonomy allows you to plan for the different ways you can interact with
pupils during these episodes.

Planning for sequencing learning

A lot of the thinking that goes into lesson planning is invisible, as are many
aspects of pedagogy, but in planning a lesson you need to give a lot of thought

Table 1.2 Mosston and Ashworth taxonomy

Mosston and Ashworth Meaning

teaching style

Command Teacher-centred, ‘chalk and talk’

Practice Teacher sets tasks for learners to practise
Reciprocal Pupils work in pairs, one gives feedback to the other
Self-check Teacher establishes success criteria, pupils work at own level
against these
Inclusion Teacher sets range of tasks, pupils choose which they wish to
work on (NB slightly different from usual usage)
Guided discovery Teacher guides the learner towards a predetermined outcome
using questions and tasks
Convergent discovery One outcome required, teacher guides (if necessary)
Divergent discovery Many outcomes possible, teacher supports (if necessary)
Learner-designed Teacher decides topic area, learner chooses own programme of
study within this
Learner-initiated Learner decides what they wish to learn, and organizes how they
will do it
Self-teach Entirely independent with no teacher participation

Source: Adapted from (Mosston and Ashworth 2002)

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 16 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

to sequencing learning episodes. For example, if you want to teach a child to play
chess, you need to begin by explaining the point of the game, what winning
entails, and then how each of the pieces moves. To do this you will need to
sequence the information you give, it cannot come out in one great torrent of
facts! You will also want the learner to have some experience of playing chess
games in order to try out the moves they have learned, being corrected as they go
along, and building up their confidence so that they can move towards mastery.
Later on the child can think about tactics and forward planning, but in the early
stages just getting the moves right is probably sufficient. Now, transfer the way
that chess was being taught here to thinking about lesson planning. The sequence
gone through is shown in Figure 1.3, where lesson planning activity is shown on
the left, and the chess learning sequence on the right. This is clearly a rather over-
simplistic view, but it does give an idea of one possible way in which planning
for learning can be approached.
Let us take a closer look at the middle section of the lesson, viewed from
the planning perspective, and think a little more about what is going on there.
The section we are concentrating on is shown in Figure 1.4. This renders a very
complex process such that it looks very simple – it is not! The notion of breaking
down an activity into a series of stages is actually quite complex. Our chess
example was comparatively straightforward, but suppose that the subject of
the lesson was the Battle of Hastings? Or photosynthesis? Or any of a number
of complex learning constructs that you will have to deal with? In these cases
the breaking down into a series is much more complex, so how do you know
where to start? And what do the pupils need to know in order to move on to
the next stage? Some of these decisions relate to longer-term planning issues, a
point we consider in Chapter 9. But what of the order within a lesson? To start
with, it is helpful to think of what you want the pupils to accomplish in a
single lesson, and work towards that. Then work out what the logical
sequencing of knowledge should be. If they need to know x before they can do
y, then this is fairly clear. If there seems to be a myriad of ways that the learning
could be organized, then you could seek advice from other teachers, but you
might wish to try your own sequence. If you teach in a secondary school,
where you have multiple classes doing the same topic, you can try to vary the
pattern between classes to see how they differ. The important thing is to have
thought about the sequence beforehand, and know how you will do it.
In the simple chess example above we varied instruction with practice.
The pupils learned how the pieces move, then had a go. Of course, you will want
to use visual aids, the whiteboard, animations, and all the assistance of ICT with
the instruction component here. But however you do it, you will then want the
pupils to have a go themselves. One useful question you can ask yourself is:

What is the minimum amount of information/instruction that the

pupils need before they can have a go themselves?

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 COMMON COMPONENTS OF A LESSON 17

Figure 1.3 Lesson planning and chess.

Many beginning and inexperienced teachers make the mistake of talking far
too much. Another common error committed by teachers is to explain excep-
tions too early on (a point we return to in Chapter 4). This will not help the
pupils at the beginning. (To return to chess, if they have not yet mastered
the game, there is little point teaching them about castling.) In practical subjects
especially, the learners want to get on and have a go, so think about the
minimum required information. Then having provided this, what comes next?

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 18 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

Figure 1.4 Planning for sequencing section.

Learning episodes and behaviour management

What comes next will obviously depend on what came before! But what many
teachers like to do is to think about behaviour management at the same time as
they plan for learning episodes. A well-planned lesson can go a long way towards
alleviating behaviour management issues and the converse is certainly true: a
badly planned lesson can cause behaviour management issues. So think back to
the activities in Table 1.2. If you have just had a practical pupil-centred episode,
do you want to follow this with a non-practical teacher-focused episode? If so,
what is the best way of sequencing these into your overall lesson plan? It is also
worth considering having mini-plenaries within an extended period of prac-
tical work, as not only will this help ensure that attention is focused in the right
areas, but it will also help with behaviour management in that you will be able
to rein in any untoward behaviour which may be starting to occur.

Bloom’s taxonomy

Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom 1956) is well known among teachers in English-

speaking countries. It places cognitive activity into a hierarchical list of
thinking, with lower-order thinking at the base level, leading to higher-order

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 COMMON COMPONENTS OF A LESSON 19

thinking at the top. The normal order of these in Bloom’s original taxonomy is
shown on the left of Figure 1.5. Possibly of more use to today’s teachers are
the revisions which were made to the taxonomy by Anderson et al. in 2001.
These revisions are shown on the right of Figure 1.5. The change from nouns to
verbs is clearly helpful for the classroom teacher, but other points to note are
the removal of synthesis as a category, the slight demotion of evaluation, and
the new top-level category of creating. But what is particularly helpful is the
overlaying of the new taxonomy with knowledge types. Learning theory, which
we return to later in this book, categorizes knowledge into a number of different
types, of which four are used by Anderson et al. These are shown in Table 1.3.
What Anderson et al. do is then to overlay these knowledge types onto the
taxonomy to produce a grid as shown in Table 1.4.
Using this grid it becomes possible for teachers to place thought develop-
ment and planning for both higher-order thinking and the important aspects
of knowledge which need to be remembered at the heart of their planning. As
some schools require Bloom’s taxonomy to be explicitly referenced in plan-
ning documentation, using this grid allows for different knowledge types to be
mapped against higher- and lower-order thinking skills.

Figure 1.5 Bloom’s taxonomy and Anderson et al.’s revision.

Table 1.3 Knowledge types

Factual knowledge knowing learned facts, e.g. Paris is the capital of France

Conceptual knowledge knowledge of interrelationships between things, e.g.

knowing how to undertake long division when presented
with a situation which requires it
Procedural knowledge knowing how to do something, e.g. play the piano, or ride
a bike
Meta-cognitive knowledge knowledge of your own thinking, e.g. knowing that
mnemonics may be helpful, or that imaging can help you
remember

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 20 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

Table 1.4 Bloom revision and knowledge types

The Cognitive Process Dimension

The Knowledge Dimension Remember Understand Apply Analyze Evaluate Create
Factual knowledge
Conceptual knowledge
Procedural knowledge
Meta-cognitive knowledge
Source: From Anderson et al. (2001: 28)

Another place where Bloom’s taxonomy is often invoked is in planning

for questioning, and the way we have described it above gives some cues as
to how it could be used. But let us first give some more detailed thought to
questions and questioning.

Planning for questioning

We have seen the importance of planning for learning and of sequencing

episodes within a lesson but there is another aspect of planning for learning
which it is worth giving consideration to, and this is the area of questioning.
We have already said that much planning is invisible in its execution, and
the notion of planning for questioning may seem odd, but good questioning
can really help to take learning forwards. As Ofsted observed: ‘Success . . . is all
about planning and preparation of the outline structure of the lesson, the
teaching episodes, the questions to be asked and when they are to be posed’
(Ofsted 2012: 4).
Planning for the questions that will be asked may seem one of those areas
which teachers do spontaneously. But asking good questions is a different
matter! Asking simple closed questions based on recall is easy; asking questions
which develop thinking takes a little more thought. Using Bloom’s taxonomy,
questions which can be asked at key moments in the lesson can be planned for
in advance of the lesson. This does not mean that you have to script everything
that you will say, but that key questioning episodes can be prepared for with
the text of the question ready. This will help you move away from simple recall
questions to those which develop learning.
Another way in which Bloom’s taxonomy can be used, either in its orig-
inal form or the revision depending upon what your school requires, is in the
preparation of incomplete stems which form the basis of questions addressing
both lower-order and higher-order thinking. These incomplete stems can
be prepared in advance, and many teachers keep a set of stems to hand for

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 COMMON COMPONENTS OF A LESSON 21

when the occasion demands. An example of such a list of stems, using both
original and revision versions, is shown in Table 1.5.
Using these stems as a planning tool you will be able to develop questions
in advance, but also be able to use them in the dynamic of the lesson taking
place as it happens.

Table 1.5 Bloom-derived question stems

Knowledge/ Describe . . .
remembering Describe what you are doing . . .
Show me what you are doing . . .
Can you remember how to . . .
Identify . . .
Can you recall . . .
Comprehension/ What is the idea behind this . . .
understanding Can you show me an example where you . . .
What differences are there . . .
What is going on at this point . . .
Can you demonstrate . . .
Explain . . .
Illustrate . . .
Application/ How will you go about . . .
applying What will you do to . . .
Can you think of (or show me) an instance where . . .
How will you carry out . . .
Analysis/ How might it have been different if . . .
analysing What happens in the bit when you . . .
Can you explain what went on as you were doing that bit where . . .
Compare that with . . .
Can you distinguish between that and . . .
Are you able to describe how you . . .
Synthesis What would happen if you were to put your ideas together with hers . . .
What would happen if you changed that bit where . . .
How could you do this differently . . .
Evaluation/ What was successful . . .
evaluating What changes might you make . . .
Can you justify . . .
How do you feel about . . .
Why do you think that . . .
Are you able to suggest . . .
Creating Can you come up with a solution . . .
Are you able to devise . . .
Can you generate . . .
How about a different response . . .
What would that look like . . .
What would that sound like . . .
How would that be made up . . .
Can you produce . . .

Source: Fautley and Savage (2007: 37)

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 22 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

Conclusion

One of the key messages that runs throughout this book is that it is thinking
about teaching and learning which is key to delivering successful lessons.
Hopefully by talking through the various elements and components of a
lesson, this has equipped you with the resources to be able to achieve this in
the specific context of your school and your teaching within it.

Summary

In this chapter we have looked at the common components which go into

planning for a lesson. We have thought about the three-part lesson and its
derivatives. We have considered a range of common components of a lesson
plan, including starters, plenaries, aims, objectives and episodes. We have
thought about teaching styles and how they can best be used to effectively
deliver teaching and learning. We have also considered what sort of things
constitute a learning episode. Sequencing learning is of key importance, so we
have spent some time thinking about how this can be planned for.
Knowledge is another important element of learning so we have consid-
ered types of knowledge and ways in which teachers can address higher-order
learning with their pupils. This took us to the vital teacher skill of questioning,
and we used pre-planned question stems for asking good questions in the
classroom.

Reflective questions

• How can you involve a variety of lesson episode types within your
teaching?
• What sorts of knowledge are you concerned with in your pedagogy?
How can you best foster and develop these in your pupils?
• Have you broken down the topics you teach into a series of smaller
steps? Are there difficult topics you have to teach where small steps
would be very beneficial to the learners?
• What sorts of questions do you ask? Have you tried asking a colleague
to categorize them for you?
• What makes for a good question in your context? Do you ask good
questions?

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 2 Lesson planning itself

In this chapter we consider aspects of planning that entail thinking about the
whole lesson, we discuss some of the common pitfalls that can be encoun-
tered, and we think about what lesson planning can, and importantly, cannot
achieve. We have already discussed how, when observing experienced teachers
in action, much of what goes on is invisible. It is probably this aspect of peda-
gogy that has led some, including those in governments of all hues, to believe
that being a teacher is all about having good subject knowledge. It is our
contention that this is only part of the equation and that good subject knowl-
edge is not of itself alone a sufficient precondition to make a good teacher. In
Chapter 7 of this book we discuss Shulman’s (1986) notion of ‘pedagogical
content knowledge’; for the moment we want to think about what the role of
teacher and learner are in planning for learning, and what can be achieved.
Depending on where you are on the continuum of novice–expert teacher
experience, there will be some variation in the amount of time you find you
need to spend planning for lessons. We know that at the outset teachers spend a
huge amount of time in planning and preparation. If we think of this in ratios,
the time can easily be 10:1, in other words a one-hour lesson requires 10 hours
of planning. Clearly this is unsustainable in the long term, especially in a full-
time teaching position. As teachers progress along the novice–expert continuum,
we know that they get quicker at planning. But this happens incrementally, so
the 10:1 ratio reduces to 5:1, and so on, down to 1:1. But this still means a lot of
work. As teachers move towards expert status, we would expect the planning to
take less time than the lesson takes to deliver. But there are exceptions to this
too, for instance, when a new topic is being introduced for the first time, when
a new class is being taught, or when a lesson is being observed perhaps.
In this book we want to make a clear distinction between two activities
which although related, are in fact separate. These are:

• planning for learning;

• filling in a lesson plan template.

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 24 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

The first of these, planning for learning, entails thinking about what will be
learned in the lesson, what activities will be undertaken, what learning episodes
will be appropriate, what questions asked, what resources needed, and so on.
The second of these, filling in a blank lesson plan template, involves making
visible the first. Of course, it is logical to think about undertaking both activi-
ties at the same time, but this is not axiomatic. It is the thinking behind the
lesson that takes most of the time. You may get ideas for lessons while you are
teaching, when you think you could do something next lesson with this class,
or even in a few weeks or months time. You will also get these ideas at odd
times too, shopping, out with friends, on the bus, all sorts; some people say
there is no such thing as an off-duty teacher! Capturing these ideas is impor-
tant, but it is the mechanical documentation of filling in the form which can
take a lot of teacher time. Throughout this book we are at pains to make one
thing very clear, and we will keep repeating this point:

There is no magic lesson blank template which will solve all planning prob-
lems at a stroke. Such a thing does not, and never will, exist.

This may seem an odd thing to say in a book on lesson planning, but we know
from the many conversations we have had with teachers at all levels, from
NQTs to SLTs, that many thousands of hours have been spent in schools in
pursuit of this. So much so that we wonder if searching for the ‘Holy Grail’ of
such a plan has actually taken teacher time away from planning for learning.
This is not to say that a good lesson planning template is not needed, it is, and
during the course of this book we shall be looking at this. But it is important to
bear in mind that the template is not of itself the answer. We know Ofsted are
concerned with teaching and learning as the result of planning, not the plan-
ning process in isolation from teaching and learning:

Lesson planning is one of the issues most frequently cited by teachers

as creating workload. Teachers often produce lengthy individual
lesson plans, especially when schools are preparing for Ofsted inspec-
tions, as there is a common misconception that Ofsted inspectors
require detailed written plans for every lesson. This can lead some
teachers to spend a minimum of two hours a week just filling in
lesson plan templates; time that could be better spent planning
meaningful, motivating teaching.
The Government wants to bust this myth by making it clear that
neither the Department for Education nor Ofsted require written
lesson plans for every lesson. Instead, inspectors may want to see
where the lesson they observe fits in the sequence of teaching.
The Government supports the idea that teachers should plan
their lessons but this does not mean imposing a centralised planning

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 LESSON PLANNING ITSELF 25

template on schools. A school’s approach to lesson planning is a

matter for the individual school, best achieved by the headteacher
reaching an understanding with classroom teachers about what kind
of planning is best suited to the school, its teachers and its pupils.
There may be times when it is appropriate to ask individual teachers
for more detailed evidence of how they plan lessons (for example if
there is evidence of poor planning in the past). However, this should
be the exception not the rule.
(DfE 2011)

This links closely to our description of the lesson planning process being
distinct from lesson plan template completion.

What lesson planning cannot achieve

There is a myth among new and beginning teachers that the longer time spent
planning a lesson, the more successful it will be. This attitude tends to manifest
itself when classes are encountered which exhibit challenges to the teacher.
We said at the beginning of this chapter that good subject knowledge alone is
not sufficient for teaching, but we know that in schools where behaviour is not
a challenge, and the possibility of expulsion a real threat, all sorts of things
work which will not necessarily transfer to some of our inner-city or urban
schools. In the cases where challenging classes are met, and we all have them,
the issue of over-planning can become a real problem. We know of trainee
teachers who have spent so long planning for these classes that when they
come to teach they are already exhausted! This helps no one. Lesson planning
is, as we have said, linked to behaviour management, but it is not the sole solu-
tion. Other factors need to be considered too, including whole-school
approaches to behaviour for learning and the consistent application of rewards
and sanctions processes which should already be in place. Lesson planning
alone cannot guarantee good behaviour.
Another thing lesson planning by itself cannot do is to ensure that learning
takes place. There is a common staffroom cry of frustration along the lines of
‘I don’t know why they haven’t learned it yet, I’ve taught it to them hundreds
of times!’ The answer here is that because it has been taught does not mean it
has been learned. Indeed a maxim for teaching everywhere can be expressed
using a simple mathematical symbol:

Teaching≠Learning

In other words, teaching does not equal learning. Reasons for this are mani-
fold, but it is an important message. Its implications are enormous. You can

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 26 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

plan the greatest all-singing, all-dancing lessons ever, but if in their execution
little or no learning is taking place, then you have wasted your time. Planning
needs to be done systematically, and in Chapter 1 we discussed breaking down
learning into episodes. But it is important that even as these episodes are taking
place the teacher is reflecting on what is going well and on what needs
adjusting. Doing this is true assessment for learning, which we will deal with
in Chapter 8. It also means that there is a serious purpose in asking teachers to
reflect on their lessons and evaluate what has taken place with a specific focus
on the learning. In the early stages of their careers teachers tend to focus on
evaluating their own teaching, and it is only after some time has elapsed that
they begin to think about learning.
This shift in focus from teaching to learning can be represented graph-
ically, as shown in Figure 2.1. What Figure 2.1 means is that there is a balance
to be achieved between a focus on teaching and a focus on learning. With
experience, and over time, teachers move further to the right of this figure.
This does not mean that reflecting on teaching becomes less important, but
that more experienced teachers think about the balance between teaching
and learning, and evaluate teaching by considering the effects that it has on
learning.
From our perspective in thinking about lesson planning, it is appropriate
to think of lesson planning as part of a cycle which begins with the evaluation
of the previous lesson, this then informing what will take place in the next
lesson. The reason for discussing reflecting on teaching and learning in
the way the last few paragraphs have been is that it is important to consider the
way that learning has been progressing. This will have a significant effect on
the way you plan for the next lesson. It also prevents you planning a term’s
worth of lessons in one go. If you teach the same thing to parallel classes, you
will know that 9Z can go racing ahead while 9X are still struggling to get to
grips with the basic concepts. As we said, teaching≠learning! So evaluating

Figure 2.1 Shift from teaching to learning.

Source: Fautley and Savage (2008: 127).

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 LESSON PLANNING ITSELF 27

learning at the end of a lesson helps you to know where to pitch the start of the
next lesson. A useful technique is to do this as soon as possible after the lesson.
We know that schools are complex, and that this means that teachers have to
deal with a myriad of issues at the same time, so taking a few moments to do
this at the end of each lesson will mean that it is still fresh in your memory.

What should a lesson plan include?

There are many views on what a lesson plan can include, and there are many
variations on the lesson planning documentation that schools expect their
teachers to fill in. This means that what you are required to do by your school,
higher education institution (HEI) or teacher training programme may differ
from what we discuss here. This does not mean that either view is wrong,
simply that there are many variations on what is viewed as important.
Depending upon where you are on the novice–expert continuum some
information about the class may be required. Even for very experienced
teachers it is helpful to know who are the pupils with special needs, who are
gifted and talented, and which pupils fall into other cohorts, for example,
English as an additional language, looked after children, children from prob-
lematic home backgrounds, children of prisoners, children who live between a
number of addresses, and many others. This information is of use in planning
for differentiated and personalized learning within the lesson.
We have already discussed aims and objectives. The importance of these
should not be overlooked. They are a significant feature of the lesson planning
process, and help to place what is being done into a logical and sequential
context. We have also looked at intended learning statements. Again, these are
important in bringing the lesson to life, and in ensuring that what is being
taught and learned is of direct relevance to the class. As we shall discuss in
Chapter 8 on assessment, written well, a good intended learning statement
becomes its own assessment criterion.
Which leads us to the body of the lesson, where we have suggested that
you think about, and plan for, a variety of learning episodes to take place. In
doing this there is always an imperative to think about how long each episode
should take, and we have already emphasized the importance of timing and
timekeeping. One way in which the lesson planning template can be of assist-
ance with this is when learning episodes within a lesson are shown with
timings. An example of this is given in Figure 2.2.
This shows the timings involved in a 75-minute lesson which starts at
10.00 a.m. The timings on the left of the figure show progression through the
various episodes. In this example many of the episodes are in 10-minute blocks
but there is no necessity for this to be the case. Planning a lesson in this way
helps to visually break down the episodes so that you can see what order to do

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 Figure 2.2 Outline lesson plan with timings.

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 LESSON PLANNING ITSELF 29

things in as you move through the various stages. However, it is during the
delivery of the lesson that you will find out whether the timings you planned
for are realistic or not! It is important that the lesson plan is not treated as a
fixed and immutable object from which you cannot ever deviate. Differences
between the planned lesson and the delivered lesson should be evident in the way
that you as teacher make professional judgements concerning the ways in
which things take place. So deviating from the plan is not only acceptable, it is
to be expected. This is another invisible aspect of more experienced teachers’
pedagogy, and another point that we re-emphasize throughout this book.
When novice teachers deliver a planned lesson, they often tend to do so
sequentially, with all of the activities being undertaken in order. Due to the
often unforeseeable nature of classroom life, this can lead to situations where
the final practical activity can be started with, say, only two minutes left to run!
The way in which more experienced teachers avoid this problem is by shifting
their attention away from sequentially operationalizing the lesson plan, and
instead constantly monitoring the sequence of the lesson so as to decide what
needs to be altered in order to arrive successfully and without stress at the
endpoint. These two perspectives are represented visually in Figure 2.3.
What Figure 2.3 shows is that experienced teachers plan sequentially, but
operationalize their within-lesson thinking, what Schön (1983) might refer to
as ‘reflection-in-action’, from the end of the lesson backwards. In other words
they know from the lesson plan what they want to cover, but they are sim-
ultaneously monitoring their own performance so that this can be accom-
plished within the span of the delivered lesson. If this means things need to be
jettisoned in order to reach the end of the lesson, then so be it. The problem of
over-running is especially acute when novice teachers’ lessons run over the
bell going for the end of the lesson. Good behaviour management does require
an orderly end to the lesson, and so this needs to be planned for and enacted.
Likewise if things are going more rapidly than planned for, then the teacher
knows they can allow more time to be spent on some activities than they had
originally envisaged. This contrasts with the sequential unalterable delivered
lesson of the novice teacher. Knowing this may be of use in helping novice
teachers with what mentors often say is a key problem for them, that of
timekeeping.
This distinction between the planned lesson and the delivered lesson is a key
one, and is another theme we return to during the course of this book. It is
important to bear in mind at all times that the lesson plan is a guide, not an
end in itself. It is the way the lesson plays out in practice that is important
for the learners. They will not know how many hours have been put into
honing the lesson, they will only be aware of what happens in the classroom.
As the quotation from the DfE at the start of this chapter showed, it is apparent
that what Ofsted will be concerned with is the quality of the learning
experience.

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 30 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

Figure 2.3 Novice and experienced teachers’ foci of attention.

Common pitfalls in lesson planning

This discussion of timing takes us towards thinking about some of the other
common pitfalls to be found in lesson planning. Timing figures significantly
here, but other pitfalls relate to the appropriateness of material taught and
availability of resources.
Apart from lesson over-run, another common planning pitfall is to over-
allow or under-allow for some aspects of the lesson. After a while you will

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 LESSON PLANNING ITSELF 31

know that it takes, say, about five minutes to get the equipment ready for a
certain sort of practical episode, so planning that this can be done in 90 seconds
is unreasonable, likewise allowing 10 minutes for it is simply a waste of time.
This does not mean that you need to become a sort of classroom time-and-
motion monitor with a stopwatch, and harangue the pupils if they take
10 seconds too long in getting things ready!
In some ways linked to this is a tendency for beginning teachers to try to
pack too much into the lesson. The lesson they have planned contains far too
many activities, teaching episodes and practical work to be achievable in the
given time. During the course of the delivered lesson these points become
apparent, but because they still are operating in the way shown for novice
teachers in Figure 2.3 they are not able to do anything about it. Sharing plans
with mentors and more experienced teachers helps significantly, especially as
this over-stuffing tends to occur at the start of a teacher’s training.
As a corollary to this, having experienced over-stuffing, sometimes begin-
ning teachers follow this with under-scheduling. Having had far too much in
one lesson, they then react by planning only one thing for the subsequent
lesson. Inevitably the pupils then finish this learning within a few minutes,
leaving the novice teacher wondering what to do for the next hour.
Another related issue is over-specification of activity sequences in lesson
plans. We have seen examples where things are planned for in unnecessary
detail. If the pupils need one special measuring scale ruler per pair from the
stock cupboard, then details of which order they will be given out can be too
much (although there can always be a reason for things in the classroom, and
as an observer, these are questions worth asking). Likewise listing every tiny
detail of what is to be done can also be over-specifying. If the pupils need to
work from page 56, that is fine, but writing into a lesson plan to say ‘now 9Z,
I want you turn to page 56 in your text books, that is the one with the heading
in green followed by blue writing’ is probably too much. This represents an
over-emphasis on filling in the lesson plan template at the expense of
thoughtful planning for learning.
Another frequently encountered pitfall, especially common among trainee
teachers, is to plan a lesson for an idealized class, as opposed to the real one
that will be receiving the lesson. This tends to involve a number of problematic
features, including not recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of the real
pupils in front of the teacher, not taking into account the nature of the learners
as they really are, and, particularly alarming, not taking the prior learning of
the class into account at all.
It is this last point which tends to cause the most problems for the teacher
when they come to the delivered lesson. It seems obvious when pointed out,
but the sequence of learning needs both planning and monitoring to ensure
that what is planned for is learned, and that what is needed has been dealt
with. Knowing the prior knowledge of a class is obviously easier with time,

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 32 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

after all, if you are the teacher you will know what they have done previously.
For teachers new to a class, this information may not be quite so immediately
accessible, but nonetheless it does need to be looked into.
Another area often neglected by novice teachers is the issue of equipment
availability. It is often the case that some costly items of equipment are avail-
able on a shared basis, and there is normally a way of booking or a rota system
so that such articles are fairly distributed. Novice teachers sometimes assume
that they can have equipment at any time, and so plan lessons accordingly.
Clearly this will not work, and lesson planning needs to engage with school
systems already in place, however informal they may seem.
Another pitfall is where the planned lesson, when put into practice, tran-
spires to have some problematic aspects which require correction in delivery.
For novice teachers, thinking on one’s feet can be a skill which has yet to be
acquired, and so correcting these flaws takes rather more time than would
normally be expected. This can affect the flow of the lesson, and as with so
many things in teaching, can also lead to behaviour management issues if
unchecked.
This discussion of common pitfalls is not intended to be exhaustive, but it
is meant to illustrate some of the issues and to point to more general planning
issues which need to be taken into consideration when thinking about teaching
and learning.

Who is the lesson plan for?

Lesson planning is in many ways a difficult activity to engage with. We know

that it is one which teachers across the novice–expert continuum continue to
find problematic. There are many reasons for this. Planning for learning is
complex, and involves the teacher in an activity which only partly relates to
the way the lesson will be delivered. Let us clarify what is entailed in that last
statement. It is undeniably the case that professional expertise of teachers is an
invisible part of their pedagogic practice. This is true whether it applies to
teaching and learning, pedagogic content knowledge, behaviour manage-
ment, crowd control, or sheer presence in the playgrounds, public spaces,
corridors, and classrooms of the school. We have all known teachers who walk
into a classroom and simply by being there the class falls silent. These attributes,
always built up over time, are carried with the teacher as part of their invisible
cloak of professionalism. It is doubtful whether these attributes are directly
learnable. If they were, we could teach all novice teachers how to silence a class
simply by walking in. We know it is not as simple as that. So within the activity
of planning for lessons, teachers need to be aware that they bring with them
their own personal baggage of teacher persona. This means that planning for
learning, certainly by novice teachers, needs to be planning for themselves.

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 LESSON PLANNING ITSELF 33

This is why the process of planning only partly relates to the way the lesson will
be delivered. Indeed, the same lesson plan could be delivered in entirely
different ways by two different teachers.
What this all means is that we need to give some attention to the issue of
who the lesson plan is actually for. There are a number of possible audiences
for this, including:

• the teacher
• the head of department
• the rest of the department
• a university tutor
• the subject mentor
• the professional mentor
• the learning coordinator
• the SLT
• governors
• Ofsted
• the pupils

Each of these will have different requirements and different reasons for wanting
the lesson plan. But the primary audience should always be the first and last
people on this list, namely the teacher and the pupils. It is unlikely that you
would want the pupils to actually see the lesson plan (especially as it should
contain information about personalizing learning for key named pupils), so
they are the audience for its delivery, whereas the others on the list may well
want to be involved in seeing the planning process in action, or reflect on its
outworking in the lesson itself.
This means that different levels of detail may well be required, depending
on who the audience is. For an experienced teacher planning an unobserved
lesson for themselves to deliver it may well suffice to have a brief outline of
what is required. For an observed lesson it is quite possible that more detail will
be needed. Depending on why the lesson is being observed may well affect the
level of detail that can reasonably be expected in the lesson planning docu-
ment. This is a point which many novice teachers fail to grasp. They often
complain that ‘real’ teachers do not spend many hours staying up half the
night, as they do, planning lessons. This is because of the invisibility we spoke
of before. Experienced teachers are able clearly to differentiate between the
planning process and completing the lesson planning blank template. For
novice teachers the two are inextricably bound together. So although experi-
enced teachers often appear to have little by way of detailed lesson planning
documentation, the reality is that the detail is there but invisibly located
in their heads. Asking novice teachers to produce detailed lesson planning
renders it visible, and, importantly, amenable to discussion, and suggestions

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 34 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

for improvement can therefore be readily made and incorporated, a point we

return to in Chapter 11.
But in all of this it is easy to lose track that the real purpose of a lesson plan
is to facilitate learning; this should always be at the forefront of attention.
While you may be able to impress lesson observers with your plate-spinning
skills in keeping lots of disparate activities going on at the same time, if the
people who observe your lesson know anything at all about education, they
will want to see the effect that you are having upon the learners. In relation to
this, an interesting question to ask yourself is this:

In this lesson, who is working hardest, me, or the pupils?

There may well be good reasons why in some lessons we would want to see the
teacher working harder than the pupils. However, many seasoned lesson
observers say that when watching learning, as opposed to watching teaching,
they expect the pupils to be working at least as hard as the teacher. Is this the
case for the lessons you are planning and delivering? If an observer came into
your class, what would they see more of – teaching or learning? This takes us
back to the point we stated earlier on in this chapter, that teaching≠learning.
You can be teaching away, but very little learning could be taking place. So,
how do you do something about this? This is a point we will address particu-
larly in Chapter 8 on assessment.

The starting point for lesson planning

We have looked at the various ways in which lesson planning needs to take
into account a wide variety of factors when planning for learning, so let us turn
our attention now to the beginnings of the planning process.
In later chapters we discuss how an individual lesson needs to be seen as
one of a series, which have their origins in the planning evidenced in a unit of
work. Throughout this book we ask a series of key questions which the teacher
planning the lesson needs to consider. These will often be simple restatements
of, or variations upon these three:

1 What do I want the class to learn?

2 Why do I want them to learn it now?
3 What do I need to do to enable them to learn it?

For an individual lesson plan the starting point will be questions 1 and 2 from
this list. These might seem very obvious, but we have already seen that many
teachers start instead with the question ‘what do I want the class to do?’. This
is a very different question: the key point of schooling is education, not

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 LESSON PLANNING ITSELF 35

Figure 2.4 Initial lesson plan template.

child-minding, and so lessons should be predicated upon learning rather than

activity. Knowing what you want the class to learn, it is then possible to move
to the other questions in the series. Thinking about why this lesson should be
delivered now, this should be apparent from the way in which the medium-
term planning structure delineates delivery of the various elements of what-
ever the topic is. The next stage in this sequence is to ask what the teacher
needs to do, and bear in mind the maxim we spoke of in Chapter 1 on common
components, ‘What is the minimum amount of information/instruction that
the pupils need before they can have a go themselves?’ To this end, some
teachers find it helpful to begin with a fairly minimal planning template and
use this to develop initial ideas. Such a template is shown in Figure 2.4. From
this initial template further and more complex ideas can be added later.
However, as we discussed above, it is the thinking that is the key element of the
lesson planning; filling in the documentation is a distinct activity.

Summary

In this chapter we have discussed aspects of the lesson plan itself. We have
differentiated between the thinking that goes into planning and the filling in

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 36 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

of blank lesson planning templates. We have observed that teaching does not
equal learning, and that it is learning which should be the key aspect of the
lesson plan itself, as well as the enacted lesson which results from it. We have
looked at the ways in which experienced teachers plan in the heat of the
moment by having a point of attention which is not the end of the lesson, and
have discussed how doing this is an important aspect of developing expertise
in teaching. We have thought about episodes that can occur within a lesson
and how these can be planned for. The important aspect of timing has been
revisited, and we have pointed out some of the common pitfalls that can occur
in lesson planning. Finally, and most importantly, we have discussed how it
is learning that should be at the heart of all lesson planning, and thus it is
learning, rather than teaching, which should lie at the heart of all good lessons.

Reflective questions

• Where does the main focus of your reflections lie, teaching or

learning?
• How do you manage a lesson when you realize your planned timing is
awry? Have you ever still been teaching when the bell goes?
• Have you encountered any of the pitfalls we discussed in this chapter
yourself? How did you deal with them?
• How do you plan for changes between episodes? How do you opera-
tionalize these in practice?
• Have you started to think about sequencing learning?

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 3 Pedagogy and the plan:
bringing it to life

Throughout this book we emphasize that lesson planning has a close and vital
link to your emerging pedagogy. Your lesson planning will have consequences
for your actions within the classroom. We have seen that it is important to
make explicit and constructive links between the time you spend planning
lessons and the time you spend actually teaching. To this, we would add a third
and vitally important period of time: the time you spend reflecting on and
evaluating your work as a teacher. This triangle of activity underpins the
vast majority of your work as a teacher. Within this chapter, we are going
to explore this triangle in some detail and think about how you can make
those constructive links between these three key activities.

