8.3 Helping trainees to plan a lesson

Planning individual lessons is a vital part of professional competence. The ability to define precise learning objectives and to devise learning activities that enable pupils’ to make progress is the basis of all effective teaching and learning. Trainees’ lesson plans are crucially important, not only in ensuring successful learning for pupils, but also in helping the trainees to develop their thinking about learning history and in providing evidence of the trainees’ progress.

Trainee history teachers are often daunted by the idea of producing their first lesson plans. Getting to grips with the complexities of a particular chunk of history, thinking about National Curriculum or examination specification requirements and planning for the needs of an individual class makes lesson planning a challenging intellectual process. How, then, can we best support trainees in planning their first lessons?

You will obviously want to give careful consideration to the timing and nature of your trainees’ first lesson-planning task. Where will this come in relation to university sessions and school-based training? Will it be a ‘dummy run’ or will trainees actually teach the lesson? Will it be done individually or jointly? How will it be evaluated? It is likely that most university-based sessions will attend to an aspect of the process of lesson planning. However, before trainees can reasonably be asked to plan a whole lesson, it is helpful if certain building blocks are in place. Trainees will need to know:

• That individual lessons rarely stand alone, but are often part of a larger historical enquiry
• How to define an appropriate focus for a lesson
• What meaningful history learning objectives look like
• What makes a worthwhile learning activity
• What makes a purposeful homework task
• How to structure learning around stimulating and rigorous tasks
• How to balance the interplay of historical skill and knowledge within a lesson

An awareness of the basic features of successful lessons is an essential prerequisite of trainees’ lesson planning. Trainee teachers need appropriate models on which to base their own planning, but, as we have already discussed, the professional knowledge of experienced teachers is often implicit. The onus is therefore on teacher-trainers to provide lesson plans and associated exercises that can develop trainees’ thinking about the essential principles that underpin effective lessons.

Activity 8.3.1 Two approaches to modelling the process of lesson planning.

Schools and universities use a range of proformas for lesson planning. Some institutions adopt a common format; others encourage trainee teachers to develop their own structures based on agreed criteria. Whichever approach is taken, trainees will require structures and frameworks to support their early attempts at lesson planning.

Activity 8.3.2 Structured support for trainees early attempts at lesson planning.

Evaluating trainee history teachers’ first attempts at lesson planning is a fascinating process. Inevitably, the most striking feature is the diversity that trainees bring to the task. Some will surprise us with an inventive lesson start. Some will fix on fun activities at the expense of rigorous learning. Some will plan enough activities to fill several lessons. It is very hard to generalise about the needs of trainees as they develop their lesson planning; however, some common issues that often emerge in the early stages are:

• An overall lack of focus in the lesson, sometimes due to weak subject knowledge
• Inconsistency in defining clear and precise learning objectives
• Poorly sequenced learning activities that do not systematically build pupils’ knowledge, skills and understanding as the lesson unfolds
• Use of weak learning resources that fail to engage and motivate pupils
• Inadequate provision for low-attaining pupils to access tasks.

Activity 8.3.3 Cases studies focused on trainees’ planning needs from the ‘Move Me On’ feature in Teaching History