This is continuing a series of practical blogs for new teachers (but I hope useful for anyone). For more useful ideas for new teachers, check out my book What do new teachers need to know?
I don’t miss lesson planning proformas. I get that they’re out there still. I get the benefit of working within a structure but I’m concerned that they distort the act of planning and embed misconceptions.
Of course, a planning proforma is as good or bad, as effective or ineffective, as the prompts and layout. But, whatever the layout or the prompts, they can give the impression that lessons are on a track that we just have to keep moving along.
I know I have received, and have definitely given feedback like Don’t be afraid to adapt the lesson when I’m in the room. You saw they didn’t understand and you ploughed on. This feedback is unfair because it lacks specificity – Don’t plough on isn’t very helpful – but also because it’s difficult to retrospectively adapt your lesson.
Without the teacher having certain habits in place, just pointing out that they could have adapted or checked but didn’t, isn’t helpful. What might those habits look like?
- Plan with thinking in mind
Daniel Willingham’s maxim, ‘Memory is the residue of thought’, directs our planning. That we should plan for thinking is both revolutionary and sort of obvious. Of course, students will remember more of what they think about.
But, in my experience at least, planning for thinking has meant different things in different classrooms.
For me, since reading Why don’t students like school?, I’ve spent more time planning content-focused activities. Students will hear about content from me. They will answer questions about content. We’ll discuss it and they will practise it.
This is all a Good Thing. But it isn’t everything.
A lesson can be planned with content in mind that misses the fact that lots of students aren’t thinking or they only think – really intensively – at certain moments in the lesson. Doug Lemov’s idea of Ratio is useful here – how many students are thinking in any given task and how cognitively challenging is the thinking that they are doing.
A grid like this can be useful to evaluate your lessons or your planning:
- Plan to embed, Plan to check
We’ve planned for lessons to focus on thinking rather than activity. What next?
Whenever we introduce something new to students – a concept, a process, a key term – we want them to understand it so we need them to think about it, to embed it. But we also want to check they’ve understood it (we also need to check they’re ready for it but that’s another blog).
At times, this is quite straightforward. Imagine you’ve just been reading about the impact of the work of the League of Nations with your class. You’ve stopped to explain the key ideas. On mini-whiteboards, the class can summarise the reading and explanation in three points. The teacher can check this.
The task serves two purposes: 1. to check students have understood the concepts in the lessons. 2. to get them to think at more length about the League of Nations independent of the teacher’s explanation.
Imagine you’re introducing a group to the concept of acceleration. You want them to get to the point where they can calculate acceleration using a formula independently. You recognise there’s science-specific terminology students will need to know, like velocity and acceleration. But you notice your resources also include the word initial. A word you’re not sure students will be familiar with.
You explain acceleration using a video and model a visual representation of acceleration on the board. You’re going to want to gradually model the process of calculating acceleration but first you check students have understood the terms and the process with a planned quiz of this knowledge.
Our check should reveal information from several students, including those who don’t volunteer answers. We could do this through:
- Hands down questions (possibly preceded by turn and talk)
- Mini-Whiteboards
- A quick quiz or task we can circulate and observe
- Plan to adapt
If we check and we notice that student’s don’t understand fully or hold misconceptions we didn’t expect, some kind of adaptation is essential.
Adapting might sound easy – Just reexplain, add a task, model another one – but for a new teacher or a teacher trying to develop, this is very difficult behaviour to change.
When planning, it might be useful to see some tasks or sections of lessons as elastic, able to stretch to their need.
We might use an I, We, You model but recognise that this is not a straitjacket we must be confined by. We can move quickly towards the You or dwell for extended time in the We depending on the way the class demonstrate (or don’t) their understanding.
Adaptations like this require subject knowledge which can anticipate, diagnose and respond to errors in student thinking within the domain.
As we plan, we can plan specific moments that can respond directly to the needs of the class and the lesson. These are things that are ready to move more quickly or slowly through, depending on what our check’s reveal.
Extend the We do element.
Continuing the guided practice or the We do element of the lesson can help to embed understanding before handing over independence.