Lesson planning and curriculum development

Lesson planning, of the type we have been discussing in this book, can be a
solitary, private activity. It involves many different skills, including diagnosing
and setting appropriate learning objectives, choosing relevant and purposeful
teaching activities, designing assessment and differentiation frameworks,
assembling or producing helpful resources and much more besides. This
private process comes to life within the classroom. You, the teacher, are the
one who embodies the lesson plan and presents it to your pupils. Your peda-
gogy is the vehicle by which this embodiment and transformation can take
place. For this reason, numerous educational thinkers, researchers and writers
over the decades have emphasized the importance of the teacher in the process
of curriculum development. This led Lawrence Stenhouse, a professor of educa-
tion at the University of East Anglia, to famously state that there is ‘no curricu-
lum development without teacher development’ (1975: 142).
Perhaps you find this a curious statement to make. After all, the processes
of curriculum development, which include lesson planning of the type we
have explored together in this book, can be done away from the classroom in

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a private space, and perhaps not even by teachers themselves (just have a look
at the vast array of curriculum materials written by educational ‘experts’ you
can buy online). But this line of thought misses the key point that Stenhouse
was making. For him, and for us, there is an intricate and intrinsic link between
the processes of planning that a teacher undertakes and the pedagogy that
they adopt within the classroom to present the fruit of that planning process
to their pupils. To explore this further, we will spend some time considering
each of the main ‘characters’ in this scenario: first, you, the teacher; second,
the pupils.
Teaching involves your whole being. Who you are is as vital as what you
teach. As one teacher famously quipped, ‘You don’t teach your subject, you
teach yourself!’ While this assertion has a significant and important element of
truth within it, most teachers are concerned with teaching a subject, or topic,
and not about self-promotion! However, the statement does ring true in a
more fundamental way. At all ages, in our experience, pupils do look up to
their teachers (even though they may not always show it); they respect them
and they are, for many, role models in various ways. Who you are as a teacher,
how you behave, how you speak, how you administer praise or reprimands,
how you deal with injustices, whether you are efficient and organized, and a
whole host of other general attributes, are all noticed consciously or subcon-
sciously by pupils. These things matter to pupils, and their parents, and they
learn from them. Clearly, none of these things have anything to do with the
subject you are teaching. They are about your professional role as a teacher.
As an aside to this opening paragraph about the importance of establishing
an appropriate professional identity in the classroom, the most recent set of
Professional Standards for Teachers emphasizes that teachers need to maintain
an appropriate professional identity both inside and outside the classroom. This
has significant consequences for the way in which you conduct yourself in
public settings too.
So, in a general sense, in your teaching role you are embodying important
general ‘ways of being’ that pupils will learn from. As we have seen, these will
include models of behaviour, communication and collaboration (with pupils
and other teachers), and your seriousness in promoting active engagement
with the opportunities for teaching and learning in your classroom. But,
second, in a more specific way, whether you are teaching in a primary or
secondary school, you will be the vital first point of contact in relation to the
specific subjects that you teach for your pupils. For secondary school teachers,
the science curriculum may be in place but you, as a teacher of science, repre-
sent that subject – day in, day out – for your pupils. Like it or not, you ‘live’
science for them by the way that you act and behave in the classroom. This has
significant consequences for the way you teach science. If you are bored by the
curriculum that you are offering, can you really expect your pupils to be inter-
ested and engaged? The same is true for primary school teachers. While you

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 PEDAGOGY AND THE PLAN 39

will have to teach a broader range of subjects and topics than your secondary
colleagues, the same key point is true for you too. You need to be a passionate
advocate for all the subjects that you teach, whether or not you feel that you
are a specialist in that particular area. In this sense, pupils really do take the
lead from their teachers. If you want them to be enthusiastic about your
subject, then you will need to be enthusiastic about it. If you want them to be
engaged and motivated to learn in your subject, then you have to provide that
earnest and serious approach to their learning that they deserve.
So, is there no curriculum development without teacher development?
Stenhouse’s key phrase shows us, as teachers, that if we are serious about our
intention to develop the curriculum we offer to our pupils in this way, we
cannot but help develop ourselves as teachers too. The two things go hand in
hand. In terms of the planning process specifically, it will be important to
remember that your own sense of teacher identity informs the process of plan-
ning. How do you feel about the lesson plan that you are putting together?
Does it capture your imagination? Are you finding it hard to make natural links
between various sections of the lesson? Is the narrative of the lesson clearly
identifiable? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then it is probably
unrealistic to expect the majority of your pupils to make sense of the lesson
either.
More positively, build on your own sense of enthusiasm for a particular
subject or topic in your planning. Look out for ideas and approaches that
engage your imagination, act as triggers for your own curiosity and enhance
your own intrinsic motivation. Design your teaching activities carefully in
order to sustain that initial enthusiasm that pupils will have. Ensure that they
have the correct balance of challenge while remaining within their capabili-
ties. Choose your resources carefully. Make sure that they do not undermine
the approach that you want to take within a particular lesson. Like you, they
need to be ‘on message’ and chosen for a specific reason that enhances
the lesson’s central learning objectives. Think back to those lessons in your
own education that excited you. Which ones stick in your mind? Why is
that? Ultimately, remember that you are charged with teaching a particular
subject, or set of subjects, but fundamentally who you are in the classroom is
as important as what you teach.

An informed pedagogy: the site for teacher development

In the previous section, we urged you to consider the process of lesson plan-
ning as a significant element of curriculum development and as being funda-
mentally linked to your own development as a teacher. We emphasized that
the time you spend planning your lessons in private needs to be cognisant of
the fact that you, as a human being, are as important in your pupils’ learning

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 40 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

as the subject that you are teaching them about. How you ‘are’ in the class-
room is as important as what you ‘do’.
In this section of this chapter, we will talk about the development of an
‘informed pedagogy’ as the site for your development as a teacher. By ‘informed
pedagogy’, we mean a pedagogy that is informed by your lesson planning
processes in terms of who you are in the classroom, the subject content and the
chosen pedagogical techniques that you are using within that lesson. In doing
so, we will be getting down to some of the nitty-gritty of what you will be
doing in the classroom, minute by minute, throughout your lesson.

Using learning objectives

As we have seen in previous chapters, establishing learning objectives for every

lesson is a vital and integral part of every lesson plan. These learning objectives
will have been designed to capture an essence of the learning for the lesson
rather than merely describing the activities of the lesson (remember that they
are a ‘learning’ objective not a ‘doing’ objective).
In recent years there has been a considerable debate about the role and
function of learning objectives with an individual lesson. It is not unusual for
us to visit schools where every lesson, regardless of subject, begins in the same
way: pupils enter the room, they take out their planners and they write down
the learning objectives for the lesson which have been displayed at the front of
the classroom. When questioned, teachers report that this is an excellent way
to settle a class quickly, it sets a focus for the lesson from the outset in the
pupils’ minds, and prevents the ‘why are we doing this?’ type questions that
pupils often ask!
While this might sound quite reasonable, we do wonder whether this prac-
tice negates any opportunities for learning as a journey or series of discoveries
within lessons. Learning objectives might be communicated to pupils at other
stages of the lesson, perhaps when a teaching activity has been completed and
pupils really do feel like they have found something out for themselves for the
first time. More fundamentally, you might want to consider whether pupils
actually need to be told, week by week, what the learning objectives of the lesson
are. Surely a good test of whether a lesson has been successful or not would be
whether pupils can tell you what they have learnt without having to be told by
you? This would be an interesting ‘test’ for any teacher to take. In one sense,
whether or not what pupils say they learnt matches with what you think they
should have learnt is immaterial. They might have learnt something much more
interesting than you had planned! Clearly, in most cases we would hope that
you would be able to use your chosen learning objectives in such a way as to
stimulate learning in that particular area. But being too dogmatic about this
could lead to problems. Being flexible in planning for what pupils learn, and the
pace at which they learn it, is a sign of a teacher’s competence and confidence.

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 PEDAGOGY AND THE PLAN 41

So, consider carefully how you use the learning objectives in your lesson
plan with your classes. Do not fall into the trap of a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
Learning objectives should primarily be for your benefit, not the pupils. They
will be written in language that may not be suitable for all pupils. You may
want to write a more ‘pupil-friendly’ version for use within the classroom. The
key point is that you have a strategy for their use that works in conjunction
with the rest of your pedagogy within that lesson. In terms of using learning
objectives within lessons, basic options include telling the pupils what the
learning objectives are at the start of the lesson, using them to structure a
process of reflection through a plenary at the end of the lesson, or making
reference to them at specific points throughout the lesson to help signpost
and consolidate key learning as it occurs. However you use your learning
objectives, do so in a thoughtful way that you can justify to others.

Valuing every pupil: appropriate learning outcomes

Alongside your learning objectives, the learning outcomes for each lesson are
an important part of your lesson planning. As we discussed in earlier chapters,
these will need to be explicitly linked to your learning objectives and are an
important component of your assessment strategy. Defined appropriately,
they will give you a clear indication of whether or not pupils are learning what
you intended as they engage in various activities.
Like every element of your lesson plan, learning outcomes need to be
brought to life in your lesson. Part of this involves them being meaningful to
every pupil in your class. While it would be clearly impractical to have detailed
learning outcomes written by you for each specific pupil in each class that you
teach, there are important pedagogical strategies such as differentiation and
personalization that you can adopt to meaningfully translate your learning
outcomes for the benefit of each pupil. In Chapter 5 we will examine both of
these important strategies in more detail.
However, at this point it is important to raise a key issue that, perhaps, is
one of the most significant in terms of the difference between your early expe-
riences of teaching as part of an initial teacher education course and your work
as a full-time member of staff within a school. In the former, you are para-
chuted into a school for a period of time and expected to take over a selection
of classes for a short period. However you are introduced, the pupils know that
you are there training to be a teacher. As a full-time member of staff, you are
there for the long term, pupils respond to you differently and your own sense
of identity within the school is considerably stronger. You will be teaching
your classes for longer periods of time, perhaps several years, and you will get
to know the pupils within those classes really well. This has a major impact on
your ability to plan appropriate learning objectives and outcomes for those
classes, perhaps even with specific pupils in your mind as you do so.

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A cohesive approach to teaching activities

We have written at length in the earlier chapters of this book about the design
of engaging teaching activities that give pupils the opportunity to explore key
.

concepts and ideas, develop their understanding of these and, hopefully, boost
their intrinsic motivation to want to find out more. While the design of these
activities needs to be covered in detail within your lesson plan, your classroom
pedagogy needs to present these appropriately and link them cohesively to
other elements of the lesson (e.g. starter activities, plenaries or other assess-
ment strategies).
This will require you to be organized. Your lesson plan will contain a list of
physical and virtual resources for the lesson. These need to be to hand (whether
available electronically on a computer or located within your classroom) and in
an appropriate form for easy distribution to your pupils. While some subjects
make use of more resources than others, the organization of pens, textbooks,
musical instruments, digital cameras, data-logging devices, or whatever else
pupils will need to use in your lesson does not happen automatically.
Beyond organization, teaching activities need to be framed appropriately
both before the commencement of the activity, during it and afterwards. Pupils
will need an indication from you as to why a specific teaching activity has been
included in the lesson (this might be a chance to hint at a learning objective?)
and how it relates to previous work they have done. Certain activities will need
to be modelled by you (this is different from providing them with an explana-
tion), and this modelling process needs to be practised carefully (remember,
you can practise elements of your pedagogy like this without any pupils being
physically present). During the teaching activity, pupils may need reassur-
ances about their work, they may need to receive further support from yourself
in some way, or be extended further if they are finding the basic activities too
easy. Following the teaching activity, pupils will need a record of what they
have done, what they learnt by doing it, and the implications of this for future
work. Evidence of this may be produced in various ways depending on your
subject area, but make sure that there is some trace of the activity left in the
pupils’ work. If the teaching activity has been well designed and successfully
executed within the lesson, you will be wanting to refer back to it at key
moments in future lessons.

An intelligent use of resources

The resources that you use to support your teaching are an important part of
the way that learning is facilitated with your pupils. There is a considerable
amount of research around concepts such as ‘activity theory’ that demonstrate
how our human actions are informed and mediated by the tools or resources
that we use (e.g. writing using a pencil and paper is very different from writing

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on a computer screen – beyond the obvious practical differences there are

cognitive and psychological differences too). We will examine some of these
ideas in more detail in the next chapter.
For now, your lesson plan will have identified the key resources that you
require for your lesson. Your skilful use of these resources will aid the flow and
pace of the lesson as well as provide a range of alternative opportunities to help
your pupils engage with the learning objectives you have set. Be organized!
Pupils really dislike disorganized teachers. Make sure all your resources are
available and to hand. Check any pieces of technology that you are using prior
to the lesson (and double check them!); make sure you have enough of them
for use with your class.
More fundamentally, be reflective about the adoption of specific tools
within the lesson. Even the best formed lesson plans may have miscalculated
the use of a particular resource. Be prepared to be flexible and always plan for
a way out of a particular activity if things are not going well. Many experienced
teachers always have a ‘Plan B’ up their sleeve which is quick and easy to imple-
ment for when a lesson has gone off track!

Differentiation and personalization

Your chosen strategies for differentiation and personalization will have impor-
tant consequences for the way you teach in your lesson. These will be explored
further in Chapter 5, but for now it will be essential that you think through the
consequences of these strategies for the use of your time in the lesson, as well
as the time of other adults who may be supporting your work in that lesson.
Alongside decisions about the allocation of your time in supporting individ-
uals or groups of pupils, the pace of your lesson will also need to be considered.
This a fine judgement; too fast a pace and you may leave some pupils strag-
gling, too slow a pace and you may find some pupils getting bored and
distracted. Getting the balance right here is difficult but there will be many
ways that you can use differentiation strategies to help provide a personalized
approach for each pupil in your class.

Assessment

Alongside strategies for differentiation and personalization, your lesson plan

will have given some thought to an appropriate assessment strategy for your
lesson. This is a central part of your pedagogy that will allow you to make
judgements about whether or not pupils are learning what you expected
them to learn within a particular lesson. In Chapter 8 we will be exploring
this in considerable detail, including an analysis of the different forms of
assessment and their implications for your pedagogy. For now, it is important
to emphasize that your assessment strategy will work hand in hand with other

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elements of your lesson plan. It will be linked to your learning objectives and
outcomes, have a part to play in the design and delivery of your teaching
activities, and will also inform the strategies for differentiation that you have
adopted.
Within the lesson itself, the best forms of assessment are seamlessly inte-
grated within the various activities of the lesson. You can find out a massive
amount about pupils’ learning just by standing back and watching them
working. Observation can be a valuable assessment strategy. The key thing to
think about here is what you are going to do with the information drawn from
those observations. Similarly, teacher-led or pupil-to-pupil discussion about
an aspect of the lesson and the learning contained therein can be highly
enlightening for you as a teacher. Again, having planned for an opportunity
for such a discussion in your lesson plan and rehearsed and practised some
specific questions to help stimulate the discussion, what are you going to do
with the information that you have gleaned from the discussion? How will it
be captured and help develop your future work with those pupils? Making
judgements about the outcomes of pupils’ work will also be a valuable assess-
ment strategy. All teachers love marking, don’t they? Again, marking work has
an immediate benefit for the individual pupil (providing they look at what
you have written) but there is also a major benefit for you too. You can quickly
gain an overall impression of how that individual pupil is doing, as well as how
that class as a whole has grasped a particular concept or activity that you have
introduced it to.
Assessment, then, can have a vital role to play in helping you understand
the impact your teaching is having on your pupils’ development. This moves
us into the final section of this chapter where we are going to turn our
attention to the third key part of the triangle of activity that forms the bulk of
your work.

Reflection and evaluation: two essential tools for

continuing teacher development

In this final part of this chapter we are going to consider two vitally important
strategies that constitute the third part of our triangle of teacher activity. The
cognitive processes involved in reflection and evaluation help you make
constructive links between the mental planning processes behind lesson plan-
ning and the intense activity of teaching itself. Used constructively, they will
also help you improve as a teacher.
Right at the outset we want to emphasize that reflection and evaluation
are not the same. Like differentiation and personalization, there are areas of
overlap, but we will be considering each in turn in an attempt to disentangle
some common misconceptions.

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Reflection at the heart of your pedagogy

One thesaurus (Collins 2002) has the following entry for ‘reflection’: ‘a calm,
lengthy, intent consideration’; it follows this with words such as ‘musing,
rumination, thoughtfulness, contemplation, reflexion, meditation, introspec-
tion and speculation’. In the hurly-burly of school life, you might ask yourself
whether reflection, while desirable, is possible! While many programmes of
initial teacher education promote the idea of the ‘reflective practitioner’, how
realistic is this for every teacher?
Before we answer that question, a more basic one needs to be asked: what
does it mean to be a reflective teacher? Drawing on the work of Donald Schön
(1983: 332–4), we think the reflective teacher does the following:

• They listen to their pupils and really seek to understand them as

unique individuals, tailoring their instruction, speech and learning
resources to respond to their specific requirements. Please note the
links here to the strategies of differentiation and personalization.
• They think beyond their lesson plan in seeking to respond to indi-
vidual students’ needs and requirements. Again, this has resonances
with your broader pedagogy. A well-constructed lesson plan can get
you so far, but you need to be open and responsive within the class-
room itself and, at times, willing to deviate from your lesson plan if
necessary.
• They use the curriculum as an inventory of themes to be understood
rather than a set of materials to be learnt. This is a contentious thought
in the current educational climate. But, we would argue, it is an impor-
tant one for you to consider. After all, is there not a difference between
teaching a pupil something and educating them about it?
• They expand their knowledge of the pupils to encompass their
learning and interests outside of the classroom.
• They use technology in a way to empower pupils to undertake their
own learning rather than to reinforce old-fashioned, teacher-
centric pedagogies. This has important links to the selection and use
of appropriate resources that we will explore further in the next
chapter.
• They prioritize independent, qualitative, narrative accounts of learning
over blunt, accountability-driven assessment frameworks that deper-
sonalize the pupils and their achievements. This will have important
consequences for any assessment strategies that you might want to
adopt. We will explore this further in later chapters.
• They challenge set theories of knowledge and its organization within
the school systems of timetables and classrooms, seeking to make
links in imaginative ways across and between subject boundaries.

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While this list of attributes might seem daunting, reflective practice should
start simply and quietly, in your own mind or in a private teaching journal. It
should not be part of a grand-scale process of performance management or
other accountability mechanisms. We think it too important to be compro-
mised by them. You might argue that the general busyness of school life can
compromise any well-meaning approach to develop a reflective practice.
Clearly, this is a danger. But the writers on reflective practice recognize this
and, more importantly, identify the larger structural forces at work in any
organization that can compromise an individual’s attempt to be reflective. So,
how can you respond as a teacher? We suggest that you do the following:

1 Make a firm commitment to practise the art of being a reflective

teacher.
2 Find a short period of time each day, even if it is just a few minutes, to
reflect on the teaching you have engaged with during the day. Ask
yourself simple questions such as:
• What went well?
• What did not go so well?
• How could you improve things?
• What would you do differently next time?
3 Keep a teaching journal, if not all the time at least for a set or specific
period (e.g. the introduction of a new unit of work) to help you reflect
more deeply on a specific intervention.
4 If possible, find a colleague to help share your reflections and act as a
‘critical friend’.

Many of the broad ideas that relate to being a reflective teacher find resonances
with the work of educational evaluation. In your early teaching experiences,
you are most likely to come across evaluation related to the lessons that you
have taught. In many courses of initial teacher education, students are required
to evaluate each lesson. How can you do that in a constructive way that helps
you develop as teacher? This is where our attention will now turn.

Evaluation at the heart of planning

It is not enough that teachers’ work should be studied; they need to study
it themselves. (Stenhouse 1975: 143)

Education is a complex activity. It involves many different elements, including

people, resources and ideas. As a teacher, watching education in action within a
classroom or other learning environment is fascinating. Educational evaluation
is a means of understanding the activities that go on within your classroom.
It is a tool that you can use to investigate your own practice in a systematic and

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self-critical way. Evaluation involves many things and activities. It includes

looking at things, asking questions, listening to others, describing events and
making interpretations. It is a skilful activity that some writers relate to an
art form.
We want to explore two key evaluation activities you can undertake that
are complementary to the broader processes of lesson planning and your class-
room pedagogy. Finding the links between planning, teaching and evaluation
will help you manage your time effectively and avoid you being distracted
from your key roles in the classroom. It will also make for a better process of
evaluation and assist you in your own development as a teacher. The two activ-
ities are observing and communicating.

Observation in the classroom

As teachers, we are used to observing classrooms. It is a key aspect of our work.

Effective teachers make time during their lessons to take that step backwards
from the complexity of classroom interactions to observe what is going on.
Using observation as a key component of your lesson evaluation strategy will
enhance your wider pedagogy. However, familiarity with the classroom can be
a barrier to effective observation. Therefore, it will be important to find ways to
challenge your own observations. To this end, we will briefly consider a range
of issues associated with observation that will help you do this.
First, learn to live with uncertainty in your observations. The notion of
‘truth’ within an evaluation is highly contestable. What you are watching is
framed by notions of objectivity and subjectivity which you could spend a
lifetime exploring. As a classroom teacher you do not have time to do that
now! Rather, look for examples of activities which are ‘credible and defensible
rather than true’ (Kushner 1992: 1). While you are observing, use your instincts
as a teacher to look out for interesting responses that pupils make within the
lesson, unusual responses within particular activities, or that spark of creativity
that a pupil may show at a given moment. Accounting for these in a simple
way through your observation notes will be important, even if it is a brief
comment in your teaching journal that can be returned to at a later date.
Second, use a range of technology to help you with your observations.
This could include audio or video recording. If you want to explore and analyse
your own pedagogy, why not consider video recording yourself? After you
have got over the initial embarrassment of watching yourself on film (or is that
just us?), this can be a very enlightening activity. If you are able to use a laptop
computer with an in-built web camera directed at the position where you are
standing, then your pupils may not even know that you are video recording
yourself. Recording yourself as a teacher is no different from those disciplines
such as acting, dancing or athletics where video analysis is central to improving
performance. Why should it be any different for teachers? The analysis of these

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materials can also reveal interesting points that you may miss in the busyness
of a lesson. While this can be incredibly helpful and interesting, do not record
too much. It takes a long time to review recorded materials, but the benefits
can be significant if you have the time.
Finally, be focused in your observations. Your lesson plan has specific
learning objectives and teaching activities. Try to focus on these in the early
stages of your observation. But, as we discussed above, remember that these
should not be thought of as being fixed in stone. They will develop as the
lesson unfolds and you will need to be responsive to the outworking of these
throughout the lesson that you have designed.

Communication in the classroom

Good communication is central to teaching and learning. Communication
can take many forms and you will need to be alert for these throughout your
evaluation. Non-verbal forms of communication such as gesture, body
language or facial expression will all be important within your classroom, but
verbal communication will probably be a major focus in all lesson evaluations.
In particular, conversations between you and your pupils are an essential part
of your work. As such, they present a vital opportunity for the evaluation of the
lesson as well as for assessment purposes.
So, first, be natural in your conversations with pupils. Build on your
existing relationship with the class, or the individual pupil, and seek to nurture
conversations around your key learning objectives. But do this in a natural, not
a forced, way. Second, take nothing for granted. Listen to the conversations
that pupils are having between themselves during the various lesson activities.
These often contain really important evidence that can usefully inform your
evaluation. When watching pupils working, try to resist the urge to interrupt
too soon. Maintain a critical stance and do not close down the possibilities for
exploring alternative viewpoints when you do intervene.
Third, allow conversations to touch on elements of your teaching as well as
focusing on pupils’ learning. This can be difficult, and even awkward, for experi-
enced teachers. But it can prove very enlightening. So, be bold! Take a deep
breath and, perhaps, be prepared for one or two difficult conversations. The feed-
back you receive from pupils about your teaching can be extremely valuable.
Fourth, do not depend so much on the pupils’ voices and forget your own.
Recent educational initiatives have given a priority to ‘pupil voice’ that many
educationalists are now finding unhelpful. For some, the emphasis on pupil
voice is nothing more than adults’ ‘copping out’ and an ‘abdication of their
responsibilities’ (Paton 2009). Perhaps a balanced view of teacher and curriculum
development needs to reassert the role of the teacher as a professional. Within
the sphere of lesson evaluation, your voice is as vital as anyone else’s. So, do not
underplay what you think and say about your own and your pupils’ work.

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Through these and other methods you will collect a range of evaluative
data about your lesson. Remember that data can take many shapes and forms.
One method that many teachers have found helpful is writing a teaching
journal. This could contain short comments about teaching sessions, notes
about your thoughts or feelings during the evaluation process, snapshots of
conversations with pupils or other things that come to your mind and might
be useful later on. From this data, you will need to construct your lesson evalu-
ation. Your tutors may have given you a template; there are many others avail-
able online. Whatever format you use, there will be several key areas that you
want to address.

Evaluate the learning objectives, outcomes and teaching activities

Most lesson plans have learning objectives, outcomes and teaching activities.
These may well be drawn from your longer-term planning and relate closely to
the units of work that underpin your curricula. It is a good idea to start your
lesson evaluation by considering these elements. Look back on your learning
objectives in light of the lesson you have taught. Were they met? If so, were
they challenging enough? If not, were they too far removed from pupils’
current level of understanding? In terms of the learning outcomes, did all
pupils meet them? Who did? Who didn’t? Why not? Did the teaching activi-
ties proceed as you had planned? Did some work better than others? How did
the transition points between activities work out? Were they smooth and
seamless? Were the resources that you chose appropriate for the activities?
These, and other questions (see below), can help you chart the progress of your
pupils’ learning week by week.

Evaluate your own performance

As we have mentioned already, teaching is a skilful activity that, over time, you
should improve in. However, this improvement does not occur by accident. It
is the result of a deliberate process of practice and reflection. In each phase of
your teaching, you will have key areas for improvement (perhaps identified at
the start of your teaching placement) that you will want to reflect on. Your
lesson evaluation is an ideal place to start this process.
So, use your lesson evaluations as a way to discuss the nitty-gritty of your
teaching. Try to think in detail about specific elements of your pedagogy
(e.g. how you questioned a pupil, how you modelled a specific process, how
you used a new behaviour management strategy, where you stood in the
room, your body language, your tone of voice – the list really is endless!) and
discuss it briefly in your evaluation. And, most importantly, use this opportu-
nity to set yourself another target in that area (for reflection on and evaluation
later on).

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Or, alternatively (or as well), perhaps your mentor has asked you to focus
on a particular aspect of your pedagogy. They may have done this explicitly
(i.e. you really must improve X or Y) or implicitly (i.e. you’ve sensed this might
be an issue in their mind). Either way, the evaluations that you complete lesson
by lesson are an ideal time to show a positive response to their advice and guid-
ance. Done well, they can provoke constructive discussions in your mentor
meetings and create a positive impression of your engagement and progress.

Evaluate your pupils’ learning

Finally, it will be crucial to evaluate the learning that your pupils have engaged
in during the lesson. Hopefully, part of this will be covered in your evaluation
of the learning objectives, outcomes and teaching activities. But here it is
helpful to be even more specific. You might want to highlight the progress
made by one or two pupils specifically (i.e. name them and what they have
managed to achieve). It would be certainly be appropriate here to talk about
strategies of differentiation and personalization and how they have been
applied to particular pupils (perhaps those with SEN or those who have particu-
lar gifts or talents).

Making judgements about a lesson

So, you have planned your lesson, taught it and reflected on it. You have
observed pupils working and have talked to them about their work. In a parallel
stream of activity, you have assessed their work in various ways, involving
pupils in this process too. Your assessment data is collated and organized effi-
ciently. You are faced with a collection of data drawn from your assessment
and evaluative processes. It is time to make some judgements about your
lesson.
One of the key ways of making judgements is to ask yourself questions
about the data you have collected. This kind of internal questioning is essential
to reflective practice. Your questions might include:

• What are the values that have underpinned this lesson? Are they from
my experiences or beliefs, or are they from somewhere else?
• Who have been the winners and losers in this lesson?
• How have the processes of teaching and learning been connected in
this lesson? How do I know?
• How would I describe my teaching approach in this lesson? Has it
been authoritarian or democratic, formal or informal? What aspects
of my pedagogy have changed or developed from a traditional,
subject-based pedagogy?

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• How have the pupils learnt in this project? In what ways have they
learnt differently than they might have done in other lessons I have
taught?
• Were my original learning objectives and teaching activities for the
lesson appropriate? How did they change and develop over the dura-
tion of the lesson? Would I do the same lesson again?
• Whose knowledge really counted within the lesson? How did
the knowledge base of my own subject specialism relate to the existing
knowledge that pupils brought with them to the lesson?
• What would the consequences be of the changes I could make when I
teach this lesson again (i.e. on myself and my pupils)?
• How does my evaluation of this lesson link to the broader processes of
initial teacher education or continuing professional development
that I am engaging in?

These questions may or may not be appropriate for you at any one given point
in time. This is all part of a personal, analytical process. Learning to ask the
right questions about the work you have undertaken is part of the process of
reaching a judgement about the work. It is part of the process of becoming a
skilful, reflective teacher.

Summary

This chapter has discussed ways that your original lesson planning can be
brought to life within the classroom. By focusing on specific elements of your
pedagogy, we have attempted to demonstrate how your lesson planning is an
integral and vital part of becoming a skilful classroom teacher. Similarly, we
have emphasized that what takes place once a lesson has been completed,
by way of reflective and evaluative thinking, has an equally important part to
play in your development as a teacher. It provides a vital channel of feedback
into the planning process at the level of individual lessons, your broader
process of curriculum development and your wider continuing professional
development.

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 4 Resources for learning

This chapter is concerned with resources for learning, and the ways in which
they figure in your planning for teaching and learning in the classroom. We
are using the word ‘resources’ in as wide a sense as possible, and do not only
mean physical resources, but also cognitive resources, thinking skills and the
ways in which resources exist both as a means to a learning end, and as things
to be learned about in their own right.

Activity theory

To begin with, we are going to use activity theory (AT) to analyse what is
involved in planning. This might seem complex and difficult, but AT allows us
to deconstruct the various ways in which the key elements, people and ideas
involved are interlinked. What this means is that:

Activity theory provides a unique lens for analyzing learning pro-

cesses and outcomes. Rather than focusing on knowledge states,
activity theory focuses on the activities in which people are engaged,
the nature of the tools they use in those activities, the social and
contextual relationships among the collaborators in those activities,
the goals and intentions of those activities, and the objects or
outcomes of those activities.
(Jonassen et al. 1999: 159)

In this chapter it is the tools which are of concern, especially the ways in which
they are used in learning. The construct ‘tools’ used in this fashion does not solely
refer to physical artefacts, although they are clearly a good example; instead:

Tools can be anything used in the transformation process (physical, like

hammers or computers or mental, like models, theories or heuristics).

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The use of culture-specific tools shapes the way people act and think.
For the instructional designer, tools may consist of the design models
and methods, the software production tools, project management
system, or any other kind of tool that instructional designers use to
transform the object (the instructional materials).
(Jonassen et al. 1999: 161)

Activity theory is concerned, as its name makes obvious, with activity, the
components of which are organized in activity systems (Engeström 1999). ‘In
activity theory, activity is shaped first and foremost by an object held by the
subject’ (Nardi 1996: 39). The background to AT is that it arises from the
research work of Russian psychologists Vygotsky, Luria and Leont’ev (Cole
1996). When discussing AT, it is usual to represent it diagrammatically by a
series of interconnecting triangles, as in Figure 4.1. The key elements in the
upper portion of this diagram are ‘subject’, ‘tools’, and ‘object’. Tools form the
basis of much of the discussion in the first part of this chapter. The termi-
nology ‘subject’ in our case can be taken to refer to an individual, or a group of
individuals, or a class of learners. The ‘object’ refers to that which arises from
the activity using the tools. In other words the pupils, either collectively or
individually, are concerned with producing an object, a learning outcome,
which they do via the use of tools.

Figure 4.1 Activity theory triangle.

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 54 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

The base of the triangle concerns itself with aspects of the social nature of
the activity, and we return to this later.
To give a specific example, Jennie Henley describes the activity of a group
music session:

In its most basic form, the subject is the student, the object is to play
a piece of music and this is done through the use of tools such as
instruments, musical notation, physical gestures etc. The individual
cannot play the music without the instrument, and the instrument
cannot play without the student, therefore it is the mediation
between the two that fulfils the object of producing the music.
But this is not an isolated process and a second layer has been
added to place the activity within its social context and show
where the outcome lies within the process of activity . . . an indi-
vidual student will set themself a goal, for example to be able to
play all the notes of a certain piece of music. The process they
then go through to do this involves a complex set of interactions
between their instrument and the notation, as well as the physical
gestures that the conductor will give to inform the players where
they are in the piece and how to play that part. This is within the
context of where their own instrument fits with the other instru-
ments in the ensemble, the rules that embody the nature of the
ensemble, which in turn are guided by the context within which they
are playing.
(2008: 33)

This description can be applied to the majority of teaching and learning

sessions delivered in schools, not only in music but in many other contexts
too. Henley’s account also takes us usefully into thinking about the nature of
the tool itself. In her description, one of the tools is the musical instrument.
This is obviously a complex thing; learning to play an instrument takes time,
practice, skill and application. This means that many music lessons will be
devoted to the primary purpose of learning to play the instrument. This is
done both as a means to an end, and as an end in its own right. This is a very
useful and highly transferable notion. All activity in lessons involving tools
will necessitate some learning being devoted to using the tool itself before the
tool can be put into use. We already have the example of the musical instru-
ment but other tools can be much simpler, such as the pencil or the football,
both of which, however, require a great deal of practice to use well. There are
others of intermediate complexity, such as the pocket calculator and some that
can be very complex, such as the computer. Others can involve significant
health and safety issues, such as power tools in design and technology, or even

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the simple scalpel in science. Consequently tool use in pedagogy involves

ensuring that safety issues are understood and observed. There is a wide
range of tools used in schools nowadays, and you will know the scope and
variety of this involved in the course of your annual planning for teaching and
learning.
So, how does AT help? One of the principal ways is that it allows you to
plan for teaching and learning of the various elements of the activity triangle
as separate aspects within your pedagogy. This will involve progression from
pedagogy about the tool, to using the tool, to developing proficiency of the
tool, to using the tool in order to achieve something else. Let us look at an
example:

Tool example: The magnetic compass

In essence, a magnetic compass is a very simple piece of equipment.

Given no difficulties from electrical supplies, or other sources of interfer-
ence, a compass needle will point to the north magnetic pole. There are
many uses to which a compass can be put, including finding ways around
the countryside using a map, orienteering challenges which involve
doing this competitively and complex surveying applications and
construction. The tool itself exists in a variety of types, from a simple
circle with a needle, via the same with a rotating band for taking bear-
ings, through to electronic devices such as Satellite Navigation devices
with a digital display, and complex surveying technology.
Teaching and learning involving the magnetic compass will initially
involve an understanding of the principle of the needle movement. This
might involve a range of subject domains, including science, geography
and design and technology. It can also involve art where pupils can
design their own compass. From these beginnings the use of the tool will
become more specialized, until the pupils are ready to put the applica-
tion of the tool into practice. Although clearly obvious, it is unlikely that
a group of pupils would be dropped off in Snowdonia in winter with a
map and compass, and told to get to a specific grid reference for shelter
and food! But at a more advanced stage, pupils may well be involved in
similar way-finding activities, although we would hope that they began
by finding their way around the high street using similar methods first!

