Have you ever heard of the ‘7Ps’ – Prior Planning and Preparation Prevent Pitifully Poor Performance? As education evolves, it might be time for a new ‘7Ps’ – Positive Planning and Preparation are the Precursors to Precision Pedagogy and Pupil success.
Five steps to lesson success
Effective lesson planning is important when relationships with students are new. Teachers need to earn trust. There are many effective methods. The ‘5E planning model’ works well for a cycle of lessons:
- Engage
- Explore
- Explain
- Extrapolate/elaborate
- Evaluate
This model promotes collaborative, active learning. Students work together to solve problems and investigate new concepts by asking questions, observing, analysing, and drawing conclusions. It encourages students to construct knowledge and meaning from experiences.
Every lesson counts
All lessons should have an introduction, body, and conclusion. A strong introduction gains attention and maintains interest. Try using big questions and novelty to arouse curiosity. Never underestimate the value of novelty in a child’s life. Anthropologist Helen Fisher says, ‘any type of novelty or excitement drives up the dopamine in the brain’.
But don’t forget the nuts and bolts of a good introduction. Organisational psychologist Adam Grant says, ‘the most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity’. Link to students’ prior knowledge, outline the lesson, and start from the known. Diverse learners will benefit.
You have many tools to choose from. Cues provide hints for students about the content of a lesson. Questions provide teachers with the opportunity to assess what students do not already know and pique their interest. Advance organisers provide a conceptual framework to help students organise concepts and instructional material.
Here’s a few examples:
- Expository advance organisers tell students what they are going to learn directly.
- Narrative advance organisers involve storytelling.
- Skimming helps students develop a broad picture of where they are going.
- Graphic advance organisers help students see connections between concepts, the steps in a process or sequence of events or simply to organise students’ thinking.
- Analogies draw on the skill of comparison to help students learn, and this helps in extending and refining knowledge.
A playful atmosphere also captures student interest. As children’s author and pioneer Laura Ingalls Wilder said, ‘A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing’.
A body of work
The lesson body may vary, depending on what you are teaching and what phase of learning you are in. Sometimes, it’s useful to break the body down into phases. Some examples are:
- Explanation – activity – recap
- Demonstration – practice – test
The most important thing is that the teaching strategies chosen are engaging and maximise impact for students. Consider these:
- Think/write-pair-share
- Before, during and after reading questioning
- The Jigsaw method
- Simulation
- Graphic organisers, such as Venn diagrams, y-charts, or timelines.
Make the students do the work
Peer and self-assessment are effective learning tools that help teachers manage their workload. There are some excellent structures around for explicitly teaching students how to assess their own work, such as success criteria. These can take the form of rubrics, work samples, ‘what a good one looks like (WAGOLL)’ walls, ‘bump it up’ walls, or student-designed assessment. Students can support each other by providing feedback and more polished work makes its way to the teacher.
All good things must come to an end
Make sure you manage your lesson time effectively to protect the conclusion. The conclusion draws the lesson together, lets you reiterate key points, foreshadows where you are headed, and gives students time to reflect on their learning and stay organised. Consider using exit tickets. According to NSW Education they:
- quickly assess students’ understanding of a concept,
- help students reflect on what they have learned and review their performance, and
- can be modified to focus on wellbeing.
Edutopia offers the following advice on designing an exit tickets:
- link to the lesson objective,
- use multiple choice, short answer, or a couple of sentences in response to a question,
- stick to between three and five questions, and
- students should be able to complete the questions in just a few minutes.
If the school uses diaries, give students time to write in them. Stand at the door as pupils exit and ask them to approach with the current day’s date open for checking. If there’s nothing there, send them back to their spot to fill it out. Blank diaries may indicate a student is hiding how much homework they have from their parents or are struggling in other ways.
It’s now time to start planning your first few lessons in your own diary. There are some wonderful digital options available. Outlook and OneNote have many useful features, as does PowerPoint for teachers who want their planning to be classroom ready. There are also bespoke digital teacher planners on the market.
While you’re at it, set up an Excel document with your class lists on separate sheets. Add parent contact details and information from handover. You will thank yourself later when you are keeping records of who completed what, who needs to hand something in, assessment results, and report comments.
In conclusion, remember the new 7ps: Positive Planning and Preparation are the Precursors to Precision Pedagogy and Pupil success.