A teacher modelling how to embed quotations in their English lesson can continue to exercise more control and direction over that when students aren’t mastering it or demonstrating understanding during a period of shared practice.
A maths teacher working on reciprocal numbers can continue under the visualiser or using mini-whiteboards before moving to a set of questions for students to complete independently.
We need to be careful not avoid handing over independence and continuing to do most of the cognitive work ourselves. Students need to be thinking during this time through their contributions to the task whatever form those take.
Turn an independent task into a completion problem.
If that English teacher expects students to be able to write an analytical paragraph but the check has revealed uncertain understanding of the paragraph structure, they can start the task itself. Instead of expecting an independently written paragraph, the teacher can start it and get students to finish or start sections and expect students to complete.
This could happen on mini-whiteboards or with a strong circulation to ensure you know whether students are understanding or not.
Similarly, a Geography teacher expecting students to analyse a climate graph could highlight the areas to examine in depth or offer a scaffold to support analysis if checks reveal students haven’t got these things.
Add questions or task.
There are various ways we might correct a misconception we see. We might share a book under a visualiser or get pairs to discuss what’s got wrong. If we think the mistake is common, more of the same questions can help.
In some subjects – particularly where resources are readily available (e.g. Maths) – it’s easier to have some spare questions ready to extend practice where it needs extending. But it’s possible to have a backup question or alternative versions of tasks if we know students might struggle.
For example, an English teacher might change the wording of the question – just slightly – that prompts paragraph writing. The overlap between questions might be extensive but the difference is enough to allow students fresh practice.
Here is a slightly crude representation of what we’ve been talking about so far:
Lessons can be on a track from task to task that we struggle to deviate from. Often, when this is the case, we have to field a lot of questions as we circulate the room. We notice errors and misconceptions in work and answers.
When we add checks for understand, we can reexplain around misconceptions or have confidence to move on. We should avoid the overconfidence that might come from taking answers from a select few with hands up.
As we start to introduce more flexibility to our teaching, and our planning, we can plan some tasks where we’ll maintain control of a task or hand over independence, depending on what we see from students.
- Two habits to embed
There are two habits it can be useful to have at your disposal for the unexpected in your lessons. As much as we can plan to adapt as outlined above, there will be moments that throw us, moments where we think students haven’t got something but aren’t sure why, moments where we need to pause before moving on.
These habits are things we can have ready to give students extended time to think and embed, offering us a further opportunity to check for understanding.
Habit #1 – Turn and Talk
If we want students to think about a process or concept we’ve explained or we just want to give them some processing time before asking them for responses, turn and talk is really effective.
In particular, it’s effective to be able to switch to turn and talk when we notice:
- Students aren’t sure, not many hands are up.
- We want students to remind themselves/each other of something we’ve covered before
- Understanding seems patchy, some students understand but other don’t know.
- We’ve realised students don’t completely understand something we’ve just explained but could figure it out with a bit of time (e.g. what the word initial might mean in that acceleration example).
- An explanation or model has gone on longer than we anticipated and we want students to process it and participate.
For Turn and Talk to be effective we need to embed a routine that includes:
A question – Look at what it’s describing on the board – What might initial mean?
A phrase (that always signals Turn and Talk) – Turn and talk to your partner
A timeframe (preferably short) – 10 seconds
A starting point – Go
A more advanced version might include:
Clarity about which partner speaks first – Some teachers label partners as door, window, wall partners depending on room layout.
An immediate countdown – Turn and Talk can fail because there isn’t a sense of urgency about the conversation or there isn’t a routine in place for immediately talking. A countdown can help with that.
Habit #2 – Mini-whiteboards
If students always or almost always have mini-whiteboards in front of them, they can use them whenever you want to check they’ve understood something.
So the Science teacher explaining acceleration might say, I just want to check we’ve got some of the vocabulary there before we move onto the calculation. On your whiteboards, write down the difference between acceleration and velocity, 10 seconds. Go.
We need a routine that ensures:
- Students can move to their whiteboards quickly
- Students hold their whiteboards flat until we want them to reveal.
- Students show their boards at the same time.
Peter Foster 
3 thoughts on “Filling the Planning Gap”