In the example of way-finding in the tool example above, the AT triangle

elements would be as follows: the compass is the tool, the subject is the pupil

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 56 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

using it, and the object is to arrive at a given grid reference. The rules would be
those of tool use, the compass points to magnetic north; the community would
be the users of map and compass; and the division of labour within a group
could involve some pupils taking bearings, others transferring them to the
map, and maybe some acting as lookouts.
Although all of this is perfectly obvious in conceptualization, nonetheless
new and beginning teachers often make rudimentary errors of sequencing
learning materials by moving too rapidly towards using the tool in context,
without the pupils gaining a clear understanding of how, why and when it
should be used. If we consider the developmental pedagogic planning for this,
we arrive at the situation shown in Figure 4.2. What this shows is that different
lessons with regard to tool use will give rise to different learning objects,
depending upon what is to be the focus of learning and activity. Hierarchical
progression through tool use is shown by the descending arrows, the different
objects arising from the lesson shown in the right-hand column. What is
important in planning for teaching and learning concerning tool use here is

Figure 4.2 AT pedagogy of tool use.

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that the teacher is clear in their own mind about the purpose of the lessons
they are teaching concerning tools and their use. Of course, it is important to
be able to put tools into practice as soon as possible, but teachers do need to
spend time ensuring that pupils understand how to use the tool, as well as
knowing what to do with it.
So far we have considered tools as being physical things, but they can also
involve thinking skills and other concepts. For example, in mathematics, the
notion of integration involves understanding the expression
b
∫ f(x)dx
a

and being able to apply it when appropriate. The purpose of this mathematical
expression is, to put it extremely simply, to find the area under a graph.
However, some mathematics teachers have talked of having inherited pupils
perfectly able to undertake the calculations required, but not having a clue
what the tool of integration was for! This is a problem when teaching for
understanding, and so use of the tool needs to preface, as Figure 4.2 shows,
being able to put the tool to use in context.
Also important in AT is the notion of rules, and here it is appropriate to
think about how learners are introduced to these. Clearly there will be a great
deal of variation in rules of an activity involving tool use, and especially where
health and safety are concerned, we would want these to be understood well in
advance. Otherwise a commonly observed area of misunderstanding in begin-
ning teachers is to try to work in too many rules too soon and to include in
these the exceptions. It is here that Mrs Curwen’s advice in her 1886 Piano
method remains most appropriate, ‘Leave out all exceptions and anomalies
until the general rule is understood’ (Curwen 1886, in Swanwick 1988: 133).
This can give beginning teachers all sorts of problems and tie them up in knots!
Yes, the exceptions are important, but they are probably best dealt with later,
unless there is a pressing need to do so at the outset.
Division of labour is also a useful notion: it is not only a justification for
groupwork (and vice versa), but it helps pupils think about ways in which they
can cooperate on complex tasks, such as many real-world situations require.
It also enables sharing the cognitive load in difficult tasks, parcelling out
different aspects of this between groups of pupils, so that they can conjointly
achieve something that alone they might not be able to (see ZPD in Chapter 7,
pp. 100–1).
Having considered the planning processes involved in preparing for cogni-
tive and physical tool use, we now turn our attention to a more detailed discus-
sion concerning three different tools that are commonly found in classrooms
and that may influence how you plan activities within your lessons. The three
tools and their contexts are:

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• teaching with interactive whiteboards;

• writing with word processing technologies; and
• researching with the Internet.

Teaching with interactive whiteboards

We can remember a time when teachers used a blackboard and chalk. In our
own careers as schoolteachers, blackboards were gradually replaced by white-
boards and pens. In our visits to schools today, it is unusual to find a classroom
without an interactive whiteboard. This march towards the almost wholesale
adoption of interactive whiteboards presents an interesting context within
which to explore how a particular tool impacts on your planning and teaching.
In terms of activity theory, if the interactive whiteboard is the tool and you are
the subject, the object will be the act of teaching itself. Clearly, this will have
an impact on the bottom portion of the AT triangle (the rules, the community
and the division of labour).
In the early days of interactive whiteboard use, we were constantly
surprised by how un-interactively they were used! Positioned on a wall behind
the teacher (who often worked in a ‘presentational’ style with a PowerPoint
presentation displayed), early uses of interactive whiteboards were as glorified
digital whiteboards. Pupils seldom got to interact with the board (apart from
looking at it), and teachers resorted to the digital equivalent of ‘chalk and
talk’ with their PowerPoint presentations (thereby demonstrating the old
adage that those who rely on PowerPoint often lack power and seldom get to
the point!).
More recently, interactive whiteboards have facilitated a greater degree of
interaction between teachers, pupils and other learning resources. Partly this
has been because teachers have had access to other technologies that have
worked alongside the interactive whiteboard (e.g. digital slates, polling devices,
iPad apps that link with the boards, etc.) but, more generally, teachers have
just become more creative with their pedagogies and know when, and when
not, to use the interactive whiteboard itself. It has become one of many poten-
tial tools that they can choose to use within their pedagogical repertoire in the
classroom.
However, AT does provide an interesting lens through which to view the
use of this tool and to ask constructive questions about how you might use it.
For example:

• To what extent do I position the interactive whiteboard as part of my

(i.e. the subject defined as the teacher’s) usage and to what extent can

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I utilize it to impact on the community within which it is situated

(i.e. the pupils within my classroom)?
• If the objective for using the interactive whiteboard is to improve my
pedagogy, how does this relate to the division of labour within
the classroom? How can I ensure that the whiteboard is used in a
truly interactive way to facilitate pupils’ learning (and how does
this relate to the facilitating role it might play in developing my
pedagogy)?

There will also be some specific questions about the tool itself that you will
want to consider. For example:

• What are the benefits or limitations of presenting information

(whether text, image or video) with this tool? How does the interac-
tive whiteboard itself impact on the sequencing of information, the
retention of that information by pupils and the process of discovery
(the ‘learning journey’) within a lesson?
• Is it possible to become over-reliant on the interactive whiteboard?
What would happen to your teaching if it was taken away, or you had
to teach in a room without this tool? Would anything change? (This
is a good test to apply to any tool as you try to identify and analyse the
precise impact it is having on your work.)

Writing with word processing technologies

This chapter is exploring how the tools that we choose to use within our
teaching impact on our teaching as well as our pupils’ understanding and
learning. Having briefly considered the interactive whiteboard which, as we
discussed, can unhelpfully become the preserve of the teacher in the class-
room, let us turn our attention to a tool which is routinely used by teachers
and pupils – the word processor.
Word processing technology – whether located within a particular piece of
software, or in other locations with keypads or keyboards such as mobile
devices – is pervasive in our lives. The ability to produce text on a screen as
opposed to by hand is becoming the tool of choice for many pupils inside and
outside of school. Does this matter? Is anything being lost in the process? The
‘frame’ of AT can help us analyse what is going on here. But before we do that,
there is time for a little historical reflection. As this unfolds, see if you can spot
some of the main AT concepts of tool, subject, object, rules, community and
labour within this aside.

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An historical aside

In a letter of 1916, T.S. Eliot reflected on how he felt the typewriter was
changing his ability to write:

When composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all

my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like
modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not
sure that it encourages subtlety.
(Eliot 1988: 17)

Thinking back even further, Carr (2010: 17–19) recounts the story of the
famous philosopher Nietzsche who, suffering from many ailments that threat-
ened to jeopardize his career as a writer, ordered a typewriter to be delivered to
his lodgings in 1882. The Malling-Hansen Writing Ball was an object of great
beauty that, with practice, allowed him to write up to 800 characters a minute.
It was the fastest typewriter that had been made.
Nietzsche was so delighted with this technology that he composed a short
ode to it:

The writing ball is a thing like me: made of iron

Yet easily twisted on journeys.
Patience and tact are required in abundance,
As well as fine fingers, to use us.

But, as Carr reports, the Writing Ball began to have a more subtle effect on
Nietzsche’s work. His friend, the writer and composer Heinrich Köselitz, began
to notice changes in his writing style:

Nietzsche’s prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was

new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine’s power – its ‘iron’
– was, through some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, being
transferred into the words it pressed in the page.
(Carr 2010: 18)

Köselitz’s letter to Nietzsche is fascinating. In his own work, he said, his

‘thoughts in music and language often depend on the quality of the pen and
paper’. Nietzsche replied, ‘You are right, our writing equipment takes part in the
forming of our thoughts’ (Nyíri 1994; Kittler 1999; Emden 2005; Cate 2005).
More recently, it was fascinating to read the famous American composer
John Adams’ reflections on how his musical composition process is still facili-
tated by paper and manuscript paper despite his having powerful digital compo-
sition and scoring software available (Adams 2013).

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The stories of T.S. Eliot, Friedrich Nietzsche and John Adams demonstrate that
the tools we choose to use for our writing impose limitations as well as open
possibilities. ‘We shape our tools’, observed John Culkin, ‘and thereafter they
shape us’ (Culkin 1967). Paraphrasing him, we could write that as teachers we
choose our tools and thereafter they shape us and our pupils.
This short historical reflection provides a fascinating insight into the inter-
play that thinking with an AT mindset can provide. Within these stories there
are specific subjects (writers and composers) working towards particular objec-
tives (a poem, play or musical composition), working within particular sets of
rules (stylistic conventions or grammatical frameworks), communities (of other
writers, composers, publishers as well as readers and listeners) and potential
divisions of labour too. Central to all these networks are the tools themselves
(the pencil, pen, typewriter, paper, etc.).
Within your teaching, have you been able to stop and reflect on the
specific differences that writing with a pen or pencil might have to writing
within a digital environment? There will be benefits (psychologists would call
these ‘affordances’; Gibson 1979) as well as limitations. For example:

• Pupils may be helped, automatically, with their spelling and grammar

as they use a digital tool. Is this automatically a good thing? When is
it, and when isn’t it?
• Pupils will think differently about ideas if they handwrite them.
Researchers believe that handwriting is linked closely to cognition
and this changes when digital tools are adopted. Are you aware of
these changes and how they may impact on how pupils might engage
with a specific learning task?
• The structure of one’s writing changes as the tools change. Sentence
construction varies, the ordering of paragraphs and the structuring of
longer narrative structures may become more difficult as writing
disappears off the screen. Does this matter? How can you help pupils
to compensate for this? Are they using word processing tools skilfully
to help combat any potential shortcomings within the writing envi-
ronment? Do they know what these might be?

Researching with the Internet

The Internet is a powerful tool. It transforms many of the basic tasks that we
do every day. From buying watches to scheduling meetings, updating personal
profiles on Facebook and sharing key thoughts on Twitter, it is hard to imagine
life without it.
There are many potential benefits from using the Internet as a learning
tool. Research shows that many cognitive skills are substantially strengthened

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through its use. These include the strengthening of brain functions related
to fast-paced problem-solving, recognizing patterns in a range of data and
analysing their important characteristics, and making judgements about the
quality of information contained within a particular source. One study of the
way that British women searched for information on medical conditions
revealed that the speed with which an individual was able to assess the value of
a particular page of information increased as they gained familiarity with using
the Internet. While an experienced Internet user was able to ascertain the value
of a particular page in a few seconds, it took a novice user much longer to find
out whether that information was trustworthy or not (Sillence et al. 2007).
Other studies have reported benefits in terms of small increases in our
working memory. These increases allow us to become more skilful in juggling
ideas, focusing our attention on competing ideas and analysing, almost instan-
taneously, their relative value. Small and Vorgan (2008: 21) report that for
many of us this has led to our ‘developing neural circuitry that is customized
for rapid and incisive spurts of direction attention’. Using the Internet also
improves a range of lower-level skills such as hand–eye coordination (through
various gaming environments), reflex response and the processing of visual
cues (Green and Bavelier 2003).
Developmental psychologists have explored the effects of different types
of media on people’s intelligence and learning abilities. The conclusion of
Greenfield’s recent work (Greenfield 2009) starts with the obvious thought
that each medium, each technology, develops a particular aspect of cognitive
skill at the expense of others. So, what does she have to say about the Internet?
Her research indicates that the growing use of the Internet has led to a ‘wide-
spread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills’. But what is the
trade-off? Greenfield suggests that the new strength in visual-spatial intelli-
gence goes ‘hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of
“deep processing” that underpins mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive
analysis, critical thinking, imagination and reflection’ (2009: 52).
Given findings such as these, writers like Nicholas Carr have argued that
while

the Net grants us instant access to a library of information unprece-

dented in its size and scope, and it makes it easy for us to sort through
that library . . . what the Net diminishes is [Johnson’s] primary kind
of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to
construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of
connections that give rise to a singular intelligence.
(Carr 2010: 143)

As teachers, what have you noticed about your pupils’ use of the Internet? Has
it diminished their ability to know, in depth, a subject for themselves? Is it a

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distraction or a source of interruption? Are your pupils aware of or taught strat-

egies for collecting, curating and synthesizing knowledge and understandings
from multiple sources?
As a tool, AT teaches us that the Internet is connected to a complex web
of people, their community, their rules for engagement and operation, their
division of labour and, perhaps most importantly in a teaching and learning
environment, their objectives for learning. The Internet is an example of a
‘mega-tool’, something that encompasses so much by way of information,
opportunities for sharing and communicating that it is difficult to reduce it
down to manageable questions without resorting to trivial generalizations.
But, for now, consider the following questions in light of our discussion about
the tools we adopt within our classrooms and the consequences that these
have for our pupils’ learning and our teaching:

• What do you think are the benefits or limitations of using the Internet?
• What difference does using the Internet make on how your pupils
learn about your subject?
• How does it make them think about a particular key concept within it,
or link together ideas in different ways?
• What difference would it have made if you had given the information
to the pupils in a different way, e.g. in a textbook or worksheet?
• What specific reasons can you give for choosing to use the Internet at
a particular moment in a lesson rather than any alternative tool?

Developing our choice of tools in the classroom

This chapter has explored the framework of activity theory in relation to the
tools we use within our teaching. We have argued that tools are not neutral in
how they impact on the processes of teaching and learning. Tools exist in a
complex web of interactions. The AT triangle helps us to broaden our under-
standing of how a particular tool exists within this web, allowing us to see how
it has a range of affordances as well as limitations.
So, what should you be doing to help make informed choices in this area
in respect of the tools you plan to use within your teaching? We would like to
suggest a number of practical considerations for your work in this area.

1. Remember that the choices you make display the particular values that
you hold

First, the choices of tools that you include within the classroom are a very real
indicator of the values that you hold for your subject, as well as the particular
pedagogy that you adopt to teach it. As we have seen with AT, tools are not

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value-neutral. They relate to you and your subject, as well as the objectives and
outcomes for your use of them.

2. Weigh up the pros and cons of individual tools

Before adopting specific tools with your teaching, analyse the pros and cons.
These will relate to the rules of engagement, the community within which the
tool both is drawn from and used within, as well as the division of labour in
terms of who is using the tool and for what purpose. We would urge you to
consider the whole AT triangle (with all the various pathways and networks
between its various nodes). There are always powerful, meaningful and benefi-
cial uses of a broad range of tools that we can use in our teaching. But every
tool has limitations too and the AT triangle can facilitate your exploration of
these in a considered and thoughtful way.

3. Listen to a range of viewpoints

In considering your use of tools and technologies within the classroom, it is

important to draw information and ideas from a range of disciplines. Within
the world of education it is easy to listen to the latest educational guru or inspi-
rational speaker. However, in forming judgements about the use of different
tools within your teaching, it will be wise to listen to the voices of the sociolo-
gist, the psychologist and the technologist as well as the educator. While this
may seem daunting, it is certainly worthwhile! Read broadly and develop an
enquiring mind. We would advise you not to become a teacher who just
follows the trend. Rather, seek broad counsel about the tools you consider
adopting within your teaching.

4. Do not become over-reliant on one tool

As a general rule, do not become reliant on one particular tool within your
teaching. If your pedagogy is, broadly speaking, a didactic one, you may find it
comfortable and helpful to use a presentational technology like an interactive
whiteboard. This is fine as far as it goes. However, the challenge for you will be
to broaden your pedagogical approach where needed and to find tools to help
support this development. If you teach the visual arts and you find that your
pupils’ work is becoming clichéd through the over-use of a particular piece of
drawing software, this might be a signal for change. Uncritical use of the
Internet as a research tool may be yielding poor results in a history project.
Perhaps it is time to consider other sources of information retrieval. The exam-
ples could be endless and we are sure you will be able to apply this to your own
work. You will need to pick the tool to do the job (so do not choose a chisel

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when a hammer is needed). However, if all you do is hammer all day, you will
not produce a very good carving!

5. Do not allow technology to numb your senses

As we have discussed, all technologies impose limitations as well as open up

possibilities. Part of the key here is choosing technologies that are appropriate
to the tasks at hand and using them skilfully, with full knowledge of both the
upsides and downsides. The AT framework we have presented in this chapter
can really help you do this well.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the ‘numbing’ affect of technology has been well documented.

Carr, drawing on Marshall McLuhan, writes:

When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance

ourselves from the amplified part and its natural functions. When the
power loom was invented, weavers could manufacture far more cloth
during the course of a workday than they’d been able to make by
hand, but they sacrificed some of their manual dexterity, not to
mention some of their ‘feel’ for the fabric. Their fingers, in McLuhan’s
terms, become numb.
(Carr 2010: 210)

What is true for the fingers is true for the mind too. Carr goes onto illustrate
this by reference to the work of the cartographer. The navigational skills of our
ancestors were aided greatly by the invention of the map. It allowed them to
travel across lands confidently, and had tremendous benefits in terms of trade
and warfare. But this was at a cost. Carr continues:

Their native ability to comprehend a landscape, to create a richly

detailed mental map of their surroundings, weakened. The map’s
abstract, two-dimensional representation of space interposed itself
between the map reader and his perception of the actual land. . . .
The loss must have had a physical component. When people came to
rely on maps rather than their own bearings, they would have expe-
rienced a diminishment of the area of their hippocampus devoted to
spatial representation. The numbing would have occurred deep in
their neurons.
(Carr 2010: 211–12)

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More recently, neuroscientists have noted a big effect on London taxi drivers’
brains as they increasingly rely on GPS devices rather than the traditional
process of acquiring ‘the knowledge’ (Dobson 2006).
Illustrations like these should warn us against being too positive or cele-
bratory about the potential benefits of any one tool within our teaching. In our
experience, while it is often easy to see the potential benefits of bringing a new
piece of technology into a classroom, the downside of any piece of technology,
in both physical and cognitive aspects, is often harder to identify and analyse.
As teachers, whether the choice of a tool comes from our own under-
standing, or whether it relates to a technology that is situated in the wider lives
of young people, it is essential that our analysis of that tool and its use for
educational purposes is carried out rigorously and conscientiously.

Summary

In this chapter we have considered how activity theory can be used to inter-
rogate the way tools are used in the classroom. We have thought about how to
teach for tool use, and how as teachers we need to begin by enabling pupils
to learn how to use tools, whether cognitive or physical, before they start to
employ them in problem-solving and real-life activities.
We have considered some specific and common examples of tool use in
the classroom and problematized this. Finally we have suggested you give
careful thought to the tools you choose to employ in the classroom, both in
terms of their affordances, and in the effects they have upon thinking.

Reflective questions

• What tools do you need to teach pupils how to use in your lessons?
• Are you able to distinguish between cognitive tools and physical
ones?
• Have you considered the sequencing of learning so that tool use is
well understood before it needs to be used in earnest?
• How do you know your pupils are proficient in their use of tools?
• What teaching and learning tools do you have at your disposal in the
classroom?

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 5 Differentiation and
personalization: valuing
your pupils

Your lesson plan contains a range of detailed information about your approach
to teaching a specific class. In this chapter, we are going to consider how you
can ensure that each individual pupil maximizes their learning opportunities
within any individual lesson that you teach. To do this effectively, we first
need to consider some of the broader issues concerning how pupils are organ-
ized within the school, in particular how they are grouped into the particular
classes that you are teaching. This is normally done in one of three ways:
streaming, setting or mixed ability classes.

Setting, streaming and mixed ability classes

Streaming and setting are both ways of grouping students by ability. Leaving
aside notions of how ‘ability’ is defined (which is probably the topic for another
book), setting is when pupils are grouped by ability within a specific subject,
for example, a pupil could be in set 1 for geography and set 3 for maths.
Streaming is when pupils stay in the same group for all subjects on the time-
table, but they have been organized into class groups based upon some notion
of their overall ability, for example, the results of their end of Key Stage 2
assessment for literacy. Mixed ability teaching means that pupils of all abilities
within a school will be present in your class.
The grouping of pupils into streams, sets or mixed ability classes raises
emotive issues in education. There is disagreement within public debates
about which approach is the best for organizing pupils within the school.
Those in favour of streaming or setting argue that children should be divided
by ability so that all can be taught at an appropriate level; opponents of this
believe that mixed ability teaching allows pupils to work unhindered by
worries about their ‘status’. In terms of educational research into this area,
it is also the case that there is no consensus as to whether either of these
two views are correct; as Ireson and Hallam observe: ‘Although there is

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considerable disagreement in the literature, the weight of evidence indicates

that selection and ability grouping do not have a powerful impact on the
overall attainment of students’ (Ireson and Hallam 2001: 17). However, this
did not stop the then Government in 1997 publishing a White Paper, Excellence
in Schools, which stated that ‘unless a school can demonstrate that it is getting
better than expected results through a different approach, we do make the
presumption that setting should be the norm in secondary schools’ (DfEE
1997: 197).
The arguments against setting and streaming focus on two areas, the
academic and the social. As Richard Hatcher observes: ‘The most overt mechan-
isms of social differentiation within the school system arise from processes of
selection, both between schools, as a result of parental choice and school
admissions procedures, and within schools, as a result of forms of grouping
students’ (1998: 494). This social argument says societal inequalities are
mirrored in streaming and setting. This argument is amplified by Adam
Gamoran (2002), who notes that ‘minority and disadvantaged students tend
to be over-represented in low-level classes’.
Arguments in favour of streaming and setting tend to relate to pupils being
able to operate at their own speed, and for teachers to be able to address the
needs of individual students. In one study, teachers told Smith and Sutherland
that they found:

• It is easier to deal with a smaller range of ability.

• It was beneficial to separate those pupils with behavioural problems
so that at least some could have a chance to learn.
• More able students could be challenged more easily.
• Mixed ability encouraged teaching to the middle and was inappro-
priate for a good number of students in the class.
(Smith and Sutherland 2003: 142)

However, the educational research literature explores a number of counter-

arguments to this viewpoint. Boaler’s research argues that setting and streaming
actually lower the results from those pupils in top sets, particularly girls:

Approximately one-third of the students taught in the highest ability

groups were disadvantaged by their placement in these groups
because of high expectations, fast-paced lessons and pressure to
succeed. This particularly affected the most able girls.
(Boaler et al. 2000: 633)

Despite various advocates for and against setting, streaming and mixed ability
teaching, and in light of the contradictory pieces of educational research,

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perhaps it is no surprise that there is still a mixture of approaches in evidence

within schools across the United Kingdom. In 2010 a Freedom of Information
request response was published by the Department for Education which stated
that of the 18,400 classroom observations conducted by Ofsted inspectors
in secondary schools in the previous year (2008/09), roughly four in ten
represented set lessons (DfE 2012). The Government figures also showed that
the majority of English, mathematics and science lessons in UK secondary
schools are taught in classes which are set for ability. The figures for other
subjects are harder to obtain, but many teachers of non-core subjects view
their teaching as being essentially mixed ability anyway. As one secondary
school art teacher observed, ‘Although they come to art lessons in their
modern language sets, they may as well be mixed ability for all the difference
that makes.’
This comment reveals an important element in this debate which is
directly relevant to the process of lesson planning – your expectations about
a specific class. The educational research literature quite clearly shows that
teachers respond differently when faced with the opportunity to teach a setted,
streamed or mixed ability class:

The great majority of teachers teaching sets expected a faster rate

of work from the more able students (89%). In mixed ability
classes there was less expectation that able students would work
at a faster rate (69%). Whether students were in mixed ability or
set classes, the majority of teachers expected greater depth of work
from the more able students (86%). In mixed ability classes
teachers expected more independent thought from the higher
ability students (84%) than in set classes (76%). Most teachers
expected the more able children to take greater responsibility for
their own written work whether they were in mixed ability (71%) or
sets (76%).
(Ireson and Hallam 2001: 139)

The opening part of this chapter has presented a range of arguments for
and against streaming, setting and mixed ability classes. Doubtless you
will have opinions of your own, and your school may well have a policy
which will affect how the classes you teach are organized. The key point for
us is this: regardless of whether or not the pupils in the class you are teaching
have been set, or streamed or not, anyone who is teaching more than one
pupil at a time has a mixed ability class. To that end, the pedagogical
processes of differentiation and personalization will apply equally to the
lesson planning and teaching that you are doing for any class, however they
are organized.

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Differentiation and personalization:

two sides of the same pedagogical coin

In the opening of this chapter we explored some of the ideas and educational
research surrounding the organization of pupils into classes by ability (sets or
streams) as well as more general mixed ability groups. Our key point is that to
a greater or lesser extent, all classes are mixed ability classes because they
contain individual pupils, all with their own set of issues and idiosyncrasies!
The essential features of good teaching will remain the same, however the
broader groupings are arranged. That said, it is important to be fully aware of
the consequences of how particular groups of pupils that you are teaching
have been formed. So, one of the first actions you should take is to find out
about the prior attainment of all the pupils in your class. Having established
this, you can then begin to plan constructively for them in your class. This
planning process will involve you using two key, interrelated strategies: differ-
entiation and personalization.
The terms differentiation and personalization have slightly different
meanings in contemporary educational discourse. We will consider each term
separately though, as you will see, there are many areas of overlap in theory
and practice.

Differentiation

For us, differentiation is about a deliberate pedagogical strategy by which indi-

vidual teachers create conditions whereby the curriculum is made accessible to
individual pupils in ways which are appropriate to their needs, and which
allow them to function to their fullest potential. In the early part of your
teaching practice, it is helpful to think about planning for differentiation in
two main ways – by task and by outcome. Although these are not the only ways
that teachers can differentiate, they do cover the majority of the most common
differentiation strategies that you will see teachers using.
Differentiation by task involves choosing different tasks within a lesson
plan for different pupils or different groups of pupils. This can be a fairly major
commitment, and may involve you having to do a considerable amount of
extra planning. As Diana Burton observes:

Differentiation by task requires a great deal of forward planning by

teachers and a thorough knowledge of each learner’s needs. While
commercially produced material can be of some value, case-study
research . . . has shown that teachers still need to devise their own
differentiated support materials to meet each student’s needs.
(2003: 59)

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Differentiation by task requires you to have planned carefully what the overall
learning objectives will entail, and then have worked out pathways through
this for groups of pupils within your class. One of the most common strategies
that we have observed in recent years has been to divide the class into three
main groups. The first group might be considered as ‘average’ attainers; the
second group would be expected to make good progress and perhaps require
tasks that are more challenging; the third group would need a greater degree of
support and would find a simpler task more appropriate. Dividing your class in
this way makes the process of differentiation by task a little more manageable.
Clearly, the key point here is to make sure that the right pupils are in the right
groups, and this would require a significant amount of knowledge on your
part about each individual pupil and their educational abilities. In your early
experiences of teaching, perhaps on teaching practice, this would require a
detailed conversation with the teacher who normally teaches the class you are
working with.
Differentiation by outcome occurs when students all undertake the same
task, but produce different pieces of work from this. In some ways this is a
much more manageable form of differentiation for you in terms of your initial
planning. However, it is important to think really carefully about when this is
an appropriate strategy to use. Some activities within certain subjects have a
natural degree of differentiation built into them, for example, painting a self-
portrait can be attempted by almost anyone but the outcome, in terms of the
quality of the picture and the technical or artistic skills associated with it, will
vary radically depending on who has painted it! Therein lies a major danger
with differentiation by outcome. We need to acknowledge that there is a
natural degree of differentiation by outcome in most teaching activities
and natural learning environments. The point here is that differentiation by
outcome should be chosen as a deliberate strategy. In other words, you need to
consider, and perhaps define in a general way within your learning objectives,
the learning outcomes of an activity in advance. This will allow you to move
beyond the obvious and unhelpful stance of just accepting what pupils may do
in response to a particular activity, and really use the teaching activity as a way
to challenge pupils and move them forwards in their learning. Ideally, this
needs to be reflected in your learning outcomes for the lesson. Like differentia-
tion by task, you could imagine producing tiered statements of learning
outcomes for a teaching activity that is differentiated by outcome. This would
be a helpful framework within your assessment strategy for the lesson
(of which more below). In the case of painting a self-portrait described above,
clearly every pupil would produce an outcome of some sort. However, if your
learning objectives focused on a particular aspect of shading and texture, then
their outcomes could suddenly become more dramatic and differentiated as
you would expect some pupils to demonstrate a firmer grasp of the artistic
processes behind shading and texture than others.

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Beyond differentiation by task and outcome, there are other forms of

differentiation that you will find teachers using regularly. These include the
following:

• Differentiation by teaching resource Different worksheets,

materials, software packages or other forms of instructional materials
are used at the same time in the class with different students or groups.
In a way this a variation on differentiation by task, but with the nota-
ble difference that the students can be doing the same thing but by
using different materials.
• Differentiation by support Learners receive different levels of aid
from the teacher or from a teaching assistant. This can be an inclusion
strategy and involves making the curriculum accessible to all the class.
In the previous chapter we examined two ways in which you can do
this by differentiating your time (and those of other adults supporting
you in your classroom), and by the pace of the lesson.
• Differentiation by questioning We discuss elsewhere in this
book the vital role that questioning plays in developing learning.
As a differentiation strategy it can be used to focus specific learning
possibilities on individuals or groups of students, by asking
questions that lead to higher-order thinking or to different aspects of
learning.

Carol Ann Tomlinson delineates the stages involved in effective differentia-

tion by merging a number of these strategies:

Effective differentiation is not random. Rather, it is based on a clear

cycle of: (a) articulating what is essential in a topic or discipline,
(b) assessing a student’s standing relative to those essentials,
(c) providing feedback and adapting instruction to ensure that each
student progresses in the most effective ways possible to master
the essentials, (d) assessing outcomes, and (e) making additional
adaptations as needed.
(2005: 264)

She also points out that differentiation is not about producing different lesson
plans for each individual in the class:

[W]hile it is true that differentiated instruction offers several avenues

to learning, it does not assume a separate level for each learner. . . .
Effective differentiated classrooms include purposeful student move-
ment and some purposeful student talking.
(Tomlinson 2001: 2)

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Differentiation is a clear pedagogical strategy that every teacher will need to

use. It needs to be described clearly in your lesson planning. However, what
differentiation is not is an overbearing requirement to personalize everything
to the nth degree, making your work impossible. Neither should it be a recipe
for classroom disorder with individual pupils undertaking unrelated tasks
or activities. What differentiation should be is a manageable approach to
teaching and learning which uses materials, resources, plans or tasks to help
pupils achieve their individual potential. This is a vitally important part of
your pedagogy that is linked closely to the other side of this pedagogical coin
– personalization.

Personalization
Personalization is the flip side of differentiation. Personalization, for us, is
about ensuring that every individual child is given the best possible chance to
succeed. Gilbert defined it as

taking a highly structured and responsive approach to each child’s

and young person’s learning, in order that all are able to progress,
achieve and participate. It means strengthening the link between
learning and teaching by engaging students – and their parents – as
partners in learning.
(DfES 2006: 6)

As teachers, you will encounter students with many different educational

needs. Within any class you teach, your pupils’ needs will be various and
complex. Through strategies of differentiation, you will need to make adjust-
ments to your own pedagogy in order to respond positively to them and give
them the best chance to learn through your teaching. This will be a constant
challenge to you throughout your career and it is one of the elements of
teaching that can be most enjoyable. Nothing beats the thrill of seeing a pupil
make progress as a result of a specific intervention that you have planned for
and delivered through your teaching.
It will be no surprise to you by now that one of the most important
elements by which you can do this will be through your lesson planning. This
is not just about planning in terms of your subject or the knowledge that you
want to try to impart. It is about planning the personalized processes of
learning that the students are going to engage in during the lesson. This is an
important distinction to get hold of. Although with any group of pupils of a
similar age there will be a certain amount they have in common, planning the
learning and the types of engagement that you are hoping pupils will have
within the classroom involves you considering their ability levels, the struc-
ture of tasks (open or closed), the types of presentational approaches you might

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adopt (e.g. explanations or modelling), the progression routes within the

learning, the particular tools you want to use (or get them to use), and much
more besides. As you can see, providing a personalized approach to pupils’
learning goes beyond adopting a particular differentiation strategy within a
teaching activity. It is a way of thinking in the classroom.
Over the coming years there will be a increasing range of top-down,
business-led initiatives which claim to personalize learning and result in more
effective pupil engagement, cognitive acceleration, personalized visual, audi-
tory and kinaesthetic learning styles, mental processing or whatever the latest
educational catchphrase might be. We would urge you to maintain a critical
approach to what seem like quick-fix solutions to something as complex as
personalization within teaching and learning. While there may be valuable
components within some of these types of initiatives, much of the psychology
and neuroscience behind these innovations is at best only particularly under-
stood by some of those advocating these approaches, and at worst deliberately
manipulative. There may also be commercial agendas at play here which one
should always be wary of. The motivation for financial profit behind many of
these initiatives is very questionable and you should be very careful about
adopting them within your teaching.
The pedagogical strategies of differentiation and personalization will, to a
greater or lesser extent, implicate all your thinking about how to construct a
coherent lesson plan and how to turn this into a meaningful set of learning
opportunities within your classroom. In the final part of this chapter, we
are going to turn our attention to two examples of how these strategies
work themselves out with specific groups of pupils – those who have been
identified as having special education needs and those who may be gifted or
talented.

Teaching pupils with special educational needs

‘Special educational needs’ (SEN) describes the needs of a child who has a diffi-
culty or disability that makes learning harder for them than it might be for
other children of their age. It is a legal term that covers a broad spectrum of
difficulties and disabilities. Many children will have special educational needs
at some point in their education. As a teacher, it will be your responsibility to
work as part of a team to support these children, adopting and implementing
specific support to help them engage and learn within your classes. There are
numerous ‘types’ or ‘categories’ of special educational needs. You can find a
comprehensive list and description of many different SEN at http://www.
specialeducationalneeds.co.uk/typesofsen-disability.htm.
Whatever form of SEN a student has, it is your school’s responsibility to
ensure:

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1 the right of the child to have their SEN met through a broad, well-
balanced and relevant education;
2 the right of the child and their parents to have their views listened to,
taken into account and acted on if they are in their best interests;
3 the incorporation of children with SEN into mainstream schooling
whenever and wherever possible, sometimes with the assistance of
outside specialists working collaboratively with the school.

Once a child with SEN has been formally identified, a senior member of your
school’s staff will normally write an individual education plan (IEP) to help
formulate a coherent approach to that pupil’s educational entitlement in the
school. This IEP would normally include:

1 what special or additional help is going to be given to that particular

child;
2 who will provide that help and how often it will be delivered;
3 what help the parents can give their child at home to support the
work being done by you and other teachers within the school;
4 the setting of some individual targets for that child’s progress during
the term or academic year;
5 a description of how and when the child’s progress will be checked or
assessed.

As a classroom teacher, you will have a vital role in supporting children

with SEN. It is vital that you know which pupils in the classes you teach
are on the SEN register. You will need to read their IEPs carefully and act upon
the various individual targets within your lesson planning. This will require
you to make individual provisions for certain pupils and adopt whatever
differentiation strategy you feel is most appropriate in light of their individual
targets. So, you may find yourself dealing with pupils with SEN who find it
difficult to do some or all of the following:

• general work within your classes including reading, writing, number

work or understanding information. For these pupils you might want
to amend or adapt the resources that you are using to assist them in a
specific way.
• expressing themselves or understanding what others are saying. This
may result in you having to consider the social groupings in your class
and the ways in which pupils engage with each other in different
activities.
• making friends or relating to adults. Perhaps this is an aspect of
support that extends beyond your individual classroom and will affect
how these students are integrated into the life of the whole school,

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but there is plenty that you can do within your own classroom to
make these pupils feel valued and supported through your own
teaching too.

