As a warm up to going back into work next week, I started to revisit some of the books I’d read for my PhD. Not the research methods ones, obviously, or the heavy duty theory & philosophy, but the practical teaching books. One of them is Planning From Lesson to Lesson by Tessa Woodward & Seth Lindstromberg, a slender 10″x8″ tome1 full of teaching ideas. It’s an old book, published in 19952, and uses the tried and tested “recipe book” approach. The introduction is really striking, and includes interviews with teachers about their planning processes, and how they view lessons and sequences of lessons, with this quote from a teacher really hitting home.
I can’t say that I “see” or visualise the plan. It’s more like I feel it. It’s a sensual object. It’s a shape I feel. I need that framework. It’s sort of internal.
Another teacher desribes planning like this:
I think of activities as “choreography” – as movement and rhythm and “togetherings”. I feel quite happy about not using a plan that I’ve taken in. After all, you have bannisters up the side of the stairs but nobody says you have to hold on to them.
These really hit home with me as I come to my year ahead. We have planning proformas, of course, and mine are, of course, duly filled in with all the appropriate content. Ours uses a spreadsheet to organise the sections, although previous ones I’ve used use a word processor, but either way the stages of the lesson are usually organised into cells. By and large, there’s a cell for activity detail, one for adaptive / differentiated learning ideas, one cell for formative assessment, as well as a couple more. There’s usually some sort of nod to whatever the current political agenda demands (Prevent, British Values, embedding maths/digital/literacy/sustainability). That’s not intended as a criticism of those things, or of the nod, by the way. There’s nothing at all fundamentally wrong with including work on sustainability or safeguarding, for instance, or health and safety, and my criticism is only of the faddish nature of such things.
Trouble is, by the time I get to the “formative assessment” cell, I’ve pretty much done all my thinking about the lesson. For me at least, formative assessment, that is basically checking students are learning and progressing is simply not some separate section of the lesson. I don’t see a lesson as a repeated cycle of “input > practice > check > move to next stage.” Maybe some teachers do. Maybe if you’re teaching Level 3 Business Administration or Level 2 hairdressing, you tell the students some stuff, then check whether they’ve taken it on. Maybe that’s your world, and that’s fine – you are teaching something where knowedge and its application are separable; theory and practice come together at a later time, if they come together at all. Certainly the standard planning proforma suggests that this separation is seen as normal, because formative assessment assumes knowledge input followed by checking that that knowledge has been retained.
It’s different in ESOL. Yeah, I know, I know, ESOL is special, Sam, blah blah, not this again. But wait, bear with me. For one, the separated nature of explicit and tacit knowledge is way more complex than learning, say, the princples of marketing or the events that led to the outbreak of WW1. Language learning is integrated learning from the beginning. The relationship between what a teacher wants to teach (based on whatever arbitrarily developed syllabus you happen to be following) and what the students take from the lesson is much more complicated than input>output. Leaving that discussion aside, even if I am teaching a straight learning outcome driven lesson (“by the end of the lesson students will be able to…” etc.), formative assessment, literacy and maths development, digital skills, adaptive methods and so on are all intertwined into one block of practice. Let’s say, for example, we’ve been practising past simple and I have got the students to ask each other questions about what they did at the weekend. So far so “shit AI generated ‘learning’ activity.” So I set up the activity, students are busy asking and answering questions, and I’m going round the room listening, observing and making notes about what is being said. In my head is something like this:
What errors are being made? Do they need addressing? What’s the best way to do that with them? What really exciting new language is coming up? What can we do to make the language even better? Do these students need more scaffolding and support? What shall I do with the students over there who are doing really well, and have almost finished? Woah, hang on, what did that student just say – I need to address that.
Of course, the questions might be different for, say, a reading task, or formalised grammar practice, but the interlocked and interwoven nature of formative assessment, adaptive teaching and so on is clear.
So cells don’t really help with that. The stated aim of having a separate cell for “formative assessment” and the rest is that it supposed to help you to think about how you are going to make sure you do those things. This is, of course, based on the assumption that as a teacher you are “delivering” some “input” and when you get so excited by your delivery you forget that there are some students in the room who are supposed to be taking on the knowledge you deliver. If I were doing those forms properly, in a way that reflected those internalised teaching processes, I’d have a ten page lesson plan for every lesson, with each micro stage having a list of possible formative assessments and adaptive activities. Put simply, planning in cells creates boundaries where no boundaries should exist.
Planning forms assume ignorance. They are there to prop up the inexperienced, novice teacher. It’s good practice (shhh) to plan, yes, but it’s not good practice to spend hours filling in forms that you don’t need to. Cells make for performative course and lesson planning, essentially to show to someone else that you’ve done the planning. I’ll hold my hands up and say that it has been many many years since I paid more than a cursory glance at a lesson plan during a lesson. But cell-based lesson plans don’t help: they’re much much harder to use in a lesson. Uou don’t have time to flit through a spreadsheet or online document (especially if you’ve had to format the text small to fit into the cell, or the cell has decided to hide a chunk of text thanks to the technological ineptitude of the form designer3). if this is all online, and not printed, then you’ve got a teacher scurrying back and forth between the students and their little nest next to the interactive whiteboard to see what the plan has told them to do next.
We’re all different, of course. You might like lessons separated into misleadingly organised cells, and that’s fine. Live and let live, you do you, etc. Whatever floats your boat. It just doesn’t float mine. For me a lesson is like a narrative – it has a plot and subplots, expressive flourishes, plot twists. Sometimes the narrative continues past the lesson, and into more lessons, and sometimes it ends early. Sometimes a subplot becomes the main plot, sometimes, multiple plotlines are being explored simultaneously. Throughout all of this, the elements of the lesson, activity, intention, assessment, adaptation and so on, are intertwined. Forcing those elements into separate cells simply constrains the possiblities, and severs the connections, and that, I’m afraid, is just not for me.
- I’ve noticed these teaching “recipe” books are almost always around 10″x8″ – a size which makes them awkward to photocopy. This is probably intentional on the part of the publishers because teachers are either skint, stingy or both and will happily ignore copyright laws in the name of getting stuff for free. ↩︎
- For my research, I read a lot of these older late 80s to mid-90s “recipe” books and they are, for the most part, absolutely brilliant. The joy of these books is that they pre-date the widespread use of the internet, so come from a time when innovation meant more than “throw technology at it”. They’re often out of print, but second hand copies can be found online for a few quid. ↩︎
- One of the first things I do with a new planning document is to go over the whole thing and reformat everything so that it all works. You’d be surprised how often form designers get this wrong, for example by extending a cell in word using the enter key, or formatting spreadsheet cells so that the text obscures the next cell along. ↩︎
Sam Shepherd 