Lesson Planning for Effective Learning PDF

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...

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 Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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. Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 23 30/08/2013 12:07  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- Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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 Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 24 30/08/2013 12:07  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 Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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 Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 25 30/08/2013 12:07  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 Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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). Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 26 30/08/2013 12:07  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 Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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 Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 27 30/08/2013 12:07 Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Figure 2.2 Outline lesson plan with timings. Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 28 30/08/2013 12:07  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 Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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. Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 29 30/08/2013 12:07  30 LESSON PLANNING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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 Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 30 30/08/2013 12:07  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, Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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, Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 31 30/08/2013 12:07  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 Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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. Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 32 30/08/2013 12:07  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. Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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 Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 33 30/08/2013 12:07  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 Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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 Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 34 30/08/2013 12:07  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- Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. 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 Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 35 30/08/2013 12:07  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? Copyright © 2014. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Fautley, M., & Savage, J. (2014). Lesson planning for effective learning. McGraw-Hill Education. Created from brenauuniv on 2025-01-06 19:35:41. 25655.indb 36 30/08/2013 12:07