Teaching gifted and talented pupils

Like your work with pupils with special educational needs, the provision of
appropriate educational opportunities for pupils who are gifted or talented will
span from whole school initiatives into your classroom. While the notion of a
‘list’ of pupils with particular gifts or talents has fallen by the wayside in many
schools, there will be pupils in your classes who show an exceptional ability for
your subject. It will be important to consider what individual provision needs
to be made for these pupils. There are many ways in which you can do this. We
will examine one such approach below.
Van Tassell-Baska (1998) provides a helpful framework for the analysis of
your pedagogy in this area. Her curriculum theory for gifted and talented
pupils identifies four key attributes that individual teachers need to consider:

• the level of the curriculum;

• the pace of the curriculum;
• the complexity of the curriculum;
• the depth of the curriculum.

The level of the curriculum relates to the way in which it will interest and chal-
lenge pupils. In some ways, it relates to the most basic differentiation strategies
discussed above including differentiation by task and outcome. Her argument
here is that the level of curriculum content, and how it is presented, must be at
a suitable level for high achieving pupils. The pace at which the curriculum is
offered to all pupils is important and an integral part of effective differentia-
tion. It is something that all experienced teachers vary, almost minute by
minute, in response to their analysis of how pupils are responding within a
particular sequence of the lesson. Van Tassell-Baska argues that your gifted and
talented pupils will be able to maintain a higher pace of learning than your
average pupils. The key here is to find ways to facilitate a faster pace of learning
for some, while acknowledging that others may require more time on a specific
topic. Here, more sophisticated types of differentiation may be appropriate.
Van Tassell-Baska’s third element relates to the complexity of the curricu-
lum. This is not so much about the curriculum content (that, she argues, is part
of the ‘level of the curriculum’) but rather it focuses on the capacity of gifted
and talented pupils to engage in a number of advanced level ideas simultane-
ously. Challenging gifted and talented pupils at the level of ideas and advanced
cognitive thinking is not new. However, it is important that you differentiate

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this from standard curriculum content and this will require a separate degree
of lesson planning for these pupils. Finally, the depth of the curriculum relates
to the opportunity of allowing gifted and talented pupils time to continue
exploring an area of interest to higher levels, perhaps even reaching the level
of an expert in a particular field of enquiry. Many gifted and talented pupils
will show a considerable degree of intrinsic motivation and engagement when
a topic or theme grabs their attention. They will want to run with this, explore
it and mine it for new information. Allowing time for this when it occurs is
difficult to plan for, but as with any element of lesson planning you should be
alert to this and flexible in your pedagogy when it happens.
This brief discussion about the specific educational needs of pupils with
special educational needs and those with particular gifts or talents highlights
our overall point that all lesson planning needs to be done with a particular
group of individual pupils in mind. All your teaching, whether with classes
that have been set, streamed or anything else, are full of pupils with mixed
abilities. Certain individuals may require more support for whatever reason,
but how you use your time and energies within the classroom is, perhaps, the
ultimate form of differentiation. You have to differentiate yourself! This is no
easy task. You have limited time and energy and you will want to make sure
that all pupils benefit from their time with you. Learning to use the strategies
we have discussed in this chapter will take time but it does get easier with
reflective practice, focused evaluation and experience.

Summary

In this chapter we have explored how processes of differentiation and person-

alization can be adopted and used within your classroom pedagogy. Lesson
planning underpins a learning journey. You start with a group of pupils in one
location and, through your lesson, you travel with them to a new point. As
with any journey, while it may follow a predictable route, there will elements
of surprise and discovery along the way. Developing a skilful pedagogy is your
main tool in facilitating both the journey and your pupils’ individual responses
to it. Part of this will involve you using the strategies of differentiation and
personalization in tailored ways.
We have emphasized that every class is a mixed ability class full of indi-
vidual pupils, each with their own educational needs. Thinking about plan-
ning for an ideal or idealized class is pointless, so effective lesson planning has
to take account of these real individuals. As pedagogical strategies, differentia-
tion and personalization are not about producing an individual lesson plan for
every pupil. They are about maximizing the opportunities for all pupils to
learn through careful application of ideas, resources, support, time and energy.
Pupils with special educational needs and those with gifts or talents will require

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additional thought and planning in conjunction with wider whole school

policies and support frameworks.
For us, effective teaching and learning are centred on a strong relationship
between you, the teacher, your emerging pedagogy and your pupils. All pupils
deserve an education that is appropriately personalized to their educational
needs. Every child matters and their education is too important to be left to
chance. Focus on your role in the classroom, hone and craft your pedagogy
and listen carefully to your pupils. These are the keys to an effective, personal
approach to teaching and learning.

Reflective questions

• How are pupils organized when you teach them – sets, streams, etc.?
• Do you group pupils yourself within the class? If so, what criteria do
you use for this?
• What strategies for differentiation does your school/department
encourage? How are these manifested in your planning and teaching?
• Do you know who are the pupils with SEN and the gifted and talented
pupils you teach? How do you personalize your planning for them?
• How do you ensure your planning for personalization actually ‘comes
alive’ when you deliver the lesson?

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 PART 2

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25655.indb 80 30/08/2013 12:08
 6 Metaphors for lesson
planning and pedagogy

This chapter opens Part 2 of our book. Within this part, we are going to examine
a number of broader educational themes and relate them to our book’s central
topic of lesson planning. In this chapter, we are going to broaden our under-
standing of lesson planning by using a number of metaphors and link this
broader understanding to the development of your pedagogy.

Introduction

How would you describe the physical act of teaching? What does it contain?
Clearly it involves you doing things – speaking, listening, moving, describing,
explaining, assessing, analysing – and these things involve both your mind
and body. But trying to pin down precisely what constitutes an effective peda-
gogy is tricky and it is not something that is easily observed. Skilful teachers are
able to teach effortlessly, with an illusive quality that it is hard to describe
accurately in words. As a beginning teacher, perhaps you are watching lessons
delivered by more experienced teachers prior to doing some teaching yourself;
maybe you are watching the exact lesson that you know you are going to have
to teach in a few days time. But when the time comes to teach your lesson,
despite your planning and preparation, the delivery of the lesson does not
seem quite so smooth, the flow is a little more disjointed and, perhaps, the
learning that the pupils engage with is not so intense.
The reasons for this are obvious. Planning and preparation for a lesson are
important and build on skills that you can learn relatively quickly, but devel-
oping a skilful, practical pedagogy takes time. Experienced teachers are able to
draw on years of practice. However, experience in and of itself does not equal
an effective pedagogy. There are plenty of ‘experienced’ teachers whose peda-
gogy is often lacking and for whom teaching has become a mundane chore. As
we saw in Chapter 3, the practice that teachers undertake has to be combined
with a commitment to self-reflection and evaluation on a regular basis. Our

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advice for you, as a beginning teacher, is to place a firm emphasis on the devel-
opment of your classroom pedagogy. Make the development of this skilful
pedagogy your number one priority in the first few years of your teaching.
But in order to do this, you need to settle in your mind a few foundational
principles. What, exactly, is pedagogy and how does it develop?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘pedagogy’ as ‘the profession, science,
or theory of teaching’. Other definitions of pedagogy extend this to cover the
practice and process that underpin the activity of teaching. For example,
Popkewitz develops a broad-based definition of pedagogy:

Pedagogy is a practice of the social administration of the social indi-

vidual. Since at least the 19th century pedagogical discourses about
teaching, children, and learning in schools connected the scope and
aspirations of public powers with the personal and subjective capa-
bilities of individuals. This administration of the child embodies
certain norms about their capabilities from which the child can
become self-governing and self-reliant.
(1998: 536)

Bernstein picks up on this notion of pedagogy as process, defining it as:

A sustained process whereby somebody(s) acquires new forms or

develops existing forms of conduct, knowledge, practice and criteria,
from somebody(s) or something deemed to be an appropriate provider
and evaluator. Appropriate either from the point of view of the
acquirer or by some other body(s) or both.
(1999: 259)

Note the ethical dimensions of a pedagogical approach in the above definition.

The teacher, as an appropriate provider, acts in the role of evaluator (by valuing
knowledge, skills and understanding) and developing appropriate forms of
practice and conduct. This goes much further than just viewing pedagogy
as the uncritical delivery of pre-packaged knowledge. This underpins our
view that it is very difficult for you to teach successfully from someone else’s
lesson plan!
In recent years, one of the most influential figures in discussions concerning
pedagogy has been Robin Alexander. A Fellow of Wolfson College at the
University of Cambridge, and Director of the Cambridge Primary Review,
Alexander defines pedagogy as: ‘the act of teaching together with its attendant
discourse. It is what one needs to know, and the skills one needs to command,
in order to make and justify the many different kinds of decisions of which
teaching is constituted’ (2008: 11). Alexander makes the key, and hopefully
by now familiar, point that pedagogy is not the same as teaching.

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With resonances to Bernstein’s quote, Alexander highlights the important

justificatory elements of pedagogy that are all too often ignored within contem-
porary educational discourse.
So pedagogy involves teaching, but it is much more than that. It also
involves an ‘attendant discourse’ that comprises the knowledge and skills
which inform, justify and value the decision-making processes within teaching.
Pedagogy is both a ‘practice’ and a ‘process’ through which certain things can
be acquired or through which certain capabilities can be developed, justified
and valued. In all definitions, references are made to something ‘outside’ the
obvious context of an educational exchange (i.e. a teacher and pupil). In
Popkewitz’s definition, this is seen in the phrase ‘scope and aspirations of
public powers’; in Bernstein’s by ‘an appropriate provider or evaluator’; in
Alexander’s quote by his phrase ‘attendant discourse’.
Skilful teachers embody a skilful pedagogy. They are responsible for its
development and application. This skilful pedagogy does not appear by acci-
dent. It develops over a long period of time and needs constant nurturing
through critical reflection, analysis and evaluation. Pedagogy is all the various
elements of your thinking, planning and preparation that you do prior to a
lesson, together with all the intellectual, physical and emotional aspects of
delivering the lesson, as well as the processes of reflection and evaluation that
you will undertake after the lesson has been delivered. In short, it is everything
that you need to ‘be’ in order to be a teacher.
The focus of this book so far has been on the planning that you need to
undertake. In Chapter 3, we considered how this planning relates to your work
in the classroom. We encouraged you to consider the explicit links between
lesson planning and how you bring that to life within the lesson itself through
your pedagogy. We also emphasized that reflection and evaluation are key
tools in making improvements to your teaching practice and providing feed-
back for your future lesson planning. But here, for a while, we want to ask
some broader questions about how your lesson planning activities relate to
the development of your broader pedagogy. In particular, we will focus on
a number of metaphors that will help us think about how planning and
pedagogy work together.

Teaching as science

The dictionary definition of pedagogy as the ‘science of teaching’ introduces

our first metaphor: ‘science’. Is it helpful to describe pedagogy as a science? We
think this is a mixed blessing. There are many helpful aspects of this metaphor.
Science, for us, implies a clear process of enquiry. It relies on key principles,
appropriate methods, careful handling of materials, precision and rigour.
Planning is a central component of ‘doing’ effective science. Like us, perhaps

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you remember practical science lessons where particular experiments were

modelled by the teacher at the front of the classroom before being done by the
pupils on benches around the laboratory. A key element of this approach is the
experiment ‘method’, that has to be written up clearly and concisely as part of
account of the experiment. It was not enough to merely find out the correct
answer to a particular scientific problem. The process by which you have come
to find out that answer has to be represented and accounted for in order for
others to replicate that experiment and test your findings. Being able to write
this process down in clear steps was an important part of ‘doing’ science well.
But there are limits to this metaphor. As we explored in the opening para-
graph of this chapter, it is not possible to find the perfect mix of pedagogical
ingredients and then mix them together in the desired quantities, according to
a particular method, and – hey presto – effective teaching results! Teaching is
built on human relationships and these do not lend themselves to be easily
reducible to basic component parts. That said though, there is merit in the
rigorous exploration of the specific elements or characteristics of a pedagogical
approach. Finding ways of accounting for this in the ‘method’ of pedagogy
would be a useful exercise for any beginning teacher. It would involve detailed
and focused observation of a particular element of a teacher’s pedagogy. For
example, you might focus on a teacher’s body language throughout part of a
lesson: where do they stand/sit? (plot their movement); what posture do they
adopt? (describe it in detail), and how does this flow from one posture to
another?; how do they use their hands to emphasize key points? (when does
this happen and how does it relate to the language they are using and the tone
of their voice?); what, if any, barriers are there which inhibit their body
language, and can these be removed? Or, to provide another example, you
might focus on the technique of explaining a new concept: how is the explana-
tion structured (does it have one)?; what hooks are used to engage the pupils’
curiosity? (and are these are an aide-mémoire for pupils later on?); how are key
points repeated or re-emphasized throughout the explanation?; what scaf-
folding devices are used?; are references made to existing knowledge structures
and, if so, how are these extended?; what, if any, links are there to modelling
and how does this differ from explanation? This kind of detailed, almost
forensic, analysis of a specific pedagogical technique or device can produce
very rich learning experiences for young teachers. However, as we emphasized
above, just conducting the observation and finding out the ‘correct’ answer to
your enquiry will not automatically translate into your being able to adopt an
appropriate body language in the classroom, or explain new concepts better.
Defining pedagogy as the ‘science of teaching’ has its limitations.
So, alongside this idea of pedagogy as the ‘science of teaching’, we would
like to bring other metaphors into this debate. These, we trust, will help you
think through the relationships between the physical act of teaching and the
planning and preparation that you need to do in order to do this effectively.

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Our next metaphor relates teaching to a type of ‘performance’. In order to

explore this in a helpful way, we are going to consider the work of three
different types of performers: actors, musicians and footballers. Like teaching,
all of these types of ‘performance’ and ‘performers’ require specific sets of skills
and techniques, various pieces of knowledge and a broad understanding of the
art form or sport they are working within. Like teaching, they also all require
planning and preparation, often done in private, prior to a performance. We
will start with the world of the theatre and the work of actors.

Teaching as acting

The theatre is a fantastic place that allows actors and audiences to dream
together, be taken to new places and to enjoy and be challenged by new
experiences. One of the aspirations of any theatre production is that the
audience will leave the theatre changed in some way as a result of experiencing
that production. This has many similarities to the processes of teaching and
learning in the classroom. As teachers, we would all hope that our pupils do
not leave our classrooms in the same state that they entered them! Learning
should have occurred and this, over time, will result in cognitive and physical
development.
With the exception of the most improvisatory forms of theatre (of which
more below), most actors work with a script. In the majority of cases this script
is fixed. It contains the words and other directions needed to perform the play
according to the desire of the author. In many theatre traditions, for example,
the Shakespearian, it would not be considered appropriate to change the words
of the play, though, of course, many other aspects – such as the context within
which the play is set, the staging of the play, the lighting and sound design –
could all be developed in ways far from those imagined by the original play-
wright. However, it is worth pausing and considering whether or not the script,
which the actors have to remember and deliver using all their skills, is really
‘the play’. As we have already hinted, the words of the script are framed by all
kinds of other devices and structures. These would include the larger aspects of
artistic direction such as a broader context for the play, the set and sound
design, but they would also include elements that are intrinsic to the skills,
techniques and work of an individual actor within this framework: the sound
of their voice, the pace of their delivery, the emotional input they impose on
the language, the way that they interact with other actors, and much more
besides. Beyond all of these considerations are the audience, who constitute
another layer of interaction with which the actor needs to communicate. How
they respond to the events that unfold before them has an intrinsic effect on
what any individual actor may do. They may ‘play to the house’ during one
performance in a way that they would not do on another occasion. More

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broadly, certain elements, for example, set design, are likely to be fixed and
unchangeable despite what an audience might think about them.
To what extent is this like the process of planning for teaching? At a basic
level, the lesson plan document could be compared to the script. It contains
the key sequences and instructions needed to deliver a lesson. The teacher
plays the role of the actor and the classroom becomes the set, the context for
the performance that plays a fundamental role in bringing it to life (or not).
Finally, of course, the pupils are the audience, invited into this space for a
particular performance and engaged and changed, we hope, as a result.
But the metaphor begins to fall apart because it places the teacher in the
dual role of author and actor. Initially, the lesson plan has to be imagined and
created. It is written by the teacher (author) with a specific group of pupils in
mind, for a specific place (their classroom) at a particular time (Monday
morning, period 2). As we have seen, all of these aspects (pupils, place and
time) need to be considered carefully and the plan needs to reflect that level of
specific thinking. It will present a set of ideas through a narrative that has
structure (some kind of scene setting leading to the main events of the play),
key ideas (characters or topics) and some kind of resolution within a set time
period. But, second, the teacher is also the actor charged with bringing the
script to life within a specific performance event (the lesson). Here, like the
actor, they have to bring all their human qualities and attributes to bear in
order for the performance to be engaging and convincing.

Teaching as musicianship

The second type of performance that we are going to reflect on here is that of
musical performance, and the work of the musician. Like the actor, a musician
is often required to work with a script (called the ‘score’) that has been produced
by a composer. Many of the considerations that we gave to the work of the
actor equally apply to the musician. The score is the basis for a performance,
however, it does not contain everything that is needed in order to give a
convincing performance. Like the actor’s script, the musician’s score has to be
interpreted in light of a number of factors. These factors are informed by the
musician’s understanding of particular performance conventions that surround
the period of time when the music was written or the style that it exhibits. So,
for example, a musical score from the Baroque period of music (e.g. the work of
J.S. Bach) would need to be approached in a different way to a score produced
by a Romantic composer such as Rachmaninov. Part of this is because of the
amount of detail that such a score may or may not contain. There is a general
movement in the history of music for scores to contain more and more detail
within them. For example, J.S. Bach might have been quite happy to tell his
musicians to play quietly or loudly; Rachmaninov would have expected to

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communicate very precise instructions about the volume of specific passages of

music within his score, as well as the gradual changes of volume that might
occur over a period of time. The same is true of many other aspects of music’s
composition and performance. By the twentieth century, the score had become
a very detailed representation of the composer’s wishes that the performing
musician had to take notice of and reproduce faithfully. By the end of the
twentieth century, many composers had sought to replace the musician them-
selves and communicate with their audience directly through tape, and later,
digital recordings of their music which, to a larger extent, were under their own
control.
This element of control with a musical score is only part of the story though,
because all composers expect their performers to play within a particular style
that is suitable for their music. Bach would have expected his musicians to
provide embellishments to his score (perhaps by adding particular musical
effects at key moments); Rachmaninov would have frowned on his musicians
playing his music in this way. In many operatic styles, the practice of the Da
Capo aria became the vehicle by which singers were able to show off their vocal
virtuosity. Here, the basic structure of the aria (song) contained two main
sections – part one and part two. Following part two, the first part would be
repeated but it would be quite wrong for the singer to perform it in the same
way as earlier in the aria. The singer was expected to take the basic ideas of
the song (the melody) and transform it through their virtuosity into some
significantly different. As opera shifted from a private to a public form of enter-
tainment in the early nineteenth century, audiences would pay vast sums of
money to hear specific singers (virtuosi) interpret these Da Capo arias in this
way. This resulted in many composers, and others, complaining that the overall
narrative of the opera was being hijacked by the singer for their own personal
fame and notoriety.
There are some interesting comparisons here to the work of teachers in
planning and delivering lessons. First, as with the previous example, teachers
are in that dual position of creating the lesson plan (the score) and delivering it.
Our exploration of the role of the score in musical performance raises questions
about the amount of detail that may or may not be necessary in the lesson plan
and the extent to which any individual teacher needs to be held accountable to
the lesson plan as an integral part of their performance. As a beginning teacher,
you may decide to include a lot of information in your early lesson plans but,
over time, you may be able to provide the general structure within the plan
itself and allow space for embellishment. The stylistic differences between
different types of music have some relevance here too. As we will go on to see
later in the book, the differences in subject approaches to lesson planning need
to be borne in mind. These reflect more than just technical differences, but go
right to the heart of what individual subjects really are and what they try to
achieve as part of a pupil’s formal education. Lesson planning should not look

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or feel the same for every subject. There is an important lesson here for those
responsible for managing the curricula in our schools.
There is also an interesting element of audience (pupil) expectation here.
To what extent should the lesson plan and the activities therein build on the
‘legitimate’ sense of pupil expectation within lessons? Like the Da Capo aria,
the endless repeating of familiar ideas needs to be avoided so the skilful embel-
lishments and improvisation that a teacher can bring to existing subject
content are something that can provide endless challenge for the most experi-
enced of teachers. No two performances of a Da Capo aria should be the same;
similarly, no two lessons taught to any group of pupils will ever be same (even
if they have the same or very similar lesson plans underpinning them).

Teaching as coaching

The third part of our metaphorical application of ‘performance’ within teaching

brings us onto footballers. While you might characterize footballers as sportsmen
or women, for the sake of our discussion here let’s call them performers! We have
chosen to focus on their work for a number of reasons. First, there are a number
of similarities with the work of actors and musicians – they work in a group, they
are highly skilful as individuals, and they provide a ‘performance’ (of varying
quality perhaps). But in contrast to the vast majority of actors and musicians,
footballers do not have a script or a score to work towards. Or do they?
The recent change in the manager of the England football team caused a
lot of press speculation. While there was an initial momentum in favour of
Harry Redknapp, the appointment of Roy Hodgson in May 2012 came as a
surprise to many pundits. One of the concerns that was raised at the time
related to the coaching style of Hodgson (Zonal Marking 2012). While a club
manager, some professional footballers had found his coaching style too
heavy-handed and laborious, involving them walking through particular team
movements in what was seen as a stifling way. This was contrasted with the
work of other football managers who, it was claimed, allowed their players a
platform to exhibit their own flair and creativity. Harry Redknapp, some
claimed, was ‘all about individuals’, whereas Hodgson was ‘the ultimate system
manager’ (Zonal Marking 2012).
These approaches to coaching and team management can be seen by any
keen football supporter. Sitting towards the back of a football ground, it is
possible to observe the ‘shape’ of the football team ebbing and flowing as they
move between defensive and attacking positions. The eleven players, while
each being individually skilful and tactically aware, are playing as part of a
larger team that has to be flexible enough to accommodate and rebut the
advances of the other team while maximizing their own potential to attack
and score when the right moment arises.

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This curious reflection on the style of coaching that footballers receive

gets to the heart of the relationship between lesson planning and lesson
delivery. Taken to an extreme, the ‘certain anarchy’ (Zonal Marking 2012)
style of management represented by the work of Redknapp could result in a
pedagogical style that is all about a teacher’s individual flair, exhibitionism
and personal charisma. To these teachers, perhaps, the requirement for careful,
systematic planning for learning that covers all eventualities (akin to the
system management approach of Hodgson) is an anathema. But for others, a
planning approach that covers every square inch of the field, and every even-
tuality, is seen as preferable. Within that clear structure, these coaches would
argue, the individual flair of specific players can be nurtured and developed.
For teachers following this model, very detailed planning might be seen as a
requirement for teaching that will facilitate every pupil learning to their full
potential.
But unlike actors and musicians, the footballer metaphor has one unique
element – another team to compete against! The opposition are coached and
drilled to exploit your own team and your individual players’ weaknesses, and
are there to beat you within the rules of the game. Here, we are not imagining
the pupils as the opposing team! Rather, we would like to suggest that they do
provide the challenge to any teacher’s planning and pedagogy. The challenge
is to match their planning and individual characteristics and flair to the devel-
opment of a pedagogy that captures and inspires their imagination, making
them enthusiastic about their learning and keen to participate fully in your
classes. They will also provide that ‘grit’ against which your teaching will be
honed. Often, very well behaved, passive classes are the hardest to teach well.
A lively group of pupils who respond to your lesson (in good or bad ways) will
often give you that immediate feedback that you need as a young teacher to
change tack, provide additional support or more challenge.

Using metaphors to inform your planning

These three performance metaphors raise a number of key points for us to

consider in light of developing links between planning and pedagogy. First, all
performance activities do require preparation and planning of some sort. In
acting, music and football, being well prepared with technical skills, stylistic
awareness, communication skills and a good sense of teamwork are all neces-
sary criteria for success. These things do not happen by accident. They require
dedication over many years, regular practice, analysis and a constant focus on
reflection and evaluation of one’s own practice. While actors and musicians
often work with a script or score, and this imposes certain restrictions on them,
even footballers are working within a particular ‘system’ that may constrain
the opportunities for any one player’s individual action. In all cases, having

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a framework for artistic or sporting action is essential to the success of the

activity.
Second, in all these metaphors there is a tension between the script, the
score or the coaching strategy which all seek to impose, and the work of the
creative actor, musician or football who wants to bring their own sense of
personality and vision to the play, the piece or the game. You could charac-
terize this through a sense of conformity or liberation. Perhaps the moments
that an audience most value are when an actor, musician or footballer is able
to take that step out of conformity and bring something that is unique and of
the moment to that particular audience? However, that process of liberation
can be taken too far. We would not want our Shakespearian actors to deviate
from the script into some kind of free-form narrative; nor would we expect a
right-back with defensive duties to abandon his team mates and adopt a care-
less forward role within a football game. For novice teachers, sticking with
your lesson plan is a vital first step towards creating this link between planning
and pedagogy. You have to lay the groundwork for a more liberated approach
to teaching in the conformity of the lesson plan. There is no short cut.
Third, even with the most highly improvisatory forms of theatre, music
and team management, there are mental frameworks and schemata within
which performers work. This is important. Musical improvisation, when musi-
cians apparently make music up on the spot (combining composition and
performance together in the moment) is, essentially, an illusion. Improvisatory
musicians have a framework of musical ideas in their minds, generated through
hours of practice and pre-rehearsal; improvising jazz musicians have highly
developed stylistic languages to draw on, developed through their listening to
recordings, so playing one type of chord for Ella Fitzgerald might be highly
appropriate while for Billie Holliday it would transgress her style. For teachers,
making up lessons on the spot should be avoided, but experienced teachers
will often talk about their best lessons coming to them in an instant, perhaps
while doing something else completely different. These moments do not
appear out of nothing. There will have been a systematic exploration of that
particular field of subject teaching and pedagogy that underpins that creative
moment. Creativity in lesson planning can happen, but it happens against the
backdrop of hard work and effort (in our experience, 99 per cent perspiration
and 1 per cent inspiration).

Planning, pedagogy and practice

Jo Salter was the first female jet pilot in Britain. Her account of learning to fly
is fascinating reading and illustrates the variety of teaching and learning
methods required to become a top pilot. Of particular interest was her account
of how you can learn to fly without actually being airborne:

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I used to walk around, rehearsing the checks, the switch positions,

the radio calls – running circuits in my bedroom, plotting air defence
tactics across a field, circling dogfights on bikes, even flying forma-
tion in my sleep. Rehearsal builds muscles in the brain and the brain
remembers this much more effectively when flying and operating an
aircraft. It is the beginning of an automated sequence where pilots
react without thinking – essential for rapid decision-making at life-
threatening moments.
(Salter 2005: 30)

When Salter began to train as a teacher, she began to relate this process of
learning to the challenges associated with teaching:

As a teacher I employ the same lessons that I learnt as a student; I

rehearse and visualise – how I am going to stand and how I am going
to use my body language in order to convey my message. The spoken
word is only part of how we teach. We have all experienced the flat
teacher, the one who seems to no longer be there, whose energy has
disappeared and whose presence is blurred. These are not the lessons
you remember.
(Salter 2005: 30)

Much of this chapter has been devoted to forging an explicit link between
planning and pedagogy. To these two Ps, we now add a third – practice. Practice
is essential in turning your carefully prepared lesson planning into an exciting
and stimulating series of opportunities for learning. But practice need not only
be done in front of children. You can practise being a teacher all on your own!
Salter’s pre-rehearsal strategies and visualization exercises find common
ground in the work of actors, musicians, artists and many sports people too.
There are numerous ways that you can turn your lesson plan into a living
enactment of your lesson and pre-lesson rehearsals are a vital part of turning a
lesson plan into a reality. So, why not try the following?:

• Read through, act out or practise certain key parts of a lesson plan in
private.
• Structure explanatory dialogue or key questions and, if necessary,
mentally script parts of the lesson plan, ensuring that there is clarity
and purpose in your words. These can be rehearsed in front of the
mirror.
• Imagine responses to various different scenarios and planning
courses of action. These need not be extreme situations. It may be
something as simple as a pupil asking an awkward or seemingly irrel-
evant question. Having a number of good diversions or re-focusing

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statements up your sleeve can smooth over potentially problematic

exchanges.
• Rehearse a few jokes! There is a significant amount of literature that
emphasizes the importance of humour in creating positive learning
and teaching environments (Hill 1998; Garner 2005). While we may
not all be natural wits, there is plenty of time to rehearse and practise
a few, relevant jokes to insert with your lesson plan. Pupils will really
enjoy this element if it is done well.

Summary: teaching, artistry and identity

In his classic book on pedagogy (Alexander 2008), Robin Alexander describes

Douglas Brown, an inspirational and exceptional teacher at the Perse School in
Cambridge during the 1950s. Perhaps not surprisingly, the teaching of Brown
that Alexander describes throughout his chapter is very different from that
which many teachers provide today. For example, Alexander reflects on the
way that Brown talked to his classes (Alexander 2008: 156) as something that
today would be considered a monologue. But Alexander explores Brown’s
intellectual, moral and pedagogical approaches which resulted, he says, in a
display of the ‘humility of genius and the artistry of teaching’ at their best. The
broad pedagogical approach Brown adopted led Alexander to describe him as
not one teacher but four (language, literature, music and the man through the
whom the power of these was unlocked).
It is notable that Alexander chooses to describe him as ‘not one teacher but
four’, rather than ‘not one teacher but three’. Brown’s sense of personality and
identity informed his teaching in powerful ways. The greatest subject that
Brown taught was life itself. Within his English classes, individual subjects
were subsumed through a skilful educational dialogue between teacher and
pupil that we would be wise to try and recapture in our schools today.
Within this chapter we have explored the links between lesson planning
and pedagogy through the adoption of various metaphors (teaching as science
and teaching as performance). We have considered the work of other performers
in significant detail and drawn inferences from their work to help our under-
standing of the links between lesson planning and the classroom where our
planning comes to life. In doing so, it is easy to forget that your human char-
acter and personality are as important to the act of teaching as are the specific
skills of lesson planning, explaining a concept or assessing a learning outcome.
The early definitions of pedagogy quoted at the beginning of this chapter all
hinted at that broader aspect of pedagogy as, in Alexander’s words, an
‘attendant discourse’. Never forget the example of Douglas Brown. It is the
person you are that will provide the power to unlock a love of learning in your
pupils that will span their lifetime.

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Reflective questions

• What metaphors are the most appropriate for the ways in which you
approach teaching and learning?
• Have you considered your role as a performer in the classroom?
• Do you change your role when teaching? If so, why is this?
• Have you observed an experienced teacher who makes pedagogy seem
effortless? What lessons can you take from them?

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 7 Learning

We have said throughout this book that the most important focus of lesson
planning has to be learning. In this chapter we discuss the topic of learning
itself in some detail, consider theoretical approaches to learning, and think
about ways in which you can apply these to your planning and teaching.

What is learning?

Whenever the topic of learning is encountered, discussion fairly quickly moves

to the notion of knowledge. Indeed, many would argue that learning is all about
gaining knowledge. A problem with this standpoint is that it treats all knowl-
edge as being the same, and that this knowledge is therefore amenable to
simply being given to people. We have already mentioned how novice teachers
tend to hold views similar to this, and we also know that:

Prospective teachers tend to believe that knowledge is a property that

is created outside people’s heads, and learning occurs when people
absorb knowledge. The right thing for educators to do, then, is to
transmit as much knowledge as possible to students and see that they
memorise it.
(Torff and Sternberg 2001: 20)

This view, of teaching as telling, is often referred to as the ‘simple transmission

view’ of learning. This view can also be frequently encountered in other areas
too, including the popular press, and, sadly (and potentially dangerously)
among those politicians who over-simplify pedagogy solely as transmission
from teacher to pupil.
More generally, simplistic views of teaching and learning are referred to by
the American educator Jerome Bruner as ‘folk pedagogies’, and he counsels
teachers to be aware of other people, including the pupils, holding these:

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[I]n theorizing about the practice of education in the classroom (or

any other setting, for that matter), you had better take into account
the folk theories that those engaged in teaching and learning already
have. For any innovations that you, as a ‘proper’ pedagogical theo-
rist, may wish to introduce will have to compete with, replace, or
otherwise modify the folk theories that already guide both teachers
and pupils. For example, if you as a pedagogical theorist are convinced
that the best learning occurs when the teacher helps lead the pupil to
discover generalizations on her own, you are likely to run into an
established cultural belief that a teacher is an authority who is
supposed to tell the child what the general case is, while the child
should be occupying herself with memorizing the particulars. And if
you study how most classrooms are conducted, you will often find
that most of the teacher’s questions to pupils are about particulars
that can be answered in a few words or even by ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ So your
introduction of an innovation in teaching will necessarily involve
changing the folk psychological and folk pedagogical theories of
teachers – and, to a surprising extent, of pupils as well.
(Bruner 1996: 46)

This notion of folk pedagogies is a useful one to bear in mind both when
thinking about your own views on teaching and learning, and, as Bruner
observes, when talking about these issues with others. The reason that the
notion of folk pedagogies has such a powerful hold on people is that the idea
of something being simple and straightforward is appealing. After all, as
H.L. Mencken may have, possibly apocryphally, observed, ‘For every complex
problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.’
In order to consider why folk pedagogies and the simple transmission
model are not sufficient, let us refer back to some issues which have been raised
earlier in this book.

Types of knowledge

In Chapter 2 we started to discuss knowledge and observed that there are many
ways of categorizing knowledge into different types. Let us look into this in
more detail now.
One common distinction made is that between knowing how and knowing
that (Ryle 1949). Here knowledge is divided between facts and processes.
Indeed, this distinction is commonly encountered, with a variety of terminol-
ogies being employed to cover what are, in essence, very similar things. These
distinctions and their labels include those seen in Table 7.1.

