There is a potentially bewildering amount of advice available to trainees about how they might approach lesson planning. The most important source of advice early on in the course is likely to be the university subject tutor (or equivalent). The school-based mentor will quickly become just as important (if not more so) when the trainee begins to plan lessons they will actually teach. In addition to these key people, however, there are further sources of advice and influence, including the Standards for QTS, the QCA schemes of work, the Key Stage 3 Strategy and OFSTED, not to mention school textbooks and their own reading.

Activity 8.1.1: the usefulness of different advice about planning

It is inevitable that trainees will encounter differences between these different sources of advice about planning. One of your jobs will be to help steer them through these differences, enabling them to be discriminating in the advice they follow and the advice they reject. This involves you being clear both with yourself and with the trainees about the degree to which you believe there is a ‘right’ way to plan – or at least, sharing with your trainees some fundamental principles that you believe underpin effective planning in history.

Is there an orthodoxy?

Where might you stand in relation to these statements?

• The ‘enquiry’ approach, where single lessons are always part of a sequence and where learning is organised around a challenging and engaging question and a clearly defined end-product, is the only way to plan in history
• When starting to plan a lesson or series of lessons, trainees must first define the learning objectives
• The incorporation of equal opportunities for visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners must be a priority in all lessons
• The matching of the lesson focus (often encapsulated in a key question), objectives and activities is one of the most important things to get right in planning

Some people hold clearer views than others. The first example, above, would be defended strongly by many, but others might want to reserve the right to teach ‘one off’ lessons from time to time that are not embedded in a sequence. The second two examples owe a great deal to current educational trends. The Key Stage 3 Strategy invites teachers to plan to objectives, but there is evidence, both empirical and anecdotal (think of your own practice and see Pendry, 1994) to suggest that trainees (and experienced teachers) are more likely to have different starting points, including a resource, an activity, the nature of the topic and so forth. Similarly, whilst the need to incorporate a variety of teaching and learning styles and to develop a broad repertoire of strategies is important, you may feel that is unnecessarily restrictive to insist that this should be the case in every lesson. The class debate that lasts a full hour or the timed essay would simply not be feasible. Perhaps all of us are most likely to rate the final bullet point as crucial in all circumstances. It is therefore one that trainees will wrestle with constantly during the training year in order to get right.