Rethinking planning – what if we plan not to finish?

Whenever I think of lesson planning, it is usually in the form of filling the lesson time with a series of ‘activities’/actions that will happen during the lesson. The activities fit neatly into the time available. A trainee may ‘overplan’ or ‘underplan’ but most teachers get used to how long things take and adjust their timings. It will be one topic of part of a topic, neatly arranged into the lesson, so that it covers ‘everything needed’.

In this model each lesson is a stand-alone lesson of content. I see many lessons shared with other teacher where these are literally named ‘lesson 1’, ‘lesson 2’ etc so each lesson is a stand-alone, in a series.

However, I generally don’t do this. Luckily I don’t have to write lesson plans in my school so planning is ‘in my head’. The difference to what I do from above is that I don’t plan activities that fill the length of the lesson. I plan for us to do things and I judge how long they will take at the time. I roughly know how long they’ll last but many times a side discussion on a linked topic will take more time or students will ask more questions.

(I have previously read a blog that links to this idea that a lesson isn’t a unit of learning by Bodil Isaksen ,A lesson is the wrong unit of time ,however sadly it no longer exists)

What if we deliberately plan not to finish something?

Instead of making a lesson the unit of learning*, make the ‘learning’ the unit of time; the learning dictates the timing not the other way round.

*learning being the set of things done that enable long term knowledge and understanding.

Why?

Without planning for this I’ve come to realise it means that it helps with long-term memory. It means they have to retrieve what we were doing last lesson and we have to recap. It makes them think about last lesson. They have to re-engage with the content.

It’s useful for those that are absent for a lesson. It means they haven’t fully missed out on something because we were partly through it. There’s more logic to trying to quickly copy notes and engage as it’s still a ‘live’ topic.

It also means an activity can carry on for as long as is needed; it’s not restricted by time. In my subject, we can discuss some topics more than others, students have examples they can share and we can expand or contract the timing as needed.

I also don’t have PowerPoints of lessons. (My use of PowerPoint isn’t ‘normal’ compared to others anyway). I have one PowerPoint of the entire topic all in one. It’s not neatly divided into lessons because I don’t know how long a lesson will be. Sometimes I add slides, sometimes I jump them. They’re not my lessons; they just hold useful stuff I don’t want to keep rewriting or re-searching for.

Issues

If time is an issue for your subject/class it may feel disorganised or not moving at the pace needed to cover the content needed. Planning each lesson has a certain neatness and certainty of covering all the syllabus needed.

I teach some classes every fortnight. I don’t use this with them. It is probably too much to ask them to do this and if someone was absent it would take them too long to catch up. It would be a constant catch up. I do use quick 1-10 quizzes at the start of lessons but I wouldn’t fully use the model above.

This model would be problematical for colleagues that have to hand in lesson plans in advance (which of course is nonsense in most cases) as you wouldn’t know how far you’d got along the way to write the next plan. You could however deliberately plan to split the end of lesson activity to go into the next.

If you have a trainee or you plan lessons in these neat blocks, consider if this might be a useful way to rethink lessons.