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Table 7.1 Knowledge

Factual knowledge: Procedural knowledge:

Declarative knowledge Procedural knowledge
Knowing that Knowing how

Declarative knowledge, Ryle’s ‘knowing that’, is knowledge which can be

declared, in other words, spoken. For instance, we can say that we know that
London is the capital of England, that pork comes from pigs, that the Beatles
sang, and that Aston Villa won the FA cup in 1887. Procedural knowledge,
which Ryle described as ‘knowing how’, is knowledge concerning how to do
something. For example, you may know how to play the piano, how to drive a
car, how to play table-tennis, or how to bake a cake. These are all types of
knowledge which require you to be able to do something, to perform an
activity of some sort. This is an important distinction. You could be told, in a
declarative fashion, the procedures which are involved when you are intending
to ride a bike. This would probably involve something like this: ‘Sit on the
saddle, steer with handlebars, keep moving the pedals with your feet, and try
not to fall off.’ All of which seems to be very straightforward when uttered in a
single sentence, but as anyone who has ever ridden a bike knows, it requires
much more than this sentence of declarative knowledge in order to ride a bike!
What will be needed in this situation is procedural knowledge. This also applies
in many others areas of endeavour too; from the examples above we want
people who can actually play the piano, play table-tennis, or bake cakes.
Knowing how to do something involves more than being told by someone
how to do it, it requires practising so that it can be done. We know that a
person is able to do these things because they evidence their achievement in
performance; someone who can play the piano does not demonstrate their
mastery by describing what they do, they will sit at the keyboard and play
some music.
In addition to Table 7.1 we also looked at cognitive and meta-cognitive
knowledge earlier, which leaves us now a fifth knowledge type we want to
explore in the context of learning. This is knowledge of values, what Swanwick
and Taylor refer to as ‘Knowing what’s what . . . what we like . . . what we
value’ (1982: 7). Knowledge of values has a pedagogy associated with it, namely
‘values education’. In Australia, the Department of Education, Science and
Training (DEST) observed that values education

refers to any explicit and/or implicit school-based activity to

promote student understanding and knowledge of values, and to
inculcate the skills and dispositions of students so they can enact

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particular values as individuals and as members of the wider

community.
(DEST 2003: 2)

This is a complex area, but one which affects planning for learning in many
ways. For example, in assessment, which we look at in more detail in the next
chapter, one of the questions often asked is: Do the pupils know what a good
piece of work is? This involves making a value judgement, and in order to do this
pupils need to understand what a good piece of work looks like, sounds like,
feels like, tastes like, or whatever is involved, and, importantly, why this should
be the case. Education for the development of values can be seen therefore to
be of a different type and nature to education concerning declarative knowl-
edge. In Chapter 1 we saw that in the original version of Bloom’s taxonomy
(Bloom 1956), evaluation was placed at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of
higher-order thinking skills. As evaluation clearly involves making judge-
ments, then this sort of learning will need careful planning to avoid an over-
simplistic ‘mine is better than yours’ slanging match. Teachers do need to do
this, and do need to explain why one piece of work is better than another. But
explaining to a class why a National Curriculum level 6 is different from a level
5 is of an entirely different order to trying to explain why Shakespeare is viewed
by society at large as being better than EastEnders!
Having ascertained that learning involves some form of knowing, we can
now turn our attention to theoretical descriptions concerning ways in which
those processes of knowing can be accounted for.

Theoretical perspectives on learning

There are many separate theoretical accounts of learning. Despite this, or maybe
because of it, it is not unreasonable to say that there is no one single theoretical
perspective which we can use to account for all learning. What we do have is a
series of viewpoints, positions and stances on learning which between them can
be used to account for its various aspects. The reasons that we are discussing these
here are that in order to plan effectively for learning you, the teacher, need to
have some understanding of the ways in which pupils learn and how to maximize
this by addressing their learning needs using suitable teaching strategies. You will
also have some theories of your own as to how pupils learn. In order to take the
learning of your pupils forward and develop it, you really need to give some
consideration to how they learn, and it is learning theory that helps us with this,
From the many theoretical accounts, we shall for the sake of this book
follow current conventions used in this area, and place theories of learning into
three broad families. These are behaviourist accounts, cognitive or constructivist
accounts and socio-cultural or situated accounts.

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Behaviourist accounts

Behaviourist views of education are concerned with overt human behaviour,

in the sense of observable action and activity. Note that behaviourism is not
about getting pupils to behave well, but that it is concerned with broader
aspects of human and animal behaviours. Strict, or classical, behaviourists
downplay the role of mind and mental activity in learning, and are concerned
with the observable behaviours that people exhibit.

Behaviourists have no opinion or desire to understand internal

mentalistic process but accept that the processes of reward and
punishment associated with intrinsic factors influence behaviour as
strongly as extrinsic, tangible rewards and punishments.
(Woollard 2010: 7)

Learning is seen as involving a conditioned response to an external stimulus.

‘The environment impinges on us, and we form associations about it in such a
way that the more we are exposed to a particular environment, the stronger
the association’ (Strauss 2000: 34). What this means is that rewards and punish-
ments (if not punishments per se, then at least the removal of rewards) are
powerful motivators for learning: ‘From this perspective, achievement in
learning is often equated with the accumulation of skills and the memoriza-
tion of information (facts) in a given domain’ (James 2006: 54).
Experiments with animals have in the past formed a large component
of behaviourist research. The classic example of this is Pavlov’s experiment
on conditioning with dogs. In this work, Pavlov started from the observed
behaviour that when dogs detect food in their vicinity they will start to sali-
vate. This process is known as ‘stimulus-response’. Pavlov then made sounds
which were presented at the same time as the food, bells, whistles, tuning forks
and other sound sources being employed for this purpose. What Pavlov had
done was to have ‘conditioned’ (key behaviourist term) the dogs to ‘associate’
(another important term) sound with food. After a period of such conditioning,
the dogs would eventually salivate at the occurrence of the sound, without any
food being present at all. This, behaviourists would say, is a conditioned
response.
Later research including that of B.F. Skinner, one of the key figures in
American behaviourism, involved animals learning to undertake desired behav-
iours, such as pushing a lever, and consequently being rewarded with food for a
correct response, or punished if an incorrect response ensued, for example, with
a mild electric shock. From this and similar research behaviourists concluded
that rewards, which they called ‘reinforcement’, strengthen the likelihood of a
desired behavioural outcome, while ‘punishment’ reduced the likelihood of an
undesired behavioural outcome.

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Although a number of facets of behaviourism are discounted in contem-

porary cognitive psychological accounts, nonetheless many aspects of it can be
seen to exist in both schooling and learning. In schooling it can be seen in
behavioural responses such as ‘no running in corridors’, ‘walk on the left’,
‘stand up in assembly when the headteacher comes in’. In learning it can be
seen in the division of complex tasks into smaller stages, in the sequenced
acquisition of skills, and of repeating work, especially that which involves
practical skills, which does not meet the required standard.

Cognitive and constructivist accounts

Although there are differences in emphasis between cognitive and construc-

tivist accounts of learning, for our purposes we shall consider them jointly.
Unlike behaviourist approaches, cognitive theories of learning are inter-
ested in the action of the brain, and of particular interest here is the notion of
mind. Constructivist accounts of learning are concerned with ways in which
individuals construct meaning for themselves. Piaget believed that the way in
which this was done was through the development of mental ‘schema’, which
he saw as ways of storing knowledge which we as individuals use to interpret
what is going on around us. As time passes, we develop these schema so that
they become increasingly complex. A very young child, for example, may have
a schema for the family car. This involves being strapped into a child seat and
being taken places. As their experiences accumulate, they also become aware of
notions of driving, of being filled up with fuel, of speed of movement, and so
on. This schema is likely to link to other similar things – buses, trains, aero-
planes – and modified as appropriate.
For Piaget, learning involves ‘assimilation’ and ‘accommodation’.
Assimilation occurs when an individual encounters some new information.
This will involve assimilating this new information into an existing schema.
This will happen if the new information does not disagree with what the
schema already contains. If there is something which seems to contradict the
information in a schema, a black swan, for example, then the schema needs to
be altered in order to be able to accommodate this new information. When
there are no such contradictions present in an individual’s mental representa-
tion of what is going on, then a state of equilibrium is said to exist; arriving at
this state is referred to as ‘equilibration’.
Constructivist accounts treat the individual learner as making meanings
for themselves, and this has ramifications for the ways in which teaching and
learning are considered:

Learning is always an active process. The learner actively constructs

her/his learning from the various inputs s/he receives. This implies
that the learner needs to be active in order to learn effectively.

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Learning is about helping pupils construct their own meaning, not

about ‘getting the right answer’, as pupils can be trained to get the
right answer without actually understanding the concept.
(Muijs and Reynolds 2005: 62)

One of the implications of this view of learning is that all of the learners in
a given class will be actively constructing their own meanings during the
course of a lesson. It may seem that this is entirely the case, and accords well
with your experiences and that you agree that this is the case with the classes
that you teach. What a constructivist view of education requires of you, the
teacher, is to think about ways in which you can approach the learning of each
pupil that you teach, and of how you can plan for personalization and differ-
entiation. Remember, though, that constructivism is a view of learning, not
teaching.

Socio-cultural accounts

Socio-cultural accounts place the learner as being acted upon by society, by

interactions with others, including by socialization and socializing. One of the
early researchers who promoted this view of development and learning was
the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. He observed:

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice:

first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first,
between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intra-
psychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical
memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions
originate as actual relationships between individuals.
(Vygotsky 1978: 57)

What this means is that the child learns from others, and that the way that
they function as an individual is derived from the ways in which they do this.
One of Vygotsky’s significant contributions to the way in which we view
learning was his notion of the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD).
The ZPD refers to the fact that individuals are able to work at a higher level
when they doing things with other people than they would be able to do by
themselves. Vygotsky described the ZPD as being: ‘The distance between the
actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and
the level of potential development as determined through problem solving
under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’ (Vygotsky
1978: 86). In the case of school pupils, this is true when they are working with
adults, or with other learners who are more experienced in some areas than
they are themselves. As Vygotsky observed, ‘We said that in collaboration the

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child can always do more than he [sic] can independently’ (1978: 209). This
has obvious implications for the ways in which we can consider learning taking
place. It means that by undertaking fruitful collaborative work in class, such as
groupwork and cooperative learning, these are contributing towards the devel-
opment of the individual. This is important in a consideration of why group-
work may be appropriate, because, as Vygotsky observed: ‘what the child is
able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow’
(1987: 211).

Scaffolding
Another aspect of socio-cultural learning theory is that of ‘scaffolding’. The
notion of scaffolding derives from the process of building. The scaffolding is
required to prop up the house until it is sufficiently firm on its own found-
ations to stand by itself. Likewise in education, scaffolding occurs when a
teacher, or significant other person, provides help, assistance and, crucially,
support, to enable a learner to make progress. One of the main architects of the
notion of scaffolding is Jerome Bruner (see Wood et al. 1976). He describes how
the knowledge that the developing pupil is acquiring (or participating in) is
supported by the teacher, who focuses them onto key points relating to the
task in hand. As pupil learning becomes more secure, interventions made by
the teacher are required less frequently, which means that scaffolding can be
withdrawn in stages.

Communities of practice and situated learning

The principal idea behind situated learning is that learning is rooted in activity,
it is situated in a context, and it does not involve the simple transmission
model we discussed earlier. The learning act here is conceived in terms of the
interaction between the learner and their environment, the learner with other
individuals and, in addition, a societal processing of information. What this
means is that learning takes place within a cultural context: ‘learners inevi-
tably participate in communities of practitioners and that mastery of knowl-
edge and skill requires newcomers to move towards full participation in the
socio-cultural practices of a community’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 29). Lave and
Wenger describe how ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (the subtitle of their
1991 book) moves learners from taking part ‘on the edges’, as it were, of what
they describe as ‘communities of practice’, to more centralized positions as
they progress along a novice–expert continuum. They describe these commu-
nities as being:

. . . a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time,

and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities
of practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the

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existence of knowledge, not least because it provides the interpretive

support necessary for making sense of its heritage. Thus, participa-
tion in the cultural practice in which any knowledge exists is an epis-
temological principle of learning.
(Lave and Wenger 1991: 98)

For our purposes in thinking about lesson planning, communities of practice

can be seen as being an integral feature of the many ways in which teachers
work. Schools do not tend to regard some activities as being solely the province
of a gifted few. The whole class normally works at similar tasks at the same time
as each other. An implication of participation in a community of practice is
that all pupils can participate in the learning activities in which they are
engaged, and that they all have something to contribute.

Acquiring and participating

Another interesting standpoint in considering knowledge and its learning,

both in schools and beyond, is represented by the work of Anna Sfard, who
distinguished between learning which we acquire, and learning in which we
participate (Sfard 1998). This is an important and useful distinction for us to
consider in our work on planning for learning in lessons, as these two meta-
phors for learning, as she refers to them, take us into quite specific ways of
conceptualizing learning.
The notion of learning as the acquisition of knowledge is a straightforward
one. We can readily see how this sits with both the complex ways we have been
thinking about learning, and with the naïve theories and folk pedagogy of
non-experts. In the acquisition metaphor, knowledge is treated rather like a
commodity, something you can pick up, handle and own. You can acquire
it in a not dissimilar fashion from going around a supermarket and placing
things in your trolley. As Sfard observes: ‘The idea of learning as gaining
possession over some commodity has persisted in a wide spectrum of
frameworks, from moderate to radical constructivism and then to interac-
tionism and socio-cultural theories’ (1998: 6). Indeed, describing learning as a
process of acquiring knowledge tends to be the commonest way in which it is
discussed.
In contrast to this is the notion of learning as something in which an indi-
vidual participates. This is a rather more complex way of viewing learning. In
it Sfard suggests that: ‘the learner should be viewed as a person interested in
participation in certain kinds of activities rather than in accumulating private
possessions’ (1998: 6). This can readily be applied to many forms of knowledge
in schools which involve participation, but it also invokes the communities of
practice idea from Lave and Wenger above. As James and Brown observe:
‘Knowledge is not a thing to be possessed but a state of knowing, shared within

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a community of practice and expressed through activity’ (2005: 13). This has
clear resonances for many teachers across the spectrum of different age phases,
different subjects on the curriculum and different types of schooling.
Having surveyed a range of theoretical accounts concerning learning, it is
now time to turn our attention to a consideration of what teachers are able to
do with this information, and what sorts of knowledge they themselves will
require in order to effectively teach, and for pupils to effectively learn.

Pedagogical content knowledge

Knowing what there is to teach is different from knowing how to teach it. The
American educational psychologist Lee Shulman distinguishes between the two
by referring to the former as ‘subject matter content knowledge’, and the latter
as ‘pedagogical content knowledge’. He writes:

Within the category of pedagogical content knowledge I include, for

the most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area, the most useful
forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies,
illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations, in a word,
the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it
comprehensible to others. Since there are no single, most powerful
forms of representation, the teacher must have at hand a veritable
armamentarium of alternative forms of representation, some of
which derive from research whereas others originate in the wisdom
of practice.
Pedagogical content knowledge also includes an understanding
of what makes the learning of specific topics easy or difficult: the
conceptions and preconceptions that students of different ages and
backgrounds bring with them to the learning of those most frequently
taught topics and lessons. If those preconceptions are misconcep-
tions, which they so often are, teachers need knowledge of the strat-
egies most likely to be fruitful in reorganizing the understanding of
learners, because those learners are unlikely to appear before them as
blank slates.
(Shulman 1986: 9)

This is another important distinction to make. It affects you, the teacher,

because you will not only need to know what there is to be taught and learned,
Shulman’s subject matter content knowledge, but you will also need to know
how to teach it. You will be developing a repertoire of pedagogical content
knowledge (PCK). Initiating the development of PCK is the purpose of teacher
training, but it does not stop there. Good teachers are continually adding to

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their stock of PCK. This includes ways to help learners understand what is
required of them, and ways in which various topics can be taught so as to lead
to learning. PCK is a component of what it is to be a teacher. An implication
of Shulman’s work is that having good subject matter content knowledge
alone is not enough; PCK is also required in order for learning to take place in
the pupils who are taught.

Combining theory with practice

Having considered theoretical accounts of learning and looked at the PCK,

we now need to put these together to explain why a knowledge of both will
have an impact upon the ways in which you plan for learning, and how
this will actually affect the ways in which you plan for teaching. Let us take
an example of this. The New Zealand education researcher John Hattie has
noted:

Every year I present lectures to teacher education students and find

that they are already indoctrinated with the mantra ‘constructivism
good, direct instruction bad’. When I show them the results . . . they
are stunned, and they often become angry at having been given an
agreed set of truths and commandments against direct instruction.
(2009: 204)

Hattie’s description of ‘direct instruction’ involves a process of stages of

delivery of a lesson. Clearly if you are following a principle such as this, then
you will plan your lesson in order to fulfil the requirements of the model, and
of the way you believe that learning should take place. As a sideline, it is worth
noting that in this book we are not saying ‘constructivism good, direct instruc-
tion bad’, but what we are doing is recognizing that as schools, academies and
colleges turn their attention more and more onto the minutiae of classroom
learning, a number of differing approaches are likely to be needed.

Planning for learning – behaviourism

In planning for learning which uses a behaviourist approach, Woollard notes

that: ‘Behaviourist teaching is associated with learning that is contextualised,
kinaesthetic, practical, visual, verbal and motivated. It is learning that is struc-
tured, sequenced, didactic, efficient and effective’ (2010: 64). This means that
the ways in which the teacher plans for learning in this fashion will involve
sequencing, especially of skill acquisition. In order to do this there will be
an overall learning programme, or scheme of work, which has detailed the
order in which skills need to be developed. The teacher will use positive

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reinforcement in the form of praise, encouragement and grades in order to

reinforce the desired responses. Learning will be assessed through the use of
tests, often trying to measure skills in an ascending sequence of difficulty
(although they may not be presented in this manner). Common behaviourist
testing involves closed questions and timed unseen tests. Practice tests are used
as preparation for the required behaviour in the high-stakes tests, the ones
which count.
Some aspects of rote learning are also associated with behaviourism
(Tulving and Craik 2000: 4), especially when enacted as drill and practice.
Aspects of this can be seen in primary schools in whole class chanting of times
tables, for example. The important thing for us here is that rote-learning should
be seen as a precursor to understanding, which is different from learning. For
example, a child may mentally recite their times table in order to arrive at the
answer to the question ‘what is five times nine?’. This behaviourists would see
as a stimulus (‘what is five times nine?’) – response (‘forty-five’) matter. The
goal in behaviourist modes of teaching would be to have such responses so
well ingrained in the pupil that the stimulus question would elicit the response
forthwith. What can happen in some instances is that the pupil has learned
the times table as a sequence, and so can get to the answer only by working
their way through the nine times table in order, starting from ‘one nine is nine,
two nines are eighteen’. Behaviourist approaches would address this by
providing more practice test questions which were timed in such a way that
there was enough time allowed for the respondent to do this.
Whether the child actually knows what this multiplication sum actually
means in practical terms is the objective of teaching for understanding, which
needs to build on remembering. There are disputes as to whether the role of
remembering as the product of rote-learning is of itself sufficient, as we explore
later in this chapter. The revision of Bloom’s taxonomy, shown in Figure 1.5,
places remembering on the base level of thinking skills, followed by under-
standing. For your planning for learning there are clearly things you want the
pupils to be able to remember, and so it might be that you put this into practice
by using behaviourist approaches in the first instance.

Planning for learning – cognitive and constructivist

Planning for involving cognitive and constructivist approaches to learning

requires the pupils to actively construct meanings for themselves. What this
means for the teacher is that teaching according to this view of learning will
involve the teacher in helping learners progress from being novices towards
more expertise. It will entail dialogue, both between teacher and pupils,
and pupils among themselves, in the use of formative assessment to develop
pupils’ structural learning, and of facilitating application of learning in novel
situations.

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Planning for learning – socio-cultural

Planning for learning according to socio-cultural accounts involves a consid-

eration of the interaction between the individual and other people:

Thinking is conducted through actions that alter the situation and

the situation changes the thinking; the two constantly interact.
Especially important is the notion that learning is a mediated activity
in which cultural artefacts have a crucial role. These can be physical
artefacts such as books and equipment but they can be symbolic tools
such as language.
( James and Lewis 2012: 192, original emphasis)

Planning for learning in this fashion will involve discussion, group-talk, tools
and their use, activity, problem-solving and creative tasks.

Mixing them up

As should be apparent from these accounts, there are aspects of all of the theo-
ries we have been discussing in the ways that teaching and learning take place
in the classroom. In considering your own pedagogy and planning for learning
you may well use selections from all of them depending on the types of
learning, activity and tasks you want the learners to engage with. The subjects
you teach and the various topics within them can also have an effect. After all,
if you are dealing with key health and safety issues you will not want the pupils
to be employing discovery learning techniques! Views of learning will influ-
ence everything about your pedagogy from the way you organize the class-
room to the way you choose activities. For example, if you wish to only engage
in individuated instruction, your classroom will be arranged with the chairs
and desks separated from each other, and all facing the front. If, on the other
had, you wish to encourage learning through discussion, then you will arrange
tables in groups so that this can take place.
Although rote-learning is making something of a comeback in some influen-
tial contemporary views of learning, it is not as yet the dominant modality, and
may not become so. The notion of education being everything you can remember,
but with no sense of understanding, is problematic. We want our current genera-
tion of pupils to be educated to understand. One frustration voiced by teachers is
that they cannot understand on behalf of the learners. At this point it is useful to
think about what it means to understand, and whether the necessary preliminary
stages involving prior learning have been successfully assimilated:

Lack of understanding leads to difficulty in remembering techniques

since steps in arbitrary techniques are easily forgotten; missing steps

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can only be repaired through testing out possibilities, but this devel-
opment needs a base of understanding that allows evaluation of what
is ‘reasonable’. Lack of meaningfulness, therefore, in the long term,
leads to faulty technique and lack of confidence, negative atti-
tudes . . .
(Brown 2012: 105)

So though remembering is an important early stage in learning, it needs to be

placed alongside understanding for it to be effective.

Deep learning

We are talking about learning here as though it were all the same, but this is
not the case! One clear distinction that can be drawn is that between deep and
shallow learning. As Ramsden observes, in deep learning there is an ‘intention
to understand’ in which the ‘student maintains the structure of the task’,
whereas in surface approaches to learning the objective is ‘only to complete
task requirements’ (2003: 47). With the multiple testing regimes that UK
school students undergo, shallow learning can also be characterized as learning
in sufficient detail only to pass a test, which, once taken, can be soon forgotten.
Learning of this sort is unlikely to be of use to pupils; it is deep learning we
wish to foster, and it is deep learning that we are planning for. Knowledge of
PCK helps here, but it is appropriate too for teachers to think about what
happens to the learning that they ask pupils to engage with. At what points
will it be revisited, developed and re-examined? These are points which we
discuss in more depth in the section on long- and medium-term planning in
this book.

Conclusions

So to return to lesson planning, the whole purpose of which is, as we have

seen, to plan for learning, thinking about what sorts of theoretical accounts you
will be employing in your lessons is not simply a matter of academic curiosity,
it is key to your pupils developing their own understandings. Knowing that
some learning benefits from direct instruction, whereas other learning requires
practice, group work and the application of skills is highly relevant in the way
you plan for, and enact, what you and the pupils will be doing. At its most
extreme, for example, you would not employ a ‘chalk and talk’ session if the
aim was for the pupils to play football; you could talk about it for hours, but
the whole point is to let the pupils get out and kick the ball around, to partici-
pate in the learning activity.

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Summary

This section has considered learning and its role in lesson planning. We have
looked at knowledge and discussed how there are different types of knowledge,
and that being aware of these is important when considering how best to plan.
We have looked at differences between acquiring knowledge and participating
in it. We have considered three key families of learning theory: behaviourism,
cognitivism and socio-cultural accounts. We have explored why these are of
more than academic interest, but affect the ways in which teaching and
learning take place at a fundamental level. Pedagogical content knowledge is a
crucial part of the intellectual make-up of the teacher, and we have seen how
important this is, both in terms of how topics are taught, and also in the ways
in which teachers think about teaching and learning. Finally we have consid-
ered the differences between rote-learning and understanding, and talked
about how the latter is what is needed for contemporary education, as remem-
bering alone is by itself an insufficient condition for deep learning to have
occurred.

Reflective questions

• As you teach, think about which learning theory best accounts for
what you are doing.
• What elements of behaviourism do you notice in and around school?
• What is your school’s attitude to group work, if it has one? Why is
this?
• Are there models of learning which are appropriate for some aspects
of what you teach, but not others?
• Think actively about your own developing pedagogical content
knowledge. How are you adding to this?

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 8 Assessment and lesson
planning

Introduction

Assessment is a key issue in contemporary educational discourse. All aspects of

the teaching and learning process hinge on assessment. Indeed, it is possible
that some external commentators, such as government and media, view assess-
ment as a proxy for education; in other words the quality of a school, and the
quality of teaching and learning in it, are judged by how well the pupils do in
terms of their assessment results.
In this chapter we look in detail at what is involved in classroom assess-
ment, at how you, the teacher, are able to plan for and enact assessment, and
at ways in which various types of assessment can be used in both everyday
practice as well as in longer-term significant assessments.

Assessment terminologies

There are a number of terminologies concerning assessment which are used by

teachers, schools, Ofsted, academics and many others. There can often be seen
to be clear evidence of definition slip between various users. Let us start this
chapter by looking at, and defining for our purposes, what the various
commonly encountered words actually mean. We will start with one of the
most frequently encountered distinctions, that which draws distinctions
between ‘formative’ and ‘summative’ assessments.

Summative assessment

Summative assessment is in essence a way of summarizing the attainment of a

pupil. It can also be referred to as assessment of learning (A of L) It involves
marking, grading or levelling, and presenting the information from the
assessment in a summarized fashion. Examples of summative assessment

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gradings include: level 5, GCSE grade B, A level grade C, degree classification

2i, Grade 4 piano, 100 metres swimming, driving test pass, and many others.
What summative assessment is normally telling us is the attainment position
of a pupil or group of pupils at a particular point in time. It does this by
grouping those with similar attainments together, so that we know that a
Grade C at GCSE should carry the same level of meaning whether it is in
English, maths, art, PE, or any other subject.
Some assessments, the driving test being a good example, can be taken
until they have been successfully passed, and in some schools modular exami-
nations are treated in a similar way and persevered with until the student gets
the desired grade, for example, GCSE grade C.
The examples of summative assessments given above are all varieties
of what are normally referred to as ‘high-stakes’ examinations. These are
ones which have some sort of currency in externally validated assessment
regimes. However, not all forms of summative assessment are high stakes
in nature. For example, many teachers will want to test their pupils during,
or at the end of, a phase, stage, unit or other point in a scheme of work.
These summative assessment tests will also be reduced to a summarized
mark, examples including 6/10 (six out of ten), 60 per cent, level 4b, B+, or
similar.
Undertaking summative assessments in this fashion means that it is
possible to judge the performance of one learner against others in the cohort
and beyond. It also means that an individual pupil can be judged against
their own previous performance. This aspect of assessment, where an individu-
al’s personal progression is assessed, is referred to as ‘ipsative’ assessment.
Summative assessment can also be used by teachers to try to establish the effi-
cacy of learning in identified elements of a teaching and learning programme,
as well as determining the level and degree that each individual pupil has
attained.
Harlen and James described the essential characteristics of summative
assessment as involving these aspects:

• It takes place at certain intervals when achievement has to be

reported.
• It relates to progression in learning against public criteria.
• The results for different pupils may be combined for various purposes
because they are based on the same criteria.
• It requires methods which are as reliable as possible without endan-
gering validity.
• It requires some quality assurance procedures.
• It should be based on evidence from the full range of performance
relevant to the criteria being used.
(1997: 373)

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Formative assessment

Formative assessment can also be referred to as assessment for learning (AfL),

and though it can be argued that there are differences between the two, for our
purposes we will take them to be the same thing. Formative assessment refers
to assessment which helps form what comes next in the teaching and learning
cycle. It is assessment which is rooted in the moment, takes place in and during
action, and helps steer the pupil towards the next stage of what they will be
doing.

Formative assessment is that process of appraising, judging or evalu-

ating students’ work or performance and using this to shape and
improve their competence. In everyday classroom terms this means
teachers using their judgements of children’s knowledge or under-
standing to feed back into the teaching process and to determine for
individual children whether to re-explain the task/concept, to give
further practice on it, or move on the next stage.
(Tunstall and Gipps 1996: 389)

One of the important aspects of AfL is that it does not automatically involve
grading or marking necessarily (although it can, as we shall see), but that it
involves teacher and pupils in reflecting on work undertaken, and thinking of
ways in which the work can be developed.

The relationship between formative and summative assessment

We have described formative and summative assessment as though they are

entirely distinct and separate activities:

It is sometimes difficult to avoid referring to these as if they were

different forms or types of assessment. They are not. They are discussed
separately only because they have different purposes; indeed the same
information, gathered in the same way, would be called formative if it
were used to help learning and teaching, or summative if it were not so
utilized but only employed for recording and reporting. While there is
a single clear use if assessment is to serve a formative purpose, in the
case of summative assessment there are various ways in which the
information about student achievement at a certain time is used.
(Harlen 2005: 208)

This is important to note, and it is probably better to think of assessment

between formative and summative as being on a continuum, from what
might be termed pure formative assessment at one end, to pure summative

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assessment at the other. But these distinctions are probably not held as rigidly
in schools where there can be confusions between what counts as formative
assessment and what as summative. For our purposes we wish to be very clear
with regard to such distinctions. Formative assessment is assessment which is
carried out in the moment and is designed to help the learning process as it
takes place. Formative assessment is done with the learner. Summative assess-
ment takes place after the learning has occurred, and is designed to summarize
what has been done so far. Summative assessment is done to the learner. These
differences can be conveniently represented in diagrammatic form, as in
Figure 8.1. Figure 8.1 also introduces another important assessment termi-
nology, this being ‘the formative use of summative assessment’. What happens
here is that assessment results from tests, marks, grades and levels are used to
inform the next stages in learning in which the pupils will be engaged. This
gives rise to discussions with the learners along the lines of ‘you are a level 4c
now, I want you to be a level 4b next time’. Of course, whether such discus-
sions are of any value is another matter, but it is important to note that so
common is this way of working that in some schools it is referred to as though
it were formative assessment proper – we want to be clear: it isn’t!

Assessment data – what is it?

Discussions concerning grades and marks which have been awarded to

pupils take us to another contested area of assessment discourse, and that is
what is meant by the term ‘assessment data’. The simplistic way of

Figure 8.1 Formative and summative assessment.

Source: Fautley and Savage (2008: 27)

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conceptualizing assessment data is to think that it is anything that is graded,

marked or levelled, and then entered into a markbook, physical or electronic.
But as Dylan Wiliam, a significant figure in the architecture of formative assess-
ment observes, ‘if formative assessment involves making marks on a piece
of paper, or putting scores into a spreadsheet then you’re doing it wrong’
(2008: 9).
We have already observed that formative assessment takes place in the
moment, and involves making judgements as work is progressing about what
could and should be done next. What this means in practice for you, the
teacher, is that sometimes formative assessment might not ‘feel like you are
doing assessment’, as one teacher put it. The effect of this was observed by
Ann Neesom: ‘Teachers feel obliged to “prove that they are doing assessment”,
this is usually expressed in terms of having to write something down, for
example, ticking boxes’ (2000: 5). Formative assessment is not like this, instead
it involves making on-the-hoof judgements about what is going on, and what
you as the teacher need to do to the lesson while it is in progress in order to
change tack, to develop learning or to correct misunderstandings. As the
teacher above said, this may not feel like assessment, but it is! It is
also, as Dylan Wiliam observed, unlikely to involve putting anything into a
spreadsheet. Let us consider a couple of practical examples to help contextu-
alize this.

Formative assessment vignette 1

A PE teacher is working with a group of pupils who are learning how to throw
the discus. The teacher has demonstrated, modelled and talked about what she
wants the pupils to focus on in this lesson, which involves posture and holding
the discus properly. After a pupil has thrown the discus, the teacher says, ‘Not
bad, that was a level 4c throw, next time I want you to achieve a level 4b throw,
please. Next pupil please.’

Formative assessment vignette 2

A music teacher is giving a group of pupils a guitar lesson. The focus of the
lesson is correctly playing a melody which the pupils have been learning to play
for a few weeks. After one pupil plays the guitar piece, the teacher says, ‘Not
bad, that was a level 3a performance, now I want you try to make it a level 4c
please.’

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Vignettes discussion

Clearly both of these examples are extremely unhelpful in their developmental

potential for improving the pupils’ learning in either case (though, sadly,
also very real in terms of the ways some schools misinterpret assessment data
use). What is far more likely to happen is that the PE teacher will comment
on the actual throw of the pupil, pointing out what she wants the pupil to do,
probably involving a slowed-down modelling or a very precise set of instruc-
tions which help that pupil specifically to be able to develop and improve their
throw next time. The guitar teacher will do the same, pointing out, again
probably re-modelling the precise details of what she wants the pupil to do,
where to put her fingers on the guitar strings, and talking with the pupil to
make sure that understanding what is required specifically for that pupil, in
playing that piece of music, is made clear with regards to what needs to be
done next.

Feedback

It should be obvious that what is important in each of these cases is the

quality of the feedback that the teacher gives to the pupils. This is what
will make a difference, this where learning takes place, and this is where
improvement can be discussed, modelled, picked over, restructured if neces-
sary, and taken on to the next stage. As Alastair Irons notes: ‘Feedback is
a key aspect in assessment and is fundamental in enabling students to
learn from assessment. Helping students to learn from their activities is
a key aspect of feedback – particularly through encouraging dialogue’
(2007: 1–2).
This last point is an important one, feedback is a dialogue, not a teacher
monologue! The points made need discussing with the learner to ensure that
they have understood, they know what to do, and they understand what they
need to do in order to make progress with their learning and consequently
with their attainment too.
When feedback is used in this way, to influence the way that things will be
done next, it is sometimes referred to as ‘feedforward’. This terminology has
been around for a while; it was used in the National Curriculum task group on
assessment and testing (TGAT) report of 1988:

Promoting children’s learning is a principal aim of schools. Assessment

lies at the heart of this process. It can provide a framework in which
educational objectives may be set and pupils’ progress charted and
expressed. It can yield a basis for planning the next steps in response
to children’s needs . . . it should be an integral part of the educational
process, continually providing both ‘feedback’ and ‘feedforward’. It

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therefore needs to be incorporated systematically into teaching strat-

egies and practices at all levels.
(TGAT 1988: para 3)

Assessment data and feedback

We observed above that it is helpful to think of assessment as lying on a continuum

between formative and summative. One of the implications of this will be that
assessment data also lies on a continuum running alongside and parallel to this,
with feedback in exclusively oral form being at one end, and feedback in exclu-
sively written form at the other. A diagrammatic representation of this is shown
in Figure 8.2. What this means is that assessment data has exclusively oral aspects
at one end of this continuum. This can be problematic in some instances, as one
of the issues with solely oral feedback is that it can be considered as being intan-
gible, in that as it exists solely in spoken form, it can be difficult to recapture,
replicate, or, in some cases, prove it existed at all! There is, however, little doubt
that giving immediate oral feedback to learners is of significant benefit, and helps
shape and influence work in the moment. As we move along the continuum the
response given to work moves from being intangible to becoming increasingly
tangible. Many teachers are finding ways to capture oral feedback to pupils, for
example, by the pupils writing down a summarized form of what the teacher has
been saying. Other teachers provide brief bullet points, and others use targets as
formative feedback. At the other end of the continuum the assessment data, and
the feedback associated with it, can exist in a very brief written format. For

Figure 8.2 Assessment data and feedback.

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example, results at degree, GCSE and A level can be expressed as simply a grade,
with nothing by way of commentary available unless requested (and paid for!).
There is currently a drive in a number of schools to make all forms of feed-
back given to pupils tangible. In some schools this means that written feedback
is the norm, whereas others have adopted more creative responses and teachers
use spoken and recorded audio files to give feedback, while others video their
comments. Although this drive towards increasing the tangible component of
feedback is seemingly laudable, it should nonetheless be remembered that it is
direct oral feedback, given in the heat of the moment while learning is actually
taking place, that is likely to have the greatest influence on pupils. While
tangible assessment data can clearly have a place in the evidence-bank you will
use for planning future teaching and learning activities, the intangible should
still have an important and useful role to play too.

Assessment data typologies

It has been observed that ‘to teach is to assess’ (Swanwick 1988: 149), and this
will very much be the case when you are thinking about how assessment can
inform your teaching. One of the starting points for ways in which this can be
done is to list the various pieces of assessment data that you will need before
starting to plan a unit of work or a lesson with it. See Table 8.1 for what such
an assessment data list could include.
What is particularly apposite in thinking about this as assessment data is
to simultaneously consider the issue of assessment evidence. In other words,
how do you know the answers to these questions? As an example, these ques-
tions are rephrased in terms of evidence in Table 8.2.

Table 8.1 Assessment data

Knowing Doing

What do the pupils know already? What can the pupils do already?
Do they all know this? Can they all do this?
If so, how well do they know it? If so, how well can they do it?
What about those who struggle? What about those who struggle?
What about those who find it easy? What about those who find it easy?
Have they enough prior knowledge to be Have they acquired the necessary skills
able to do it? already?
How does this learning build on what they How does this activity build on what they
know already? can do already?

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Table 8.2 Assessment evidence

Knowing Doing

What evidence do I have to show that the What evidence do I have to show that the
pupils know already? pupils can do this already?
What evidence do I have to show that they What evidence do I have to show that they
all know this? can all do this?
What evidence do I have to show how well What evidence do I have to show how well
they know it? they can do it?
What evidence do I have about those who What evidence do I have to show about
struggle? those who struggle?
What evidence do I have about those who What evidence do I have about those who
find it easy? find it easy?
What evidence do I have to show they have What evidence do I have to show they
enough prior knowledge to be able to do it? have acquired the necessary skills already?
What evidence do I have to show how this What evidence do I have to show how this
learning builds on what they know already? activity builds on what they can do already?

This makes for a much stronger evidence base upon which to build lesson
planning. It asks the key question ‘how do I know?’, and turns it into an eviden-
tial requirement. Although it is likely that you will know, or have an impression
at least, thinking about assessment data in this way makes for a more powerful
way of carrying out developmental planning. But how can you collect this data?
This is where the various forms we have been discussing – formative assessment,
the formative use of summative assessment, and summative assessment – come
into play. You will have work that the pupils have done, you will have comments
that you have made on their work, and you may well have marks, grades and
levels awarded for the ways in which this work has been done by individuals
within your classes. You will also have your reflections and lesson evaluations
which you have been keeping concerning this work and your teaching of it.
All of these contribute towards the evidence base we are discussing here. Using
this sort of information in your planning is a logical development of Schön’s
(1983) notion of the reflective practitioner, and his discussions of ‘reflection
in action’ and ‘reflection on action’, and builds on the discussions we had
concerning reflection in Chapter 3 and elsewhere.

Success criteria

The notion of success criteria is one which can frequently be interchanged

with assessment criteria. Using the term ‘success’ tends to render such criteria
as being a positive aspect, as assessment criteria can carry negative

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connotations for some learners. In whatever fashion you choose to refer to

them, or whether your school, college or academy has a preference, the impor-
tant thing is to have thought about what these things are and what you will do
with them.
In order to be able to develop the work that pupils are doing, one of the
major changes you will be expecting is that their work will develop qualita-
tively over time, and that it will show increasing understanding of what quality
involves. But how do they know this? One of the early writers on formative
assessment made the observation that ‘The essential conditions for improve-
ment are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar
to that held by the teacher’ (Sadler 1989: 121). In your planning for learning,
one aspect of developing AfL that you will want to make clear is this one of
pupil understanding of quality. One of the ways in which you can do this is by
thinking about what the criteria for success in any given piece of work or task
entail. But doing this is not easy, as Pirsig described:

Quality – you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But
that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that
is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality
is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing
to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know
what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows
what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for
all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades
based on?
(1974: 178)

Knowing this, thinking about what quality is in whatever it is that your

teaching and learning focus upon becomes a significant task. Simply saying
‘because I said so’ is not a good enough answer! So what are success criteria,
and how can you use them in your planning? In order to begin to do this,
let us first consider what a success or assessment criterion might look like.
Table 8.3 gives a list of suitable characteristics that it is normally desirable that
a success criterion possesses.
The purpose of Table 8.3 is to help with your teacherly thinking about
what it is that is good, and has quality, in your teaching and learning. Hopefully
it also goes some way towards dealing with Pirsig’s issue mentioned above, that
if you are not careful, when you try to define quality ‘it all goes poof!’.
In order to produce such a list, the first stage in your thinking process will
normally be to deconstruct the learning that the pupils will be doing, and
produce a series of phrases which describe the ways that success will be achieved.
Let us take as an example the teaching and learning from the formative assess-
ment vignettes above to do this.

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Table 8.3 Success criteria characteristics

A criterion should have a degree of exclusivity It should, ideally, refer to a single, isolat-
able aspect of skill, knowledge or
understanding
It should be specific enough to measure a As above, focusing on that singularity
single item/skill/construct without too many
extraneous variables coming into play
A criterion should be assessable in some way It should be possible to say how good
something is, or that it exists or is absent
It should be possible to ascribe a rough valuing If it exists, how much of it is there? How
to the criterion good is it? Can a scale of value be
produced? For example, poor, satisfac-
tory, good, very good?
A criterion should have some relationship to It should be a deconstructed aspect of
the whole the total performance
It should not be evaluating an irrelevant aspect Some things are peripheral. Are they
of accomplishment (such as one observation really relevant to the performance in
which was ‘has tie done up’!) question?
A series of criteria which deconstruct a whole The isolated deconstructed aspects of
should, when taken together, go some way criteria should not simply be an amor-
towards formation of an overall impression of phous mass of unrelated trivia, but
the whole should have an overall meaning
Just because something is hard to assess does Some things are easy to assess, but are
not mean it should be ignored they important?

Source: After Fautley 2010

The discus-throwing lesson involves a series of stages which the learners

need to practise in order to move towards mastery. These include:

• holding the discus properly – correct position of fingers;

• stance and posture – moving in the most effective way;
• movement – achieving the required momentum before the throw;
• release – letting go at the appropriate time;
• aim – making sure the discus goes in the right direction.

Each of these can be turned into a success criterion in its own right, and, using
the idea from Table 8.3 it should be possible to ascribe a rough value to this. To
do this here we are here going to use a three-point scale, which accords to:

− Not good enough

= Meets the requirements
+ Exceeds the requirement

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In these examples the three-point scale has been written with textual
comments:

• Holds the discus properly: Good hold – Satisfactory hold – Poor hold
• Stance and posture: Good stance – Satisfactory stance – Poor stance
• Movement: Fluid movement – Secure movement – Restricted
movement
• Release: Good release – Adequate release – Poor release
• Aim: Secure aim – Adequate aim – Poor aim

The guitar-playing lesson involves performing a melody, and again this can be
deconstructed into a series of stages, which we will use a three-point scale to
give value to:

• Uses left-hand fingers correctly: Accurately – Some errors – Lots of

errors
• Right-hand technique: Secure – Adequate – Weak
• Musicality: Musical performance – Adequate performance – Poor
performance
• Phrasing: Good – Adequate – Poor
• Stance and posture: Good stance – Satisfactory stance – Poor stance

To make this more manageable in the classroom, or on the field, the assess-
ments could be presented in tick-box format, as seen in Table 8.4, for example.
All the teacher has to do here is to tick the box; the text has been replaced by
the shorthand ‘– = +’. Note that these symbols are a shorthand for the text, not
a replacement for it.
In the guitar example there is an important success criterion which lies
at the heart of quality, and relates to the item from Table 8.3 which states
‘just because something is hard to assess does not mean it should be ignored’;
this is the idea of it being a musical performance. This is what will lie at the
heart of the guitar teacher’s work, and why the pupil is presumably learning

Table 8.4 Assessments in tick-box format

– = +
Holds the discus properly:
Stance and posture:
Movement:
Release:
Aim:

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to play the instrument in the first place. And yet it is much harder for a teacher
to say ‘that was a musical performance’ than to note whether the pupil was
using the right fingers. But assessing success this way is key to developing
quality. Presumably the guitar teacher knows what a musical performance is
when she hears one; she will use her professional judgement. Teachers should
not be worried about doing this. If brain surgery involves making professional
judgements – which it does – then teachers should not shy away from using
them either.

Using assessment data in planning

Establishing what success involves is clearly an important part of planning for

any teaching and learning. What is also needed is for the teacher to use this infor-
mation over time to develop learning by building on the assessment data they
have. What is important here is to use the full range of assessment data available
to you, the teacher, from the classes you teach. We discuss throughout this book
that it is important to have a long-term view of where learning should be, but
that the short term, the lesson-by-lesson view, will need to evolve as a direct
result of what has happened previously with each specific class. It is this informa-
tion which will be used in planning lessons, as opposed to schemes or units
of work.
To be truly formative, assessment data needs to inform both the teaching
and learning processes. The teacher needs to learn from assessment data what
it is that the pupils, or specific subsets or named individuals, cannot do to
a base-level standard, and then address this in future learning episodes.
Planning for learning is thus both a proactive and reactive phenomenon. What
this means is that assessment data can be divided into three essential types.
These are:

• Day-to-day assessment This is the type of assessment data which

is of most use in the classroom, gives information which the teacher
can use to plan future learning episodes. This type of assessment data
will be of most use to the teacher when planning for the learning of
each individual child.
• Periodic assessment This will take place occasionally, will be
planned for as a separate event, maybe a test or assessment lesson. Its
results can be used to inform the future direction of teaching and
learning, but it also serves as an audit of learning.
• Terminal assessment This is assessment which occurs at the end
of a unit, year, term, course, scheme of work, or other significant
moment in the learning calendar. Some types are high-stakes assess-
ments. They tend to be of limited developmental utility for individual
learners, but are of high auditing potential.

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An important aspect of this list is that it is a typology of assessment data, not

of assessments. As we saw in the quotation from Wynne Harlen earlier in this
chapter, ‘the same information, gathered in the same way, would be called
formative if it were used to help learning and teaching, or summative if it were
not so utilized but only employed for recording and reporting’ (Harlen 2005:
208). This is important to note in planning for learning, as it is important
that as a teacher you do not accidentally confuse the auditing and develop-
mental potential of assessment. Auditing occupies the national press, Ofsted
and senior leadership teams, but can and should only occur as a result of
good teaching and learning. Constant auditing alone is of little help, and
the old country saying to the effect of ‘weighing the pig every day doesn’t
make it fatter’ is very true here. Assessment solely for auditing is like weighing
the pig every day; you do have to feed it, or in our case teach it something, in
between!

Who is the assessment data for?

This last point, the confusion between assessment for learning and auditing,
brings us to an important question to be asked in thinking about planning for
learning. This question is ‘who is the assessment data for?’. From your perspec-
tive as a classroom teacher it is probably most helpful to consider three separate
audiences for assessment data, and two essential uses. The audiences are the
pupils, the teacher and what we might term ‘the system’, this being everything
beyond the classroom, from the SLT through to league tables. The uses to which
assessment data are put, again from a simplistic perspective, can either be to
help learning and activity or to audit. A diagrammatic representation is shown
in Figure 8.3.
What is important to bear in mind from a planning perspective is that the
audiences shown in the second row of Figure 8.3 have very different require-
ments from each other with regard to the ways they will use assessment data.
The pupils will want to know how well they have done, certainly, but will be
active participants in formative assessment dialogues, and it is these which will
help them in making progress. You, the teacher, will be using assessment data
in planning for teaching and learning, but also in developmental auditing
purposes. You will be wanting to know how, and how well, the pupils in your
classes are progressing. This data, which includes that of the formative use of
summative assessment, will be used by you to help with the planning and
delivery of forthcoming lessons. The systemic requirements of your assessment
data can be a little more opaque than the others, however. In many cases these
can be more concerned with auditing purposes, and this data will have very
little, if any, use in helping your pupils, in your classroom, improve in their
learning. Knowing about the uses to which your assessment data will be put
helps you to know how best to plan for implementation.

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 ASSESSMENT AND LESSON PLANNING 123

Figure 8.3 Who is the assessment for?

Source: Fautley (2010: 70)

Conclusion

So, having thought about these issues, how can you use assessment data to
help in your planning?
One of the most important ways, but least obvious in evidential terms, is
to use the information from the intangible end of the continuum we discussed
earlier. Building on the ways you have interacted with the pupils is the surest
way of ensuring that you tailor the planned learning to meet their needs.
Moving to the more tangible aspects of assessment data, you can use the results
of test scores to highlight where there may be gaps in learning and plan to
remedy this. It is also pertinent to note that assessment data is not only there
to highlight possible deficits in learning, it is also possible that the pupils have
very thoroughly grasped key concepts, and so while going over things again
may be relevant, there is also a point in moving on, and in finding other
ways to build on their extant learning and knowledge in potentially more
appropriate ways.

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We hear a lot about evidence-based teaching, and it is in the use of assess-

ment data in purposeful planning that this can be seen in your lessons. We
have talked about day-to-day and periodic assessment, and it is in interpreting
the results from these and using them in your planning that you will be person-
alizing learning for your pupils in a strategic fashion.
There is an all too present danger in the current climate of assuming that
the only things that matter are assessment results and test scores. As we said in
the opening of this chapter, what this means is that in some cases assessments
have become a proxy for education, and that testing has become an end in
itself. It is important for you to remember that you teach pupils, each of whom
is a named individual, with a life-story and human baggage, and that it is what
you do for them as people that matters, rather than how you deal with them as
assessment statistics.

Summary

In this chapter we have considered the use of formative and summative assess-
ment. We have thought about marking and grading, and discussed how it is
through the proper and appropriate use of formative assessment – assessment
for learning – that pupils are able to develop and their learning be moved on.
We have also discussed the notion of feedback and how it can be consid-
ered to lie on a continuum between the intangible and the tangible. The use of
direct and immediate oral feedback as happening in the moment has been
seen to be important, but least amenable to providing examples of detailed
evidence, which SLTs in schools may require.
There are clear differences between day-to-day assessment and terminal
high-stakes assessments, and it is in thinking about the day-to-day assessment
that you will be making a real difference to learning. In a similar fashion,
thinking about who precisely the audience is for your assessment data enables
you to focus not only on presenting the right data for the right audience, but
to consider what the most appropriate way of gathering such data is in the first
instance.
Finally we have talked about the way that assessment data should, for the
classroom teacher, be a means to an end, not an end in itself. Very few teachers
go into teaching to generate data, most want to make a difference to young
people’s lives!

Reflective questions

• What do you understand to be the differences between formative and

summative assessment? Is this how your school sees them too?

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 ASSESSMENT AND LESSON PLANNING 125

• What assessments do you have to do, and what assessments do you do

because you wish to?
• How do you give feedback? Can this be worked on?
• What happens to any assessment data that you generate? Who else
sees it?
• How do you use assessment data in your planning? Are there ways in
which this could be improved?

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 9 Lesson, medium- and long-
term planning

Introduction

For obvious reasons, this book has focused on the key topic of lesson planning.
By now, we hope that you have got a firm grasp of our thinking and advice
about how to plan for an individual lesson, how to enact that plan through an
informed pedagogy, and how to reflect constructively on the plan – and its
enactment within your teaching and your pupils’ learning – through your
evaluation.
In this chapter we are going to turn this bottom-up, individual lesson plan
first planning process upside down. We are going to start with the notion of
individual subjects and the knowledge, skills and understanding they contain,
then consider longer-term plans which might encompass a Key Stage, and
finally focus our attention on medium-term planning (which might cover a
unit of work in a secondary school setting, or a week’s work within a topic in a
primary school setting). We will be widening our vision and looking at how an
individual lesson plan is situated within these broader planning contexts.
Along the way, we will be considering some broader themes about curriculum
development and its relationship to your work as a teacher.

Looking beyond lesson planning

Each lesson that you teach does not exist in isolation. It relates to other lessons
that you teach in a complex set of relationships. At the most basic level, any
one lesson relates to the one that preceded it and the one that follows it. For
this reason, it is a good idea to briefly signpost key activities and learning
that have been undertaken in a previous lesson at the commencement of a
new lesson; and at the end of the new lesson it is also a good idea to look
ahead to what is to follow and try to create some forward momentum and
curiosity about the learning that future lessons will contain in the pupils’

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minds. As we have discussed elsewhere, homework activities can help bridge

the gaps between lessons too.
But there is another sense in which an individual lesson is situated more
broadly within the lived experience of your pupils. Pupils ‘receive’ many
lessons within one week. In the primary school, their classroom teacher
may teach the vast majority of these; in the secondary school different teachers
will teach specific lessons in each subject. Either way, the knowledge, skills and
understanding that any one individual lesson contains will be contextualized
by individual pupils within this weekly mix of teaching that they receive and
the learning opportunities contained therein. For this reason, if nothing else,
it is useful for you to consider how any one lesson that you are teaching relates
to this broader milieu of experiences that your pupils will enjoy week by week.

Defining curriculum development

In this chapter, we are going to focus primarily on how any one individual
lesson that you teach relates to the medium-term planning that this lesson is
situated within, and then how this medium-term planning relates to a broader
curriculum plan, or map, that might constitute a year’s, or number of years’,
teaching and learning (perhaps within a Key Stage or part of a Key Stage). In
doing so, we will be considering features of what is known as ‘curriculum
development’. So, before we get into the detail of units of work and what they
might entail, it is worth considering what exactly is meant by this term –
‘curriculum development’.

‘Top-down’ curriculum development

In common language use, we use the word curriculum to mean a set of arrange-
ments for a course of study. It might include specific subjects, themes that span
across subjects (e.g. globalization), specific ways of thinking or acting (e.g.
creativity) or even ways of learning (e.g. visual, auditory and kinaesthetic).
Curriculum development, therefore, is the process by which the content of a
course of study is chosen, organized, structured and, to a certain extent,
delivered.
Top-down approaches to curriculum development dominate our educa-
tional systems. Perhaps the most obvious example of a top-down structure of
curriculum development in the United Kingdom is the National Curriculum.
The ‘National Curriculum’ meant, until relatively recently, the over-arching
structure of subjects and other elements that all state schools, regardless of
their foundation or status, were required to provide as a core offering for all
students. At the time of writing, there is a considerable amount of debate
around the construction of a new National Curriculum to replace the previous

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version (which was implemented in 2007). The proposed new National

Curriculum documentation is considerably shorter than the one it will replace.
However, its brevity has not meant that debates around the content for each
subject have been any less fierce. It has even led to some writers considering it
more of a ‘pub quiz’ than an ‘education’ (Evans 2013).
But at the level of any one school, the National Curriculum as a top-down
example of curriculum development is mitigated and mediated by decisions that
headteachers and other senior staff might make about how to implement it
within their own curriculum offering. The National Curriculum is, probably,
one of several organizatory approaches that a school might utilize to help prepare
a curriculum offering for their pupils. Within the primary school, staff may meet
regularly to choose particular themes for a particular term’s study (e.g. Ancient
Egypt). Within that theme, the specific subject knowledge and content will be
balanced and structured in different ways. Within the secondary school, the
precise amount of curriculum time or financial resources that a particular subject
receives are based on decisions made about the relative importance – or not – of
that particular subject within the broader mix of subjects being included within
a particular year or Key Stage. As schools have been given greater degrees of
autonomy, the impact of the National Curriculum has waned, with academies
and free schools being able to ignore it completely should they wish to do so. In
light of this de-nationalization of the National Curriculum, it is interesting for
you to consider what alternative organizing principles for curriculum develop-
ment have been employed within your school or may be in the process of being
considered in light of your school’s greater degree of autonomy in this area.
At Key Stages 2 and 4, key accountability measures such as SATS and GCSE
examinations could be considered to be another top-down form of curriculum
development. In most primary schools, for example, the teaching of numeracy
and literacy is often dealt with separately from the general topic work within
which other subject knowledge is presented. Within the context of specific
GCSE specifications, the accusation is often made that teachers ‘teach to the
test’ (and this could be taken to be a good or a bad thing!). In both cases, the
key content of the examination (or accountability) framework, in terms of
knowledge and understanding, does influence the choices that are made in
terms of how the medium- and longer-term planning are constructed at an
individual school level.
However, these forms of top-down curriculum development, while impor-
tant, are not the only way in which the term ‘curriculum development’ can be
conceptualized.

‘Bottom-up’ curriculum development

While ‘top-down’ approaches to curriculum development dominate most

educational thinking in our society, others have taken a more reflective view

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of the term ‘curriculum’. Like Lawrence Stenhouse, we have found it helpful to

position it alongside the work of the teacher. An over-emphasis on the external
dimensions of the ‘curriculum’ as a set of subjects, themes and ways of thinking
or learning can lead to what could be considered as an unhelpful over-
objectification of the curriculum itself.
Stenhouse worried that the term ‘curriculum’ had been removed from the
day-to-day remit of teachers and been taken over by politicians, examination
providers and others. This, he argued, led to the teacher being seen as a disem-
powered labourer, being told what to do, where to do it and, increasingly, how
to do it too. More prosaically, this concept of the term curriculum, he argued:
‘rests on an acceptance of the teacher as a kind of intellectual navvy. An objec-
tives based curriculum is like a site-plan, simplified so that people know exactly
where to dig their trenches without having to know why’ (Stenhouse 1980:
85). For Stenhouse, such a definition of the word ‘curriculum’ and the resulting
imposition of centralized prescriptions of GCSE specifications or national
curricula as a form of ‘curriculum development’ de-professionalized teachers
and undermined their work. Throughout his career he developed alternative
ideas that reasserted the teacher’s role in curriculum planning and develop-
ment. If, as he wrote, ‘it seems odd to minimise the use of the most expensive
resource in the school’ (Stenhouse 1975: 24), it would be better, he argued, to
‘reinvest in the teacher and to construct the curriculum in ways that would
enhance teachers’ understanding and capability’ (Ruddock 1995: 5).
For Stenhouse, and us, teachers are central to the creation and delivery of
a curriculum for their pupils. In this philosophical sense, you embody the
curriculum that you deliver; as a teacher you ‘enact’ the curriculum through
your teaching day by day. It is ideas such as this that led Stenhouse to make
one of his most famous statements, that there is ‘no curriculum development
without teacher development’ (Silbeck 1983: 12).

A pragmatic approach to curriculum development

As we have discussed in this section on curriculum development, the curriculum

can be understood in varying ways. From the simple notion of it being a collec-
tion of subjects that are taught in a systematic way, to the philosophical and
conceptual relocation of the curriculum to the pedagogy of individual teachers,
it is vital that all of us who care about education do not allow the ‘curriculum’ to
be hijacked by our politicians.
Pragmatically, whatever the politics surrounding the imposition of
national curricula frameworks or examination specifications, there is always
going to be a mixture of top-down and bottom-up approaches to curriculum
development in our schools. As a teacher, you are not going to be left completely
on your own to design and implement your own curriculum. Working

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collegiately in your departments or, in smaller schools as a whole staff, is a vital

way of ensuring that your own work is situated within, and informed by, your
school’s vision for the curriculum that pupils will enjoy. In terms of how you
design and implement medium-term planning (week by week) and longer-
term planning (across a year or Key Stage), you will have to consider the broader
curriculum frameworks within which your work is situated. However, this does
not mean that you are a powerless individual. As a classroom teacher, you have
a massive amount of influence to design and implement a curriculum that can
impact on your pupils’ lives in powerful ways. This influence and power need
to be exercised responsibly. So, where do you start and how do you go about
designing a curriculum within your own particular area of responsibility?

Turning lesson planning upside down: start with

the subject

In most schools, subjects are the individual buildings blocks of the curriculum.
Whether in primary or secondary schools, the notion of the individual subject,
the key knowledge, skills or learning processes and understanding that each
subject contains, and the development of your skilful pedagogy in introducing
pupils to a particular subject, are all self-evident and often unquestionable.
The love of a particular subject is one of the key reasons that new teachers
cite for wanting to learn to teach. For many of us, our academic subject was our
‘first love’ and something that we treasure very dearly. And therein lies a
problem. The nature, culture and tradition of ‘subjects’ can lead to difficulties:
‘School subject communities are neither harmonious nor homogeneous and
members do not necessarily share particular values, subject definitions and
interests’ (Jephcote and Davies 2007: 210). Every subject that is represented
within our schools has a particular culture that underpins it. This culture
informs the ‘identifiable structures which are visibly expressed through class-
room organisation and pedagogical styles’ (Goodson and Mangen 1997: 120).
A subject’s culture is what makes it unique and, in a simple way, helps pupils
sense that they are studying a particular subject at a specific moment in the
school day, whether that is in a subject lesson within a secondary school, or
within a particular topic in the primary school classroom. It is important to
recognize that a subject’s culture goes beyond its knowledge. It also incorpo-
rates ways of thinking, acting and being, that inform those processes by which
you may teach and your pupils learn.
For any structured process of curriculum development that is focusing on
long-term planning, our advice is to start with your subject. For those of you
teaching in secondary schools this will be easy in that the vast majority of
your teaching will be in one main subject area; for those teaching in primary
schools you will need to consider each subject area in turn at this deep level, as

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well as considering how these may interrelate and overlap. In the primary
school particularly, collegial ways of working will help you share individual
teachers’ particular subject expertise within this planning process. No one is
expected to be a subject expert in every area!
For us, the key process is to think through, at the highest level, what it is
that your subject considers to be the most important set of ideas or principles
that pupils should engage with throughout their formal school-based educa-
tion. You can do this in a number of ways:

1 Reflect on your own experience as a learner within that subject’s

community. What have you learnt and valued over the years? Which
teachers, or others, inspired and motivated you? How did they do it?
2 Engage with the various subject communities that work within educa-
tion settings. Groups like the Historical Association or the National
Association for the Teaching of English will all have their own sets of
ideas about what should constitute a formal set of knowledge in their
particular curriculum areas. These can be very useful prompts for your
own thinking.
3 Examine the work of professionals within your particular subject
field(s). Talk to them and ask them which areas of knowledge or sets
of skills are particularly important for their work and how these have
changed over the years.
4 Take note of the various curriculum frameworks such as the National
Curriculum or appropriate examination specifications. However,
please remember that these should not be the sole source of informa-
tion for your work in this vital area. But you will have to reference
your work to these at a basic level.

This type of reflective and consultative process does take time. But it is time
well spent particularly when you are really trying to define, in detail, what it is
that it is intrinsically important about a subject and how it ought to be taught.
By way of an example, both of us have been music teachers at previous points
in our careers. What was so important about music that makes us think, as
music educators, that it ought to be taught to all children in our schools?
Well, first, there were helpful statements in the National Curriculum
documentation. Statements such as this:

Music is a unique form of communication that can change the way

pupils feel, think and act. Music forms part of an individual’s identity
and positive interaction with music can develop pupils’ competence
as learners and increase their self-esteem. Music brings together intel-
lect and feeling and enables personal expression, reflection and
emotional development. As an integral part of culture, past and

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present, music helps pupils understand themselves, relate to others

and develop their cultural understanding, forging important links
between home, school and the wider world.
Music education encourages active involvement in different
forms of music-making, both individual and communal, helping to
develop a sense of group identity and togetherness. Music can influ-
ence pupils’ development in and out of school by fostering personal
development and maturity, creating a sense of achievement and self-
worth, and increasing pupils’ ability to work with others in a group
context. Music learning develops pupils’ critical skills: their ability to
listen, to appreciate a wide variety of music, and to make judgements
about musical quality. It also increases self-discipline, creativity,
aesthetic sensitivity and fulfilment.
(DES 2013)

Looking beyond the National Curriculum, various different subject associa-

tions that work within the field of music education had specific things to say
about music and its importance. Finally, various individuals that we had met
working as professional musicians and composers helped shape our thinking
about what was intrinsically important about music as a subject culture, and
how it could be presented in our curriculum planning (Savage 2005).
Starting with a subject is all about thinking big! The themes, topics, key
knowledge areas and learning processes that you identify through this process
are vitally important in helping you structure your long-term and medium-
term planning. What is the best mechanism for doing this? Diana Burton
suggests building up a conceptual hierarchy of ideas within a subject, and
drawing a ‘mind map’ that shows the links between the various ideas, skills
and topics that you identify (2005: 252). By doing this systematically you will
get important insights into how you can sequence learning and plan for devel-
oping knowledge, skills and concepts over time. It will also show where these
can usefully be introduced, and where reinforcement and development can
take place so that skills can be worked at and concepts enhanced. This is the
whole purpose of long- and medium-term planning. It is to these topics that
we will now turn our attention.

The long- and medium-term plan

Having started with your subject(s), you will need to consider how to imple-
ment your ideas drawn from your reflections, readings and conversations into
longer-term and medium-term planning. In this section we will present a struc-
tured process that will help you develop a long- and medium-term plan that
supports the development of your pupils’ learning in a coherent way. It does

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this through a simple, two-stage model built around the concepts of a ‘curricu-
lum map overview’ and a ‘unit map’, for developing individual units of work.

Stage one: developing a curriculum map overview

Drawing on your work from your subject analysis, a curriculum map overview
provides you with an opportunity to sketch out a long-term plan for a particular
Key Stage. Figure 9.1 shows an example drawn from the work of one primary
school at Key Stage 2.
On one side of A4 paper, Figure 9.1 provides a snapshot of learning for one
year group within the Key Stage 2 curriculum. It contains the following basic
elements:

1 a term-by-term representation of the various topics or themes

contained within the year;
2 a breakdown of the basic content within each unit of work (through a
short purpose statement, the key learning challenges and chosen
pedagogical strategies);
3 a subject-by-subject breakdown where the specific contributions of
each subject area can be identified. These will often contain references
to the National Curriculum programmes of study for the relevant
subject area.

Figure 9.2 shows an exemplar planning form from the work of a secondary
school music teacher. In this, the curriculum overview map allows you to
represent the key topics in your subject throughout a Key Stage. Alongside the
titles of each unit of work, a brief description of purpose for each unit, the
main learning objectives and pedagogical strategies can be outlined. As with
the primary school example (Figure 9.1), key reference statements (in this
example, key concepts) drawn from the National Curriculum programme of
study are included.
Conciseness is the key here. You will want to keep your responses within
each of the boxes very focused. This is not the time or place for extended expo-
sitions of, or justifications for, your chosen topics and other responses. But
while conciseness is key, the work that goes into this document to ensure that
progress and development are planned for and systematic is considerable and
will take a lot of careful thought.
Development, in psychological terms, refers to the ways in which people
mature cognitively. One of the key questions that you will want to consider in
relation to your curriculum map overview is ‘how does it allow for and facili-
tate pupils’ cognitive development over time?’ We can both remember a time
when resource books of lesson materials used to say things like ‘these units can
be taught in any order’. This is not acceptable any more. During the course of

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25655.indb 134
Figure 9.1 Exemplar curriculum map overview (primary).

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Figure 9.2 Exemplar planning form for music (secondary).

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a Key Stage, pupils’ learning should develop and the pathways along which it
develops are well known and generally understood. These need to be built into
your own long-term planning.
So, when you are considering the completion of a curriculum map over-
view in a chosen subject area or for a particular year group, as well as the
sequence of topics that you will include in each year you will want to consider
the breadth and depth of learning that each unit might entail. You may want
to give breadth to certain units of work, perhaps to ensure a blend of content
across a year, but you will also want to study some key content within specific
units in greater depth – and perhaps even revisit this key content within
different units of work. This will require you to have a sound overview of the
curriculum requirements of your topic area. To elaborate:

• Certain key concepts, skills, and knowledge may be introduced in one

unit, at an early point in the year, and then be revisited and built
upon later on (in another unit later in the year). The notion of the
spiral curriculum is a useful one to consider in relation to this discus-
sion about breadth and depth. There are many topic areas which can
be usefully taught to younger children, but which can also be studied
in greater depth in higher education settings. In the school context,
having a spiral curriculum in mind when planning your curriculum
map can allow you to introduce the essential features of a topic area at
an early stage, and then revisit them in more depth later on in the
year, or perhaps in the following year.
• Specific key concepts, skills or knowledge may depend on pupils
understanding a prior set of concepts, skills or knowledge. Therefore,
sequencing concepts, skills or knowledge is extremely important to
ensure that pupils are not asked to do something cognitively complex
without the basic cognitive skills being firmly established in their
prior work. In many respects this is more complicated than it sounds,
as any one individual pupil’s learning may not be the same as another
pupil’s! You will need to ensure that your planning, even at this level,
is appropriately differentiated. Similarly, we know that learning itself
is seldom static or uni-directional (otherwise we would tell a pupil
something once and they’d remember it for ever!) and tends to follow
complex patterns that are difficult to plan for systematically. For this
reason, a long-term curriculum plan, like any planning document, is
just a plan and should not be stuck to religiously. Like your lesson
planning processes, it should be reflected upon and evaluated regu-
larly in light of the delivery of the curriculum during each term or
year. It is vitally important to remember that your classes are full of
individual pupils who will have their own particular idiosyncrasies
and will learn differently from the class you taught in the previous

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 LESSON, MEDIUM- AND LONG-TERM PLANNING 137

year. We would not expect your lesson planning and medium- or

long-term planning to be identical each year (even though there may
be similar elements contained within it).

Having started with your subject, identified key areas of knowledge, concepts
and skills, and worked towards completing your curriculum map overview, it
is time to turn our focus to the next level of planning – the medium-term plan.
For most teachers, medium-term planning involves the writing of individual
units of work.

Stage two: mapping the individual unit of work

When talking about a ‘unit of work’, we are referring to a subdivision of the
curriculum map overview. In most schools, primary or secondary, this will
refer to a term, or half a term’s, work. However, in the primary school this may
refer to a particular topic (within which different subjects are combined
together) while within the secondary school this will probably refer to one
discrete subject and the sequence of lessons within that subject.
Whatever context you are working within, mapping the individual unit of
work is a useful exercise to undertake prior to writing the actual unit of work
documentation (of which more below). This second phase of mapping helps to
refine individual units of work within the whole curriculum map and consider
whether they are placed appropriately to facilitate and evidence pupils’ under-
standing. To do this mapping, select one of the topics or themes that you have
included within your curriculum map overview and work through the
following four steps using Figure 9.3 (the unit map).

1 Place the topic title in the middle of the unit map. For our example,
we have taken the topic of gospel music.
2 Surround the topic title with the top level, key concept ideas drawn
from your reflections and investigations into your particular subject
area (discussed earlier). In the example we have provided, we have
included five example concepts drawn from an analysis we did of
music, as a subject area, and the various key informants that we
considered the most important.
3 For each key concept area that you have identified (and which you
have placed around your topic title), identify and consider some
key questions that relate to that particular concept and how you
seek to explore it within that specific unit. We have provided some
example questions that you could adapt, but the key point here is that
the questions that you write will help you explore the key concept
ideas drawn from your own subject area within the context of your
chosen unit of work.

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25655.indb 138
Figure 9.3 Exemplar unit map (secondary).

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 LESSON, MEDIUM- AND LONG-TERM PLANNING 139

4 Begin the process of answering your questions in the final part of the
unit map. Be succinct and concise. Your answers here will help you
write your own unit of work document.

Having a clear conception of how pupils will progress and develop through
a Key Stage allows you to devise compelling learning experiences within
units of work that are engaging and purposeful and help pupils develop their
knowledge, skills and understanding within a particular subject area, or
through a combination of subject areas within a particular theme. This chapter
has presented a two-staged mapping process which started with an overview of
the curriculum as a whole and then related individual units of work to this
through a consideration of the key concepts and ideas. It has emphasized that
it is helpful to build links between different topics, ensure a range of coverage
and an appropriate blend of learning activities and pedagogical approaches. By
placing the curriculum map overview at the centre of planning we have empha-
sized the importance of a balanced, rich and relevant curriculum to enable our
learners to enjoy their experiences with us. The advantage of the planning tool
is that the whole curriculum picture can be seen on a couple of pages. This gives
you a clear map of where you are taking the pupils on their learning journeys.

Stage three: writing the unit of work

The unit of work is the final stage in the medium-term planning process. While
lesson plans detail the learning objectives, teaching activities, resources, assess-
ment and differentiation strategies for the individual lesson, the unit of work
document provides an overview of the sequence of lessons that constitute a
particular topic within your overall curriculum map. Units of work are some-
times referred to as ‘schemes of work’. There are numerous exemplar documents
for these documents available online. Some of the best ones tend to be short
and concise, perhaps containing a one-page overview of the unit, followed by
more details, including a short summary outline guide of the various lessons
that the unit contains. Figure 9.4 illustrates one example of this from a primary
school teacher’s work. It is intended as an example of this sort of planning docu-
ment, the text in a smaller font in the right-hand columns being intended
simply as a guide to give some ideas concerning the materials that will be taught.
Specifically, a unit of work normally contains the following:

1 A title that is brief, concise and describes the unit of work. You can
take this from your unit map and transfer it to your unit of work
template.
2 A broad description of the unit of work, the key content or themes,
and where it sits within the broader long-term plan for the Key Stage
within which it is placed. Refer back to your curriculum overview map

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25655.indb 140 30/08/2013 12:08
25655.indb 141
Figure 9.4 Exemplar unit of work (primary).

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 142 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

at this point and provide a simple explanation of how this unit of

work fits within the overall plan for the Key Stage (i.e. why is it where
it is?).
3 A set of learning objectives (in Figure 9.4 these are called ‘learning
challenges’) for the whole unit, from which the learning objectives for
individual lessons can be drawn. They can also give an indication of
any prior learning that pupils should have achieved prior to
commencing this particular unit of work. Significant details can be
drawn from your unit map to help you form these learning objectives.
You may want to pick up on key words from the subject-related key
concepts that have informed your planning on the unit map, as well
as the answers that you gave to the questions you defined within the
unit map.
4 An outline of how much time is available for the unit. This would
include lesson time (i.e. how many lessons are within the unit, how
long each lesson is, etc.) as well as any homework time that might be
assigned to the unit.
5 Key resources for the unit, including any specific pieces of informa-
tion and communication technologies (ICT) that the unit might
feature, any published resources that might be used, any artefacts or
other objects that you will need access to, and key online resources
(e.g. websites or other interactive resources) that you will need to
utilize.
6 A broad description of any assessment, personalization or differentia-
tion strategies that will be used throughout the unit. These should be
general, not specific to individual lessons, and should highlight any
innovative approaches or specific assessment requirements (i.e. those
related to the National Curriculum or examination specifications if
appropriate).
7 A list of the individual lessons within the unit of work, together with
one or two sentences describing each one, key knowledge and skills
covered and the expected outcomes. The unit of work should present
an overview of these lessons (i.e. not detailed content) so that anyone
reading the unit of work gets a general feel for the flow of lessons
throughout the unit. Please keep this concise. This is not the time to
write another bunch of lesson plans!
8 General statements related to the other curriculum links, e.g. cross-
curricular links, extension and enrichment strategies, future learning
(i.e. what the unit of work leads into) and key vocabulary.

In a secondary school setting, units of work are often written by heads of

department for their curriculum team. In the primary school setting, these
units of work documents are often written by teachers with a specific

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responsibility for a year group across the school. In either case, individual
teachers may find themselves delivering a unit of work written by someone
else. It is important to remember that these documents are there to serve as a
guide to your own individual lesson planning and subsequent teaching. There
will be many different ways that a unit of work can be delivered. How you plan
your individual lessons within a unit of work depends on a range of factors, of
which the general coverage provided by the unit of work is just one important
factor. So, consider the unit of work as a map of the terrain. How you move the
students from point A to point B is still your responsibility!
More generally, all teachers are responsible for creating a sense of direc-
tion, purpose and flow between their lessons. The unit of work document can
help provide that formal framework for teaching. But pedagogical strategies
such as providing summaries of learning through plenaries, highlighting or
signposting future learning opportunities; using homework opportunities to
establish links between lessons; and much more are equally important. As with
the lesson plan, the unit of work planning process is something that you will
need to bring to life within your teaching! Otherwise, it just remains a paper
exercise that will only serve to frustrate you. Remember, the ‘holy trinity’ of
planning, teaching and evaluation is as important here as it is within the indi-
vidual lesson planning that you undertake.

Summary

In this section we have considered how lesson planning needs to fit within an
overall structure of medium- and long-term planning. We have considered
both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to curriculum development. We
have considered the place of knowledge in a longer scale time frame, and how
planning for learning over a period of years, or within a Key Stage, is necessary
in order to try to establish a ‘big picture’ view of teaching and learning. We
looked in some detail at the notion of curriculum mapping, and at how this
helps with both progression and development. We considered the ways in
which concepts, skills and understanding develop over time, and how
sequencing them correctly is vital when thinking about planning in the
medium and long term. We looked at how units of work fit into such plans,
and how the individual lesson plan then derives from this.

Reflective questions

• Does your school have to adhere to the National Curriculum? If not,

how does it diverge?
• How are long- and medium-term planning laid out in your context?

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 144 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

• How involved are you with understanding how long- and medium-
term planning take place?
• Do you have a view of the ‘big picture’ into which your individual
lessons slot?
• Have you thought about curriculum mapping?

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 10 Differences in planning in the
primary and secondary school

In the previous chapter we considered how the individual lesson plan itself
is located within a broader set of planning materials, often referred to as
medium- and long-term planning, and how these can be developed in different
ways within the primary and secondary school. We identified one common
element, the notion of the individual subject, which underpins planning
in both settings. Whether you are planning to work as a primary or secondary
school teacher, we encouraged you to start with the subject itself and use
that as a springboard from which your long-term and medium-term plans
emerge.
In our preparation for this book, we have spoken to teachers from many
different schools about their planning. This has been a tremendously helpful
and interesting experience. While both of us enjoyed careers as high school
teachers of music, we have been struck by the significant similarities in plan-
ning that colleagues in primary and secondary schools have to consider. In both
settings, teachers are required to write clear learning objectives, build engaging
teaching activities, implement strategies for differentiation and assessment, as
well as evaluate their work.
But obviously there are differences in approach to the organization and
delivery of education that cast an interesting light on how teaching and
learning are planned in the different school environments. The aim of this
chapter is to explore some of these and, by doing so, to help you think a little
differently about how you go about planning lessons within your particular
school context. In the following chapter we will be looking at some of the
common documentation and frameworks that teachers use in different
settings. Here, we will start with some of the most obvious differences between
primary and secondary schools and work our way down to some of the finer
details and how they impact on the discrete elements of lesson planning. In
particular, we will introduce two short case studies, one from a primary and
one from a secondary school, to illustrate some of the lessons that teachers in
both settings could learn from each other.

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The structure and organization of the school

One of the most significant differences between primary and secondary

schools is the number of pupils that they cater for! A typical secondary
school has around 1100 pupils; an average primary school around 200 pupils
(DfE 2010).
Although most schools, primary or secondary, place their pupils in groups
of various kinds (e.g. form groups, mixed ability classes or ability sets), the
notion of a ‘class’ is very different in each setting. Primary school children are
generally taught in one class group throughout each day; secondary school
children, although placed in a form group, work in any number of different
class groups depending on the curriculum arrangements and policies.
The consequences of this are that a typical secondary school teacher will
normally work with hundreds of different pupils each week; the primary
school teacher will generally work with the same 25 and 30 pupils each day.
The average time that each secondary school teacher spends with any one
pupil is also significantly less than their primary colleagues. As we will see, this
has a significant impact on all aspects of planning including the ability to
differentiate effectively for individual pupils.

The structure of the curriculum

As we explored briefly in the previous chapter, the overarching curriculum

structures for the early years and Key Stages 1 and 2 are different from those
at Key Stage 3 and the GCSE and GCE examination specifications that
frame teachers’ work at Key Stages 4 and 5. The way that an individual
subject is located within the curriculum structure varies immensely and the
consequent effects of this on staffing, subject expertise and planning are
considerable.
Within the primary school, key subject areas such as literacy, numeracy
and science are often planned for and taught as specific areas; however, other
foundation subjects (e.g. those covered within the National Curriculum) are
often planned for and taught within topic areas (as we discussed in Chapter 9).
In the average secondary school, the vast majority of lessons are taught in
subject areas, with only occasional topic-based approaches being adopted for
specific days or events. Despite one or two exceptions to this that we will
explore in the second case study below, this is by far the norm for the majority
of secondary school teachers.
From the perspective of the secondary school pupil, the organization of
the school, in both its physical layout, staffing and curriculum organization,
serves to differentiate between subjects in a very rigid way. Geography is

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taught in one place by Miss Jones; mathematics is taught in another place by

Mr Singh; design and technology is taught in the workshop by Mrs Evans, and
so on. While the curriculum frameworks that have resulted in this division are
understandable, it is important to remember that from a pupil’s perspective
this is a massive shift in how they experience the processes of teaching and
learning in comparison to what they received throughout their primary
education.

Generalist and specialist teachers

For a range of historical, societal and cultural reasons, and put simply, many
primary school teachers are generalists, being able to teach many different
subjects to their class throughout the week; secondary school teachers see
themselves as subject specialists, teaching the same subject to multiple classes
throughout the course of any given week. Although many primary school
teachers may have a particular subject specialism (perhaps something that
they have studied to degree level or beyond), the vast majority of them work in
a generalist capacity. In some larger primary schools there may be subject
specialist teachers but this is fairly uncommon.
The balance between an in-depth subject specialism and a more generalist
approach to subject content can be both a strength and a weakness. Primary
school teachers are experts in planning content from multiple subject areas
in innovative combinations through sophisticated models of cross-curricular
teaching and learning. For some primary school teachers, certain subjects may be
perceived as being ‘outside’ their subject expertise and pedagogical comfort zone.
When this feeling of unease becomes acute, it can even result in primary schools
buying in curriculum support and delivery for that particular subject (thereby
allowing the primary school teacher to pass that particular subject responsibility
onto someone else).
The ‘average’ secondary school teacher is constrained by the notion of
their ‘subject’ and how this is perceived and organized within the structure of
the school and the various curriculum frameworks within which they work. At
Key Stage 3, subject content is prescribed by the National Curriculum; as with
the primary curriculum, the teaching of certain skills (e.g. the use of phonics to
develop literacy skills) in specific ways will impact on their pedagogy (in
helpful or unhelpful ways, depending on your point of view). At Key Stage 4,
GCSE specifications will outline, in detail, exact areas of subject content that
will need to be covered. The opportunity to devise innovative topic-based
approaches within these structures could be seen to be limited (though we
note that this does not stop some teachers innovating in these areas in spite of
what some see as ‘impositions’ or ‘restrictions’ on their work; one example of
this is explored in the second case study below).

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Different notions of cross-curricularity

Linked to this point about generalist and specialist teachers, it is interesting to

note that the idea of cross-curricularity within education is a highly contested
and fraught area (Savage 2010). Even though every National Curriculum
framework since 1992 has included statements that could be viewed as encour-
aging teachers to develop a broader, cross-curricular pedagogy, this has not
happened within secondary schools. Teachers in these schools almost always
view cross-curricular approaches to teaching and learning to mean working
collaboratively with their colleagues on specific projects (perhaps within a
collapsed timetable day). Unlike their primary colleagues who work with a
natural cross-curricular disposition every day, many secondary school teachers
have not been able to transpose what a cross-curricular approach might mean
for their specific subject teaching.
For all these reasons, although there are several key areas of similarity, the
broader processes of medium- and longer-term planning can differ between
teachers in primary and secondary schools. In the following chapter, we will be
exploring some of the documentation that these planning processes work
within, as well as suggesting some particular planning documentation that
you might like to use in your own work.
Here, what we would like to do is examine in a little more detail some of
the consequences of the differences outlined above for the work of primary
and secondary school teachers and, in particular we hope, attempt to bridge
some of the differences and show how a greater understanding of how other
teachers work can lead to a beneficial impact on one’s own pedagogy. We will
do this through two short case studies. The first is drawn from a primary school
that we visited recently.

Case study 1: placing your pupils at the heart of your

planning process

Effective teaching is facilitated through a professional relationship between

the teacher and the pupil. How well you know your pupils individually will
determine, to a large extent, the quality of the teaching that you are able to
deliver. That said, teaching is not just about the delivery of ‘stuff’ to pupils.
Pupils need to learn to know and trust their teachers too.
There are massive differences in scale here between primary and secondary
schools. As we have already seen, in the average secondary school any one
teacher may teach between 200 and 300 pupils every week; those same pupils
are taught by between 10 and 15 different teachers. In the average primary
school, one teacher may teach between 25 and 35 pupils and those same pupils

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may only be taught by that one teacher (perhaps with the support of another
adult).
Given these basic numbers, and the consequent effect on the quality of
teacher/pupil relationships that they might entail, is it really possible to place
individual pupils at the heart of your planning process?
In our observations and discussions with primary school teachers, we were
highly impressed by the constant focus on individual pupils, or small groups
of two to three pupils, within their planning. In one teacher’s work with a
mixed Year 3 and 4 class, for example, guided and independent group activities
were divided into different coloured groups. Within a weekly plan for the
literacy activities surrounding the topic of ‘explanation writing’, these coloured
groups were designed a range of differentiated activities within specific tasks.
So, when exploring punctuation within this topic the teacher wrote:

Red: I can begin to use commas for pauses.

Provide children with copies of the comma text. Adult reads through
first few sentences to model expressive reading using commas. Then,
taking it in turns to read, the children read the text out loud and use
the commas appropriately. Adult to stop children and re-read if they
forget. Gussy and Finchy to focus on using full stops – write a simple
sentence to go with the pictures from the ordering yesterday.

Green: I can use commas for 3 different reasons.

Provide children with copies of the commas sheet. They read the
sentences out loud to a partner, making sure they are using the
commas to help read them expressively. After that they label each of
the sentences to show why the comma has been used, e.g. for lists, to
break up longer sentences or to indicate additional information.

Purple: I can add further punctuation to sentences.

Children take the comma sentences and adapt and change them
showing a full range of punctuation – can they add semi-colon,
brackets, colon?

This kind of structured differentiation by task and, to a lesser extent in our

observations, by outcome, was typical of how primary school teachers planned
their work within a weekly cycle. However, as we explored in Chapter 3,
approaches to differentiation are often more complex than just the breaking
down of a task into different activities for different groups. In this teacher’s
work, as well as the task itself:

• the ways in which pupils were working with or without the teacher or
classroom assistant were being differentiated;

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• the resources available to pupils to help them complete their tasks

were differentiated and tailored towards their particular activities;
• the learning objectives were structured in a differentiated way to
ensure that all pupils had the opportunity to reflect on their progress
using a simple self-assessment framework.

This whole episode from one teacher is situated with a way of working that
really does place the individual child at the heart of the planning process. In
conversation with that teacher, we were struck by the detailed knowledge she
was able to articulate about every child in her class. Rigorous assessment proc-
esses can be conducted over a substantial period of time and can lead to a
whole array of assessment data about individual pupils’ work. However, the
day-to-day human interactions that primary school teachers enjoy with their
pupils provide a richer array of knowledge and understanding about what
makes an individual child’s learning ‘tick’.
Secondary school teachers, in contrast, face the challenge of getting to
know hundreds of children. While particular pupils might succeed academically
within their curriculum area, and thereby become well known by particular
teachers, the reality of teaching large numbers of pupils at Key Stages 3 and 4 are
that these teachers will seldom develop the in-depth knowledge of individual
pupils that their primary colleagues have been able to facilitate (despite the
massive amounts of numerical data about pupil performance and attainment
that schools generate).
In planning for the teaching of individual subjects in secondary schools
(as we explored in Chapter 3), it is important to utilize a range of strategies for
personalization and differentiation. However, our observations of teachers’
work in this area have been that these are often more generalized and less
focused on individual pupils. This is not a criticism. As we have argued here, it
is a matter of scale and workload. We would not want to suggest that differen-
tiation should result in individual lesson plans for every pupil! That is clearly
ridiculous. However, there is a sense in which secondary school teachers can
learn important lessons from their primary colleagues in this area.

Case study 2: exploring alternative approaches to

planning for Key Stage 3

There are some writers and thinkers who think that the whole system of
subjects being used as the building blocks for the curriculum is outdated and
should be replaced. For example, Ken Robinson writes that:

Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities

and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the

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individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their
motivation to learn. . . . We need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of
subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces
outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of
diversity. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages
and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a
student’s education. . . . The idea of separate subjects that have nothing
in common offends the principle of dynamism. School systems should
base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the
much more fertile idea of disciplines . . . which makes possible a fluid
and dynamic curriculum that is interdisciplinary.
(Sir Ken Robinson in Shepherd 2009)

We would not share this view. As we have argued throughout the book,
whether you are a primary or secondary school teacher the notion of an indi-
vidual academic subject plays an important part in framing how teaching and
learning are structured. Subject cultures or traditions are important and
powerful sets of ideas that frame our experiences in the wider world and, from
our perspective, have a role to play in any educational provision.
However, we would agree with Robinson that there is an important job to
do in re-imagining how subjects might be able to work together more construc-
tively within education. In particular, the bridge between a pupil’s experiences
in primary school (where all subjects are taught predominantly by one teacher
to one class) to secondary school (where each subject is taught individually to
that pupil by different teachers) needs to be carefully constructed.
To that end, it is interesting to examine the work of secondary schools
that have tried alternative arrangements to the provision of the curriculum,
particularly in Year 7 (the first year of most secondary schooling). Some schools,
albeit a significant minority, have thrown the whole concept of individual
subjects out of the classroom window and rebuilt a curriculum around different
organizatory structures. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the RSA’s
Opening Minds curriculum that is built around the five key competences of:

1 citizenship
2 learning
3 managing information
4 relating to people
5 managing situations

In the RSA’s words, this approach:

enables students not just to acquire subject knowledge but to under-

stand, use and apply it within the context of their wider learning and

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life. It also offers students a more holistic and coherent way of

learning which allows them to make connections and apply knowl-
edge across different subject areas.
(RSA 2013)

Despite comprehensive pieces of research and applied research by the RSA

(Aynsley et al. 2012; Isham and Cordingley 2012), we are still uncertain that
this is the most productive way forward.
One approach that we observed recently at a secondary school in
Birmingham did seem particularly productive. This drew on a pedagogical
approach known as ‘the mantle of the expert’. It is defined as:

a dramatic-inquiry based approach to teaching and learning invented

and developed by Professor Dorothy Heathcote at the University of
Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1980s. The big idea is that the class do all
their curriculum work as if they are an imagined group of experts.
They might be scientists in a laboratory or archaeologists excavating
a tomb, or a rescue team at the scene of a disaster. They might be
running a removal company, or a factory, or a shop, or a space station
or a French resistance group. Because they behave ‘as if they are
experts’, the children are working from a specific point of view as
they explore their learning and this brings special responsibilities,
language needs and social behaviours.
(Mantle of the Expert 2013)

This pedagogical approach allows teachers to consider a number of areas

simultaneously:

• Activity is social and collaborative; students work together negotiat-

ing meaning while sharing and deepening their understanding.
• It fuses pupils’ capacity to be emotionally affected by a situation with
their ability to reason about it.
• It requires inquiry into values as implications and consequences of
action are scrutinized from inside a dilemma and from differing
standpoints.
• It exploits the human capacity for liminality, so that pupils can be
taught to tolerate ambiguity as they are on the threshold of new under-
standings that bring their own knowledge and experience into focus.
• It uses the critical dramatic elements of tension and constraint.
• It operates in the urgency of ‘now’ time. (Fautley et al. 2008: 107)

Our case study of this approach from the work of teachers at Queensbridge
School in Birmingham (first published in Fautley and Savage 2011: 71–4)

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explored a particular example of Year 7 pupils working within a witness protec-

tion unit (WPU):

Here the learners were working at finding out what happens in a WPU, and then
working through fictive situations as they evolved. In doing this, the students
needed to investigate the communities where the suspects and witnesses lived.
They needed to know about the community so that later, as WPU members,
they could evaluate potential threats that might come from within it. This
was a dialogic approach which added both breadth and depth to the fictional
world within which the WPU episode took place. As a teacher involved
observed:

They also played the gang members because we started to look at the
gang and what it’s like to be part of the gang. They played members
of their families because we’re looking at migration of people into
Birmingham and a look at the generation gap between the gang
members and their parents and grandparents. So they’re having to
look at ritual, religion and behaviour and manners and etiquette and
all that kind of stuff . . . as WPU we’re doing files on individual gang
members . . . (using) drama to uncover key moments.

This led to a wide range of activities and curricular coverage. For example, here
is how one teacher described how aspects of the geography curriculum had been
absorbed into the process, so that the knowledge, skills, and understandings
involved all had coherence for the students:

They have done Google Earth and they went on the computer and they
each had a satellite image, which is part of what they have to do with
Geography, and then they had to locate the gang territory . . . find
areas of ambush . . . look at land usage. It’s all necessary for the
fiction to continue. And then they would come and cross-reference
with that map and do grid references and the next stage is, they can
have groups, one of them is undercover and briefed outside and we
found a new piece of evidence and they have to very quickly work out
directions using that map in order for the undercover officer to get to
Kelly’s house before anything happens. So, again, there is a tension in
that. So they’re having to manipulate all the knowledge base in order
to complete their jobs as WPU . . . we have to look at this in order to
keep Kelly and her family safe . . . there is a need to know. The urgency
is – she’s in danger, right, so – who is on Taylor Road? Right – who’s
got the grid reference quick – so . . . you are all people in on it together
rather than we (the teachers) are the people who know.

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This was with Year 7 students, and deals with subject matter which often
would be considered to be the province of older students. What working within
the convention of the mantle of the expert did was to allow teachers and
students to delimit the areas which were appropriate to the pupils, while still
stretching them.

One of the teachers involved spoke about student engagement with this process,
where the students were co-constructors of their own learning:

. . . they love being in role as WPU (Witness Protection Unit), they

love having the responsibility, they love seeing that they can influence
the course of events. They love seeing that they have ownership of
materials . . . whatever they do in one lesson is then fed into the next
lesson. They love the freedom but also the discipline of it because, of
course, it is very disciplined.

To do this required a degree of flexibility from the teachers, and at times

involved them responding to the learners, as this teacher observed:

Every lesson doesn’t have to be totally prescriptive. We don’t say,

right, we’re going to do this in this lesson, this is all we’re going to do.
You know if the pupils think of something that wants to take them off
(my) track then we’re quite confident and happy to do that.

Working in this way has resonances with how topics are organized within the
primary school curriculum. The specific pedagogical bridge that is being used
here, the mantle of the expert, helped secondary school teachers reinterpret or
re-imagine how subjects could both look and feel different for pupils when
situated within a ‘real-life’ context (the WPU and associated elements). It is a
very different way of thinking about how to construct learning opportunities
that challenges conventional wisdom about how the curriculum should be
organized.
This picks up on broader educational themes about curriculum develop-
ment. As Bruner writes:

Understanding consists in grasping the place of an idea or fact in

some more general structure of knowledge . . . Acquired knowledge is
most useful to a learner, moreover, when it is ‘discovered’ through
the learner’s own cognitive efforts, for it is then related to and used in
reference to what one has known before. Such acts of discovery are
enormously facilitated by the structure of knowledge itself, for
however complicated any domain of knowledge may be, it can be

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represented in ways that make it accessible through less complex

elaborated processes. It was this conclusion that led me to propose
that any subject could be taught to any child at any age in some form
that was honest.
(Bruner 1996: xi–xii)

Summary: building bridges from primary to secondary

This chapter has explored some of the differences and tensions between plan-
ning learning within the primary and secondary schools. We have been at
pains to ensure that we are not seen to be favouring one system above the
other. They are just different. However, we do think that there is much to be
gained by teachers within both systems sharing, at a deep level, aspects of their
work in this area.
In our roles as initial teacher educators, researchers and writers we are in
the privileged position of being able to routinely visit schools from each sector.
Every week we watch student teachers and experienced colleagues working in
schools, planning lessons, enacting these lessons and facilitating engagement
that leads to learning and reflecting on these processes in different ways.
Teaching in the primary school is not so different from teaching in the
secondary school. However, the context is very different and this seriously
impacts on how teachers do their jobs.
In your own work, try to find time to have regular conversations with
teachers working in different school settings to your own. Share aspects of your
pedagogy in this area and get their feedback. Be willing to try out new ideas
and reflect on their effectiveness. Play with your pedagogy and be creative in
how you bring new ideas to bear upon it. This is one way in which you can
ensure a long and enjoyable career as a teacher.

Reflective questions

• How many pupils do you teach a week? Are there differences in your
school? Who teaches the most?
• How are teaching and learning organized in your school? Are there
any innovative ways new ideas are being tried?
• Do different subject areas in your school have different cultures?
• How much do you know about teaching and learning in schools and
colleges in preceding and successive phases?

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 11 Lesson planning
documentation

As we have observed throughout this book, there is no simple ‘magic bullet’ of

a blank lesson planning document which will enable the teacher to plan for
everything on every teaching and learning occasion, and which will also solve
all imaginable class management issues, deal with behaviour problems, provide
full differentiation, and only take a few moments to complete. Sorry!
What we will look at in this chapter is a variety of ways of setting out
lesson planning documentation. There are many possible permutations for
this, and it seems that every school has its own requirements, from the complex
to the simple. We will try to pick our way through what is required and what
is desirable, and will offer a number of suggestions.
One of the first things that it is important to say is to echo Sara Bubb’s
observation that ‘spending excessive amounts of time on long, detailed plans
does not necessarily lead to better teaching and learning’ (2004 76). We have
seen in Chapter 2 that beginning teachers tend to spend an inordinately long
time on planning their lessons in the sincere expectation that by doing so they
will ‘plan out’ all of the issues concerning behaviour management that could
possibly occur. We repeat what we said then, that this is sadly not the case.
However well planned a lesson is, it still has to be brought to life by the teacher.
And as Sir Michael Wilshaw, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, has
observed with regard to teachers he worked with:

Planning was everything, but . . . teachers were not slaves to their

lesson plans. For each lesson, they would know what they were going
to do, what resources they were going to deploy and roughly how
long each activity would take. But they also understood that plan-
ning should not be too detailed or too rigid. It was a framework and
support, but they adapted what they did at key moments in the
lesson, for example when something was not working or when the
mood of the class changed.
(RSA 2012)

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 LESSON PLANNING DOCUMENTATION 157

And this is an important message to bear in mind!

In this chapter we are not distinguishing significantly between age phases
in terms of lesson planning. In previous chapters we have discussed differences
and similarities between long- and medium-term planning for primary or
secondary schools. In this chapter we think about the elements of a successful
lesson, and what you, the teacher, need to do to enable this to happen. Clearly
there will be some aspects which are phase-appropriate, but our concern here
is with all learning, and we feel that individual teachers are best able to make
their own judgements, and use the evidence we present to decide what is going
to be most suitable for each individual context.

Linear or overview planning?

In this chapter there are examples of planning which follow a linear format, in
other words, they plan out sequentially what should be taught and learned.
Sometimes this is done using a timeline, where the number of minutes devoted
to each activity is worked out in advance. We also present examples of what
might be termed overview planning, where timing is not worked out in
advance; instead planning takes on a more holistic form, concerning itself
with the range and type of teaching and learning episodes that will occur,
rather than strictly tying them down to a time-frame. There are no clear rules
concerning this distinction, it is simply a matter of personal preference. We
saw in Chapter 2 how novice teachers focus on the end of the lesson, whereas
more experienced teachers focus back from the end. Some people like the idea
of knowing what to do when; others prefer to be more holistic in their approach.
What we would counsel against, though, is the problem we identify throughout
this book, where teachers do not diverge from the lesson plan. If, say, ten
minutes have been planned for activity A, and activity B is predicated upon
successful completion of activity A, then there is no point finishing it after ten
minutes just because the plan says so, even though the pupils have not yet
mastered it sufficiently to progress! For beginning teachers, as we have discussed
elsewhere in this book, ‘running out of time’ is a common problem, and so
planning both an overview and a minute-by-minute account is going to be
helpful for them. For more experienced teachers, the choice is likely to be
dictated as much by school or other requirements, as by personal preference.

How much detail to include?

In Chapter 2 we discussed how it is the case that different degrees of informa-

tion will be required at different times during a teacher’s career, and for the
different audiences for a lesson plan. Beginning teachers, and those in training,

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 158 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

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 Figure 11.1 University plan for PGCE secondary student teachers.

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 160 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

need to make their thinking obvious, so their lesson plans are likely to contain
a great deal more by way of detail than those of teachers who have been in-post
for a while. So, let us begin by considering the requirements of lesson planning
for PGCE secondary students (see Figure 11.1).
This is a very complete lesson plan, with all the detail it would be expected
that a trainee teacher would need to think about. This lesson plan has guidance
provided to the students included, so that it is clear what is required.1 It is
worth deconstructing this document to think about what it is saying and what
it is assuming. The information at the top of the form and the left of section B
concerning the class and Teachers’ Standards is clearly relevant to a beginning
teacher, where the lesson plan serves a number of purposes, including moni-
toring (more on this later), and making planning visible to in-school mentors
and others. The ‘action points’ section links to previous lesson plans. We have
said before that planning needs to take account of what has gone before, and
this section emphasizes that. ‘Aims’ refer specifically to this lesson, as would be
expected. The ‘intended learning’ section includes a number of areas, but
worthy of note is that there are intended learning statements which are for the
benefit of the teacher, mentors and others in the school, and also space to
express these in appropriate wording which will be shared with the pupils (this
is a matter which we discussed in detail in Chapter 1). There are then sections
on differentiation and meeting the needs of individual pupils. There then
follow sections on Resources and Homework. Section H is a timeline for the
lesson, with the various episodes and activities plotted out. Section I is a retro-
spective AfL question, where the beginning teacher reflects on the learning
that has taken place, with a further more general reflection section to end with.
The Birmingham City University (BCU) plan is designed in part to render
the thinking processes of the beginning teachers visible, and amenable to
discussion with mentors and experienced teachers in school. This brings us
back to the question we first asked in Chapter 2:

1 For whom is the lesson plan documentation intended?

We provided a range of answers to this. To this original question we can now

add another:

2 What functions is it designed to serve?

These questions are not as naïve as they may first appear. The BCU plan is
overtly designed in that part of its function is to hold beginning teachers to
account for their planning. Teachers in the school, as well as placement tutors,

1
Thanks to Simon Spencer of BCU for providing this example.

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 LESSON PLANNING DOCUMENTATION 161

Figure 11.2 Simple lesson plan blank.

will be asking questions concerning it, directed towards the beginning teacher.
While this accountability is open and transparent in the case of a teacher in
training, for more experienced teachers this accountability aspect of lesson
planning may be less obvious, a point we return to later.
Moving to the other extreme from the university plan above, a much
simpler lesson planning form is shown in reduced form (i.e. with blank spaces
omitted2) in Figure 11.2. This is a very straightforward planning document
which omits any extraneous matter and whose sole purpose is to allow the
teacher to concentrate on planning the key aspects of learning activity which
will take place during the course of the lesson. Another significant difference
between this lesson plan outline and the one for the university students is that
there is only a very limited potential for monitoring teacher performance here.
The university plan is, as we have seen, deliberately detailed so that the thinking
that goes into the planning is evidenced. The lesson plan in example 11.2 is
not intended for this purpose. Any monitoring of the teacher here would
need to take place in conversation and observation, not simply from the lesson
planning documentation.
Other variations of this plan can also be found;3 Figure 11.3 shows one
such planning pro-forma. This is still a simple planning document, although
slightly more complex than the previous example. It contains the essential
features that the teacher will need to know in order to deliver the lesson, and
enables straightforward activities and learning to take place for the whole class.
Another variation on the same theme is shown in Figure 11.4. This uses a
slightly more graphical representation of the planning process, where differen-
tiation and assessment are considered as impinging upon the learning episodes
sequence of the main part of the lesson.

2
This is the format adopted for other examples of planning documentation in this chapter – to
save space, blank areas of planning pro-formas have been omitted.
3
Including the popular ‘5-minute lesson plan’ at http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/
The-5-Minute-Lesson-Plan-by-TeacherToolkit-6170564/.

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 Figure 11.3 Another simple planning pro-forma.

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 LESSON PLANNING DOCUMENTATION 163

Figure 11.4 Slightly more complex planning.

In these days of accountability and performativity teachers are used to

having their work scrutinized, and as a consequence are also used to the idea
that their lesson plans will come under scrutiny. One consequence of this is
that teachers have also become used to the idea that there will be differing
levels of detail required in planning, depending not only on the purpose of the
lesson, but also whether or not the lesson will be observed. This can affect the
planning significantly, as knowing who the audience for a lesson plan will be
is bound to have influence on thinking, planning and detail.
However, many schools are keen to elevate planning for teaching and
learning to involve similar high degrees of forethought in much the same way
as the university one did above. These should not be thought of being purposed
solely to monitor teacher performance; the intention behind them is more
complex than that. Such plans are designed to help teachers address key aspects
of learning, to focus on personalizing learning for the actual class that will be
taught, and to enable teachers to maximize opportunities for cohorts of pupils
who warrant some form of differentiated provision. In and of itself this cannot
be a bad thing; we hear too often about teachers teaching to a notional middle,
which excludes many pupils not in this position. More complex planning
can go some way towards addressing this. An example of such a plan
used by schools in shown in Figure 11.5. Acronyms used in this lesson plan
include:

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25655.indb 164 30/08/2013 12:08
25655.indb 165
Figure 11.5 A more complex lesson plan.

30/08/2013 12:08
 166 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

UoW = unit of work

SEN = special educational needs
G&T = gifted and talented
EAL = English as an additional language
LAC = looked after children
SPAG = spelling, punctuation and grammar
PLTS = personal learning and thinking skills

This is clearly a complex document, and requires the teacher to demonstrate

their thinking in a very overt fashion. Although there is likely to be an element
of monitoring involved in the use of this document, what is apparent, however,
is that the use of the tick-boxes forces teachers to think about – and therefore
plan for – aspects of the lesson as they apply to key groups of pupils, including
SEN, G&T, EAL and LAC.

Planning for differentiation and personalization

Other lesson planning documentation used in schools involves a different

approach to thinking about differentiation. One such example is shown in
Figure 11.6.
This sort of lesson plan is designed for those schools where there is a need
for careful thinking with regard to differentiation. We have discussed in earlier
sections of this book that while it is the case that all classes can be considered
to be of mixed ability in that they are made up of a number of individuals, it is
going to be the case that some are more mixed than others! The purpose of
Figure 11.6 is to highlight to the teacher while in the process of planning what
range of the class’s various needs and requirements should be included in the
planning.
Another aspect of differentiation which needs to be considered here is that
of personalization of planning. This can be looked at from two perspectives –
the teacher’s, and the pupil’s. Let us start with the latter.
Differentiation needs to refer to the actual pupils in the class, where the
learning needs to be personalized to meet their individual needs. In a number
of the forms we look at in this chapter this is done by naming the pupils
concerned. The EAL needs of pupils differs, as do their G&T needs, and so
on. The planning for personalization should take account of this, and include
real episodes for these named pupils to engage with. This is another reason
why we are not generally in favour of having lesson plans written too far in
advance of the lesson, as things change and sequential learning depends on
what has gone before, which the teacher will only know about once it has
happened.

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 Figure 11.6 Planning for differentiation.

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 168 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

Personalization of planning from the perspective of the teacher refers to

the level of detail that needs to be included if the lesson plan is to be delivered
by the person who planned it, or by another teacher. If the former, then the
level of detail can be less than would be the case for the latter. Indeed, some
teachers find it very difficult to teach someone else’s lesson plan which they
have not personalized in order to ‘make it their own’ beforehand.

Creativity

Creativity is generally thought to be a good thing in learners, and there are many
aspects which you may want to include in your teaching and learning. One of
the problems with creativity is that it is, by its very nature, non-linear. This
means that if you want the pupils to engage in creative activities you need to
plan for what you will do if they veer off at a tangent. This is going to depend on
the nature of the topic and what learning you are wanting to take place. Planning
for creativity entails not knowing fully in advance what will happen, but it also
means ensuring you allow the pupils space and freedom for risk-taking, diver-
gent thinking and unexpected outcomes. You may well want to include creative
aspects in your planning, and these are clearly worth thinking about in advance.

Planning elements

From the examples so far discussed in this chapter, and from your own experi-
ences as a teacher too, it is clear that there are many different approaches to
lesson planning documentation. Among these a number of elements stand out
as being common across lesson planning documents. These include those
shown in Table 11.1. Although by no means exclusive, this does show a wide
range of elements which can be included in a lesson plan. But which are the
most important?; where does the real centre of planning thinking need to
concentrate?

The three ‘A’s of planning

Although all aspects of planning for learning are important, three in particular
seem to be ones which deserve the most attention, and should be at the centre
of thinking about planning. These we refer to as the three As of planning:

• Aims
• Activities for learning
• Assessment (AfL and AofL)

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 Table 11.1 Common lesson planning documentation elements

Item Meaning

Aims The purpose of the lesson

Objectives Places the aims into the specific learning context of the
lesson
Starter Activity at the beginning of a lesson
Plenary Consolidating learning, often at the end of lesson
Mini-plenary A plenary which happens during the course of the
lesson
Differentiation (key cohorts: How learning will be tailored to meet the needs of specific
EAL, etc.) cohorts
Personalization How learning will be tailored to meet the needs of the
specific class, and named individuals within it
Teaching episodes Division of the lesson into a planned sequence – teacher
delivery
Learning episodes Division of the lesson into a planned sequence – pupil
activity
Activities Learning-focused practical tasks
Learning organization Whole class, groupwork, etc.
Teaching styles Ways in which the teacher will deliver the lesson
Assessment (AofL; AfL) How you will know whether, and how much, learning has
taken place
Key words For the lesson, or the pupils. Can be subject-specific or
more general
Cross-curricular elements Things which matter for the wider learning of the
pupils
Literacy Episodes relating to texts, even if obliquely
Numeracy Episodes relating to numbers, counting, etc.
Speaking and listening Pupil talk, turn-taking and understanding
ICT How technology will be used
Creativity Opportunities for divergent thinking
Resources What equipment will be needed, physical and
cognitive
Health and safety issues These need planning for, and explaining to learners
Homework What you will set, thought about in advance

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 170 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

Aims are clearly important. The answer to the ‘why are we doing this, Miss?’
question needs to be clear to the teacher, and the place of the lesson in
the medium- and long-term schemes we have discussed earlier in this book
should be an important part of what the teacher does, and why. The second A,
activities, we are using in its broadest sense, and really mean the various
episodes to teaching and learning which take place during the lesson. We are
certainly not meaning activities to keep the pupils busy, we are referring to
activities for learning.
Assessment is fundamental to learning. We have gone into considerable
detail in earlier chapters concerning the vital role that AfL has to play, and it
is this that should be central to both planning and delivery. One of the central
messages in thinking about planning for learning is that however good the
lesson plan is, it is how the teacher reacts to the actual learners in front of them
that matters. Deviating from the plan is acceptable – indeed, a good teacher
will know not only how and when to deviate, but also how to get back on
track. This is true AfL in action. After all, as Wilshaw has observed: ‘The worst
lessons are those in which the teacher ploughs through the plan irrespective of
how well or badly the lesson is going’ (RSA 2012).
Of course, this does not mean that we are advocating ignoring all of the
other aspects of lesson planning in favour of these, as clearly this would not
result in good planning! Instead we are trying to focus in on those areas which
can be seen as central to the process of lesson planning.

Build your own lesson plan document

For many teachers, school requirements of lesson planning documentation

mean that there may be little scope to vary what is required. Where this is not
the case, there is a lot to be said for teachers designing their own, either in
departments, year teams or other organizational groups. There is also a case to
be made for whole school planning to follow a common format. This means
that managing teaching and learning across the whole school can be done
using the same terminologies in different areas of schooling. It can also assist
consistency across and between subjects, which is helpful both for pupils and
teachers who teach in variety of teams. However, a point that does need to be
borne in mind is that some whole school planning runs the danger of entailing
too much extraneous or irrelevant work for some colleagues. It needs to be
taken into consideration that some teachers teach 20 lessons a week to 20
different classes, whereas others teach 20 lessons a week to only five different
classes. Each of these entails different planning parameters which a whole
school plan needs to take into account if it is to address teaching and learning
successfully.

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 LESSON PLANNING DOCUMENTATION 171

Summary

We have looked in this chapter at a variety of types and formats of lesson plan-
ning documentation. We have considered a range of contents which lesson
plans commonly entail, and we have looked at what simple lesson plans look
like, as well as far more complex examples. We have journeyed to the very
heart of lesson planning and considered the role that the three As of aims,
activities and assessment can and should play in this. We have also thought
about the important role of differentiation and personalization, and how the
needs of the pupils in the class must be taken into account when planning.
Whatever type of documentation is chosen, what all of the different
formats reinforce is another point we have been making throughout this book,
namely that it is the thought that goes into constructing a lesson plan which
is the important part. The resulting document is a product of thinking, it is not
a short cut to it!

Reflective questions

• What planning documentation do you use?

• Why do you use it? If you have to, are there any aspects of it which do
not suit you or your subject?
• If there are compulsory documents that you do have to use, how often
are they reviewed?
• What would be on your own lesson planning proforma if you started
with a blank page?

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 12 Conclusion

A book on lesson planning is rather like a set of instructions on how to plan an

expedition. The points we have made during the course of the book will, hope-
fully, have shown you what you need to do in order to construct your own
expedition into the exciting pinnacles of pedagogy! However, it is the expedi-
tion itself that is the important thing, and only in its undertaking will you
know how successful the planning has been.
There are a great many things that need to be taken into consideration
when teaching. We have been at great pains throughout this book to point out
that planning for learning is an important part of a lesson, but that it is your
skill in bringing that plan to life that will make for a compelling learning expe-
rience. After all, most of the pupils will be unaware that the lesson plan exists.
In drawing together the various threads that have run throughout this
book, a number of themes seem to us to be of key importance. In among all of
the deconstruction that we have undertaken, it is worth re-emphasizing some
of these key themes.

Key themes

Teaching ≠ learning

There is no axiomatic linkage between what you teach, and what the
pupils learn. They are not like USB memory sticks where you download
your knowledge to them once and it stays like that forever. Learning is a much
more complex process. A good teacher maximizes retention in their pupils,
certainly, but they do this by making learning relevant, personalizing the
content so it is suitable and appropriate for the classes they teach, and by
teaching the content, knowledge, skills and understanding in a skilful way. But
many pupils talk about more than this in successful teachers; they describe
teachers who care.

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 CONCLUSION 173

Learning is more important than doing

Keeping pupils busy is easier than teaching them something. Most people can
manage to keep a class occupied, but whether the pupils learn anything can be
doubtful. Although completing tasks is important, certainly, it is not neces-
sarily the same thing as learning. Planning for learning is harder than planning
for doing, but is necessary for pupils to make progress.

The three As: aims, learning activities, assessment

Lessons which are of the ‘turn to page 45, start copying out . . .’ variety seem
not to have any specific aims. What is the point? And that is why aims matter.
Although a lot of time seems to be available to schooling, every minute counts.
Aims should be statements that address the issues of, ‘why this lesson, now,
with these pupils?’ This should be obvious to you, the teacher, because if it is
not, how can it be clear to the pupils? Activities focused on learning are the
core of a lesson so you will need to know what this involves. We have discussed
a range of learning episodes and these need placing into a logical grouping and
context so that your lesson can proceed according to plan. These activities will
vary, will involve a range of types of learning, and will be purposefully designed
with the classes you are teaching firmly in mind. Assessment will be key in this
regard. The AfL judgements you make as you tweak your lesson plan while it is
being taught, the conversations you have with pupils to see how they are
getting on, and the reactions you get from the class as you try to develop
understanding by careful questioning – all of these will make the difference
between being a teacher and being a reflective teacher.

Your future development

We worry when we hear about teachers who feel they are complete and that
they have nothing more to learn. The best teachers we have worked with are
the opposite of this. They are the teachers who are always striving for better,
who are interested in trying new ideas out, knowing that some will be useful
and some not, they are teachers who reflect on what they do and what their
pupils do. These are the teachers who make real differences in the classroom.
These are the teachers we hope you aspire to be. We want you to be the best
teacher you can be, and we believe that these are the teachers who will make a
real difference to the young people in their charge.
This book has been written for teachers who are near the beginning of the
journey from novice to expert, and we know that this journey takes time. We
hope that the school, college or academy in which you teach supports you in
this process, and we know too that it takes time to make this progression. There

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 174 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

is an old saying to the effect of ‘some people have ten years experience,
others have one year’s experience ten times’! In teaching, with its annual
academic yearly cycle of terms, holidays, examinations and so on, it is easy for
unreflective teachers to keep having the same one year of experience over and
over again. Another key theme that has been running throughout this book is
that of reflection, and this is an important component of moving annual expe-
riences on to be cumulatively bigger than lots of multiples of one! We strongly
recommend structured reflection and believe that this is all the more powerful
if you can engage with others in doing it. The notion of having a ‘critical
friend’ is an important one here, and schools which have established teacher
research groups, either singly or collaboratively with others, have found that
they reap significant benefits, as do the teachers who take part in them.
Finally, this book has been about lesson planning; as such we hope it is
useful for that purpose, and that you are able to take some of the ideas set out
here and put them into practice in your classroom. We hope too that you will
continue to refer to it, even when you are far along the novice–expert trajec-
tory, as it will then be down to you to help every succeeding generation of
teachers in this regard.
Good luck, and good lesson planning!

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Ruddock, J. (ed.) (1995) An Education that Empowers: A Collection of Lectures in
Memory of Lawrence Stenhouse. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Sadler, D. (1989) Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems.
Instructional Science, 18: 119–44.
Salter, J. (2005) Final word. Report, July/August. London: Association of Teachers
and Lecturers.
Savage, J. (2005) Information communications technologies as a tool for re-
imagining music education in the 21st century. International Journal
of Education & the Arts, 6: 2. http://www.ijea.org/v6n2 (accessed 15 May
2013).
Savage, J. (2010) Cross-curricular Teaching and Learning in the Secondary School.
London: Routledge.
Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. Aldershot: Academic Publishing.
Sfard, A. (1998) On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just
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Shulman, L. (1986) Those who understand: knowledge growth in teaching.
Educational Researcher, 15(2): 4–14.
Silbeck, M. (1983) Lawrence Stenhouse: research methodology. British Educational
Research Journal, 9(1): 11–20.
Sillence, E., Briggs, P., Harris, P. and Fishwick, L. (2007) How do patients evaluate
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1853–62.
Small, G. and Vorgan, G. (2008) iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the
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Smith, C.M.M. and Sutherland, M.J. (2003) Setting or mixed ability? Teachers’
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Stenhouse, L. (1980) Product or process? A reply to Brian Crittenden, reprinted in

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Swanwick, K. (1988) Music, Mind and Education. London: Routledge.
Swanwick, K. and Taylor, D. (1982) Discovering Music. London: Batsford.
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Tomlinson, C.A. (2001) How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-ability Classrooms.
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Tomlinson, C.A. (2005) Grading and differentiation: paradox or good practice?
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Torff, B. and Sternberg, R.J. (2001) Understanding and Teaching the Intuitive Mind:
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Tulving, E. and Craik, F.I.M. (2000) The Oxford Handbook of Memory. Oxford: Oxford
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Tunstall, P. and Gipps, C. (1996) Teacher feedback to young children in formative
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Van Tassell-Baska, J. (1998) Excellence in Educating Gifted and Talented Learners, 3rd
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Vygotsky, L. (1978) Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1987) Thinking and speech. In R.W. Rieber and A.S. Carton (eds) The
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25655.indb 180 30/08/2013 12:08

 Index

Locators shown in italics refer to figures and tables.

ability, mixed key theme for learning and teaching,

class features, advantages and 173
disadvantages, 67–9 Alexander, R., 82–3, 92
acquisition Anderson, L., 18–21, 19, 20, 21
salience for definitions of learning, AofL (assessment of learning)
102–3 importance for planning, 168,
acting 170
teaching and pedagogy as, 85–6 Ashworth, S., 15, 15
use to inform lesson planning, 89–90 assessment, classroom
activities, learning definitions and terminologies,
cohesion as approach to, 42 109–12, 112
importance for planning, 168, 170 features and use of success criteria,
key theme for learning and teaching, 117–21, 119, 120
173 key theme for learning and teaching,
need for evaluation of, 49 173
activity theory (AT) salience as element of informed
features and application to learning pedagogy, 43–4
tools, 52–5, 53, 55 see also evaluation
perspective on interactive see also elements e.g. data, assessment;
whiteboard use, 58–9 feedback
perspective on internet use, 61–3 assessment for learning (AfL)
perspective on word processing use, importance for planning, 168, 170
59–61 assessment of learning (AofL)
role when selecting resources, 63–5 importance for planning, 168, 170
use in lesson planning analysis, 55–8, AT see activity theory
56 availability, equipment
Adams, J., 60, 61 salience as pitfall in lesson planning,
advantages and disadvantages 32
salience when selecting learning
tools, 64 Bach, J.S., 86–7
AfL (assessment for learning) BCU (Birmingham City University)
importance for planning, 168, 170 lesson plan, 158–9, 160
aims, lesson behaviour, pupil
importance for planning, 168, 170 importance of management of, 18

25655.indb 181 30/08/2013 12:08

 182 INDEX

behaviourism cohesion
use in planning for learning, 104–5 approach to teaching activities for
views on learning, 97–9 informed pedagogy, 42
Bernstein, B., 82, 83 common sense
Berry, K., 13–14 salience when selecting learning
Bloom, B., 18–21, 19, 20, 21 tools, 65
Birmingham City University (BCU) communication, classroom
lesson plan, 158–9, 160 importance as element of
Bloom’s taxonomy evaluation, 48–9
salience for lesson planning, 18–20, communities, of practice
19, 20 features and theoretical background,
usefulness for developing questions, 101–2
20–1, 21 constructivism
Boaler, J., 68 use in planning for learning, 105
‘bottom-up’ curriculum development, views of learning, 99–100
128–9 continuing professional development
Brown, D., 92 (CPD)
Brown, M., 106–7 importance for practice, 173–4
Brown, S., 102–3 need for when lesson planning, 37–9
Bruner, J., 94–5, 101, 154–5 role of informed pedagogy, 39–44
Burton, D., 70, 132 see also contributory factors e.g.
evaluation; judgements; reflection
Carr, N., 60, 62, 65 creativity, pupil
case studies and examples importance as an element of lesson
lesson planning approaches for Key planning, 168
Stage 3, 150–5 criteria, success
lesson planning documentation, features and use for class assessment,
135, 158–9, 161, 162, 163 117–21, 119, 120
164–5 cross-curricularity
magnetic compass and AT triangle, differing notions of, 148
55–6, 55 Culkin, J., 61
placing pupils at heart of planning, curricula
148–50 connection with lesson planning,
classes 37–9
features, pros and cons of streaming, definition and features of
setting and mixed ability, 67–9 development, 127–9
coaching differing notions of
teaching and pedagogy as, 88–9 cross-curricularity, 148
use to inform lesson planning, pragmatic approach to development,
89–90 129–30
cognitivism structure in primary and secondary,
use in planning for learning, 105 146–7
views on learning, 99–100 see also maps, curricula

25655.indb 182 30/08/2013 12:08

 INDEX 183

see also elements e.g. subjects documentation, planning

see also factors affecting e.g. planning, considerations for self-creation of,
lesson; teachers and teaching 170
elements of, 168–70, 169
data, assessment extent and nature of detail, 157–66,
characteristics and types, 112–16, 158–9, 161, 162, 163, 164–5
115 supporting differentiation and
purpose of, 122–3, 123 personalization, 166–8
typologies of, 116–17, 116, 117
use in lesson planning, 121–2 Elliott, T. S., 60, 61
deep learning episodes, learning
comparison with shallow learning, lesson planning for sequential,
107 15–18, 15, 17, 18
Department for Education and Science, equipment see resources
131–2 evaluation
Department for Education and Skills, importance for planning, 46–7
10–11, 73 importance of classroom
Department of Education, 24–5 communication, 48–9
Department of Education, Science and importance of classroom
Training (DEST, Australia), 96–7 observation, 47–8
development, curriculum need for self-performance and pupil
connection with lesson planning, learning, 49–50
37–9 Excellence in Schools (1997), 68
definition and characteristics, 127–9
pragmatic approach to, 129–30 Fautley, M., 21, 26, 112, 119, 123, 152–4
see also elements e.g. maps, curricula; feedback
subjects nature as element of assessment,
development, professional 114–16, 115
need for when lesson planning, 37–9 Fitzgerald, E., 90
role of informed pedagogy, 39–44 formative assessment
importance for practice, 173–4 definition and characteristics, 111
see also contributory factors e.g. relationship with summative
evaluation; judgements; reflection assessment, 111–12
differentiation, pupil vignettes of, 113–14
characteristics and importance for forms
lesson planning, 70–3 example of lesson planning, 135,
lesson planning documents 158–9, 161, 162, 163 164–5
supporting, 166–8
salience as element of informed Gamoran, A., 68
pedagogy, 43 gifted (gifted pupils)
disadvantages and advantages considerations for teaching of, 76–7
salience when selecting learning Gipps, C., 111
tools, 64 Greenfield, P., 62

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 184 INDEX

Hallam, S., 69 Lave, J., 101–2

Harlen, W., 110, 111 learning
Hatcher, R., 68 and behaviour management, 18
Hattie, J., 104 connection between teaching and,
Heathcote, D., 152 25–7, 26
Henley, J., 54 evaluation of objectives and
Historical Association, 131 outcomes of, 49
Hodgson, R., 88, 89 greater importance than doing, 173
Holliday, B., 90 objectives of, 11–12, 40–1
significance of theories of, 104–7
idealization theoretical perspectives, 97–103
salience as pitfall in lesson planning, see also deep learning; knowledge;
31–2 resources, learning
informed pedagogy see also factors achieving e.g. plans and
role in professional development, planning, lesson
39–44 lessons
internet aims and objectives, 10–12
role, usefulness and AT perspective format, 7–8, 7
on use of, 61–3 influences within main body of,
see also word processing 12–13
Ireson, J., 69 sequencing of sections, 15–18, 15,
Irons, A., 114 17, 18
types and planning for main body of,
James, M., 102–3, 106, 110 13–14, 14
Johanssen, D., 52–3 see also plans and planning, lesson;
judgements ‘three-part lesson’
process and importance of lesson Lewis, J., 106
outcome, 50–1
McLuhan, M., 65
Key Stage 3 Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, 60
approaches to lesson planning for, Mantle of the Expert, 152
150–55 maps, curricula
knowledge as stage in lesson planning, 133–7,
definition and interpretations, 134–5
94–5 materials, learning see resources,
significance of theories of, learning
104–7 Mencken, H., 95
theoretical perspectives, 97–103 Mosston, M., 15, 15
types, 95–7, 96 Muijs, D., 99–100
see also pedagogical content musicianship
knowledge teaching and pedagogy as, 86–8
Köselitz, H., 60 use to inform lesson planning,
Kushner, S., 47 89–90

25655.indb 184 30/08/2013 12:08

 INDEX 185

National Association for Teaching of pedagogy

English, 131 AT and learning resources, 56–8, 56
needs, special educational definition and characteristics, 82–3
considerations for teaching of, 74–6 importance and methods of teacher
Neesom, A., 113 informed, 39–44
Nietzsche, F., 60, 61 usefulness of interpreting as acting,
85–6
objectives usefulness of interpreting as
need for evaluation of learning, 49 musicianship, 86–8
of teachers for lessons, 11–12 usefulness of interpreting as science,
salience of learning objectives, 40–1 83–5
observation, classroom usefulness of interpreting as
importance as element of evaluation, coaching, 88–9
47–8 see also elements influenced by e.g.
OFSTED, 20, 24, 29 planning, lesson
opinions, individual see also strategies e.g. differentiation,
salience when selecting learning pupil; personalization, pupil
tools, 64 personalization, pupil
organization, class characteristics and importance for
features, pros and cons of streaming, lesson planning, 70, 73–4
setting and mixed ability, 67–9 lesson planning documentation
organization, school supporting, 166–8
importance for lesson planning, salience as element of informed
146 pedagogy, 43
outcomes Piaget, J., 99
need for evaluation of learning, 49 Pirsig, R., 118
process and importance of plans and planning, lesson
judgements for, 50–51 aspects planning cannot achieve,
salience of learning outcomes, 41 25–7, 26
over-reliance case studies, 148–55
salience when selecting learning common pitfalls, 30–32
tools, 64–5 connection with curriculum
over-specification development, 37–9
salience as pitfall in lesson planning, extent of teacher time spent on,
31 24–5
features for inclusion, 27–30, 28, 30
participation for main body of lessons, 13–14, 14
salience for definitions of learning, for sequential episodes, 15–18, 15,
102–3 17, 18
Pavlov, I., 98 need for professional development
pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) when, 37–9
characteristics and significance for process of long- and medium-term,
teaching, 103–4 132–43, 134–5, 138, 140–41

25655.indb 185 30/08/2013 12:08

 186 INDEX

significance of theory and PCK, considerations for teaching SENs,

104–7 74–6
starting point for, 34–5, 35 features, pros and cons of classroom
strengths and weaknesses of linear organization of, 67–9
and overview, 157 importance of behaviour
subjects as focus of, 130–2 management, 18
target audience, 32–4 importance of differentiation and
use of AT in analysis of, 55–8, 56 personalization of, 70–74
use of data assessment, 121–2 importance of lesson planning for,
use of metaphors to inform, 89–90 148–55
see also elements e.g. aims, lesson; importance of valuing of, 41
creativity, pupil; development, taxonomies of thought development
curriculum; documentation, of, 18–20, 19, 20
planning
see also factors impacting e.g. questions
assessment for learning; behaviour, usefulness of Bloom’s taxonomy for
pupil; curricula; differentiation, planning, 20–21, 21
pupil; evaluation; ‘informed
pedagogy;’ organization, school; Rachmaninov, S., 86
personalization, pupil; reflection, Ramsden, P., 107
self-; structures, schools; teachers Redknapp, H., 88, 89
and teaching reflection, self-
see also situations to be considered e.g. characteristics and importance,
activities, learning; gifted; special 45–6
educational needs; talented importance in lesson planning,
see also tools e.g. Bloom’s taxonomy; 37–9
questions see also ways of achieving e.g.
plenary (plenary section) judgements
role in successful lesson reliance (over-reliance)
requirements, 8, 9–10 salience when selecting learning
practice, communities of tools, 64–5
features and theoretical background, resources, learning
101–2 application of AT to use of, 52–5, 53,
primary schools 55
case studies of, 148–55 AT pedagogy of use of, 56–8, 56
curricula and notions of cross- considerations for selection of, 63–5
curricularity, 146–8 salience of availability as pitfall in
differences with secondary school lesson planning, 32
teaching, 147 use as element of informed
structure and organization, 146 pedagogy, 42–3
pupils see also particular e.g. internet;
considerations for teaching gifted whiteboards, interactive; word
and talented, 76–7 processing

25655.indb 186 30/08/2013 12:08

 INDEX 187

Reynolds, D., 99–100 situated learning

Robinson, K., 150–51 features and theoretical background,
Royal Society of Arts, 151–2, 156 101–2
Ryle, G., 95–6 Skinner, B., 98
Small, G., 62
Salter, J., 90–91 Smith, C., 68
Savage, J., 21, 26, 112, 152–4 socio-culturalism
scaffolding use in planning for learning, 106
salience for theories of learning, views of learning, 100–101
101 Sousa, D., 13
Schön, D., 29, 45 special educational needs (SEN)
schools considerations for teaching of,
structure and organization in 74–6
primary and secondary, 146 specification, over-
see also factors affecting e.g. curricula; salience as pitfall in lesson planning,
planning, lesson; teachers and 30–1
teaching Spencer, S., 160
science starter (starter section)
teaching and pedagogy as, role in successful lesson
83–5 requirements, 8–9, 8
secondary schools Stenhouse, L., 37, 38, 46, 129
case studies of, 148–55 Sternberg, R., 94
curricula and notions of cross- streaming, class
curricularity, 146–8 features, advantages and
differences with primary school disadvantages, 67–9
teaching, 147 structures, school
structure and organization, 146 importance for lesson planning,
sections, lesson 146
sequencing of, 15–18, 15, 17, 18 styles, teaching
see also particular e.g. plenary; taxonomies of, 15, 15
starter subjects
SEN (special educational needs) as focus of lesson planning,
considerations for teaching of, 130–32
74–6 success, criteria
setting, class features and use for class assessment,
features, advantages and 117–21, 119, 120
disadvantages, 67–9 summative assessment
Sfard, A., 102 definition and characteristics,
shallow learning 109–10
comparison with deep learning, relationship with formative
107 assessment, 111–12
Shulman, L., 103 Sutherland, M., 68
Sillence, E., 62 Swanwick, K., 96

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 188 INDEX

talented (talented pupils) theories

considerations for teaching of, of learning, 97–103
76–7 use of AT for lesson planning, 52–65,
Tassell-Baska V., 76 53, 55, 56
taxonomies thoughts, pupil
assessment data, 116–17, 116, 117 taxonomies of development of,
pupil thought development, 18–20, 18–20, 19, 20
19, 20 ‘three-part lessons’
teaching styles, 15, 15 role and requirements for successful,
see also terminologies 8–10, 8
Taylor, D., 96 see also elements e.g. plenary; starter
teachers and teaching time and timing
as metaphor of acting, 85–6 extent spent on lesson planning,
as metaphor of coaching, 88–90 24–5
as metaphor of musicianship, salience as pitfall in lesson planning,
86–8 30–31
as metaphor of science, 83–5 Tomlinson, C., 72
differences between secondary and tools, learning see resources,
primary, 147 learning
impact of experience of on lesson ‘top-down’ curriculum development,
planning, 90–92 127–8
objectives for lessons, 11–12 Torff, B., 94
significance of theory and PCK for, triangles, activity theory, 53–6, 53,
104–7 55
taxonomies of styles, 15, 15 Tunstall, P., 111
see also activities, learning; learning; typologies
resources, learning assessment data, 116–17, 116,
see also factors to consider e.g. 117
behaviour, pupil; continuous pupil thought development, 18–20,
professional development; 19, 20
curricula; organization, school teaching styles, 15, 15
see also targets of e.g. gifted;
special educational needs; t units, of work
alented mapping as stage in lesson planning,
technologies, word processing 137–9, 138
role, usefulness and AT perspective writing of as stage in lesson
on use, 59–61 planning, 139–43, 140, 141
see also internet
templates, lesson plan values
starting point for, 34–5, 35 salience when selecting learning
terminologies tools, 63–4
classroom assessment, 109–12, 112 vignettes
TGAT, 114–15 formative assessment, 113–14

25655.indb 188 30/08/2013 12:08

 INDEX 189

Vorgan, G., 62 role, usefulness and AT perspective

Vygotsky, L., 100–101 on use, 59–61
see also internet
Wenger, E., 101–2 work, units of
whiteboards, interactive mapping as stage in lesson planning,
role, usefulness and AT perspective 137–9, 138
on use, 58–9 writing of as stage in lesson
William, D., 113 planning, 139–43, 140, 141
Wilshaw, M., 156, 170 writing
Woollard, J., 98, 104 as stage in lesson planning, 139–43,
word processing 140, 141

25655.indb 189 30/08/2013 12:08

 DEVELOPING INTERACTIVE TEACHING
AND LEARNING USING THE IWB

Sara Hennessy and Paul Warwick

9780335263165 (Paperback)
October 2013

eBook also available

Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) are now found in over 70% of UK

classrooms (Futuresource Consulting, 2010). Yet research suggests
that, at least in the initial years of use by teachers, they are used
primarily to support pre-existing approaches to teaching and learning,
rather than developing these in tandem with advancing technological
expertise. It is also clear from research into classroom practices that,
despite the need to develop interactive approaches that promote
learning – in particular by engaging pupils in dialogue - evidence of
the use of such approaches in classrooms is rare.

Key features:

• Using the IWB in tandem with advancing technological expertise

• To develop interactive approaches that promote learning
• Provide teachers with the rationale, model and examples they
need to develop interactive approaches

www.openup.co.uk

25655.indb 190 30/08/2013 12:08

 A-Z OF TEACHING

Jonathan Savage and Martin Fautley

9780335247004 (Paperback)
July 2013

eBook also available

This is an informative, engaging and accessible book about teaching

that covers a broad range of content without being superficial. As
suggested by the title, the structure will be alphabetical, covering a
range of topics under each letter.

Key features:

• Practical teaching advice on areas such as questioning

• Each entry includes a short definition of the term
• Key ideas and key applications of the topic

www.openup.co.uk

25655.indb 191 30/08/2013 12:08

 TALK FOR WRITING ACROSS THE
CURRICULUM WITH DVD
How to Teach Non-fiction Writing
5-12 Years

Pie Corbett and Julia Strong

9780335240883 (Paperback)
2011

eBook also available

‘Talk for Writing’ is a proven approach to teaching creative writing

that is fun, engaging and motivating for children. Now you can apply
this approach to teaching non-fiction writing across the curriculum.

Talk for Writing across the Curriculum shows you how to help
children speak the language of non-fiction before they attempt
to write it. This is a three-step process using fun, multi-sensory
activities. It helps build children’s confidence and linguistic ability to
such an extent they are able to create their own writing.

Key features:

• A wide range of fun, warm-up oral activities such as connective

games, Professor Know-It-All, as well as text-based activities
such as ‘boxing up’, creating toolkits and ‘magpieing’
• Guidance for teachers on how to apply the approach across the
curriculum
• DVD of Pie Corbett ‘s workshops with teachers showing ‘Talk for
Writing’ in action

www.openup.co.uk

25655_15_Advert.indd 192 30/08/2013 12:25

 TOP TEACHER! GET IT RIGHT IN YOUR
NQT YEAR

Neil Rutledge

9780335247240 (Paperback)
August 2014

eBook also available

This book chronologically mirrors a trainee teacher’s path from

seeking a post to progressing through their first year of employment
and finally gaining their full QTS qualification. Each of the various
challenges they must face along the way are considered, and advice
and strategies given at each step are applicable to any ITE student
or qualified teacher seeking to improve their practice. The style and
approach of the book has been informed by focused interviews
and discussions with around thirty recently qualified teachers; ITE
students; and school mentors/ head teachers.

Key features:

• An anecdotal, non-academic approach grounded on research but

also offers practical, easily accessible support
• Case studies and input from NQTs and recently qualified
teachers, as well as perspectives from head teachers and school
mentors
• A ‘Get it Right!’ theme with consequences flow charts allowing
the reader to quickly appreciate the choices available and their
consequences. Such charts are provided as a quick reference for
all key content areas

www.openup.co.uk

25655.indb 193 30/08/2013 12:08

 TALK FOR WRITING IN SECONDARY
SCHOOLS
How to Achieve Effective Reading,
Writing and Communication Across the
Curriculum, with DVD

Julia Strong

9780335262601 (Paperback)
August 2013

eBook also available

‘Talk for Writing’, developed by Pie Corbett supported by Julia

Strong, is a proven approach to teaching writing that isengaging and
motivating for students and teachers alike. Building on best practice,
this practical guide takes you step by step through how to establish
quality written communication across the secondary curriculum. It
can be used as a handbook by a literacy coordinator to lead the
approach as well as being a source of practical ideas for each
subject area. Every teacher can help students internalize the pattern
of language of their subject through focused talk activities related to
exemplar text.

Key features:

• Wide range of examples from all subject areas with a particular

focus on science
• DVD of a training session with teachers showing ‘Talk for Writing’
in action suitable to use on training days to help introduce and
embed the approach
• Over 80 customisable handouts downloadable from the DVD

www.openup.co.uk

25655.indb 194 30/08/2013 12:08

 Lesson
“At last! A plain speaking book on effective lesson
planning.”

Lesson Planning for Effective Learning

Andrew R. Mackereth, Headteacher, Heart of England School, Coventry, UK

Planning
“This book gives fantastic insight and practical strategies
for teachers at all points within their career in order to
encourage and embed reflective practice. A ‘must have’
resource for any school library.”

for
Hayley McDonagh, Senior Leader, Golden Hillock School, Birmingham, UK

Lesson planning is the essential component of every teacher’s

practice and the development of a teacher’s skill is built explicitly

Effective
on a rigorous approach to planning. This goes beyond just written
plans and includes a process of mental preparation, anticipation,
rehearsal and performance - all essential elements of the craft of
teaching. This book offers heaps of useful advice and key ideas

Learning
related to planning an effective lesson.
With clear links between the preparation of writing a lesson plan,
McGr aw - Hill Education

and the delivery of that lesson plan through your teaching, this
book explores:
• Common components of lesson planning including learning
objectives, learning outcomes, starters, teaching activities and
plenaries
• The lesson plan document: what it can and can’t do
• Teaching ‘style’ and your role in bringing lesson plans to life
within your classroom
• Common pitfalls, including time management, over- and under-
running, optimum learning time, and activity sequencing

FaUTLEy & SavagE

• Broader strategies such as differentiation, personalization and
assessment
• Sample lesson planning documents from real teachers
Whatever age of pupils you are teaching, or whatever subject you
are teaching, this book helps you develop a clear and concise
approach to lesson planning that is an essential and integral part of
becoming an effective teacher.

Martin Fautley is Professor of Education at Birmingham City

University, UK. Jonathan Savage is Reader in Education and
Enterprise Fellow at the Institute of Education, Manchester
Metropolitan University, UK.

MaRTIn FaUTLEy &

Cover design Hybert Design • www.hybertdesign.com JonaThan SavagE
www.openup.co.uk