Lecture 12

Reasons for planning
Some teachers with experience seem to have an ability to think on their feet,
and this allows them to believe that lesson planning is unnecessary However,
most teachers do not share this view and prepare their lessons. The resulting
lesson plans range from the very formal and elaborate to a few hurried notes.
But even the notes are still a plan of a kind.
For students, evidence of a plan shows that the teacher has devoted time to
thinking about the class. It strongly suggests a level of professionalism and a
commitment to the kind of research they might reasonably expect. Lack of a
plan may suggest the opposite of these teacher attributes, even if such a
perception is unjustified.
For teachers, a plan gives the lesson a framework, an overall shape. It is true
that they may end up departing from it at some stage of the lesson, but at the
very least it will be something to fall back on. Of course, good teachers are
flexible and respond creatively to what happens in the classroom, but they also
need to have thought ahead, to have a destination which they want their students
to reach, and some idea of how they are going to get there. In the classroom, a
plan helps to remind teachers what they intended to do - especially if they get
distracted or momentarily forget what they had proposed.
There is one particular situation in which planning is especially important, and
that is when a teacher is to be observed as part of an assessment or performance
review. Such plans are likely to be more elaborate than usual, not just for the
sake of the teacher being observed, but also so that the observer can have a clear
idea of what the teacher intends in order to judge how well that intention is
carried through.
A proposal for action
Whatever lesson plans look like, they should never be thought of as instructions
to be slavishly followed, but rather as proposalsfor action (in the same way as
coursebook lessons - see page 153). We may have an idea of what the learning
outcomes for the lesson should be (that is, what the students will have learnt by
the end), but we will only really know what those outcomes are once the lesson
itself has finished. How closely lesson plans are followed depends, in other
words, on what happens when we try to put them to work.
Suppose, for example, that the teacher has planned that the students should
prepare a dialogue and then act it out, after which there is a reading text and
some exercises for them to get through. The teacher has allowed twenty minutes
for dialogue preparation and acting out. But when the students start working on
this activity, it is obvious that they need more time. Clearly the plan will have to
be modified. A similar decision will have to be made if the class suddenly
encounters an unexpected language problem in the middle of some planned
sequence of activities. The teacher can bypass the problem and keep going, or
they can realise that now is an ideal time to deal with the issue, and amend the
plan accordingly.
Another scenario is also possible: all the students are working on preparing a
dialogue except for two pairs who have already finished. The teacher then has to
decide whether to tell them to wait for the others to catch up (which might make
them bored and resentful) or whether to stop the rest of the class to prevent this
(which could frustrate all those who didn’t get a chance to finish).
There are other unforeseen problems too: the tape/CD player or computer
program suddenly doesn’t work; we forget to bring the material we were relying
on; the students look at the planned reading text and say ‘We’ve done that
before’.
Good teachers need to be flexible enough to cope with unforeseen events, and it
is because they know that they may have to adapt to changing circumstances
that they understand that a lesson plan is not fixed in stone.
So far we have suggested that teachers need to be flexible when confronted with
unforeseen problems. But a happier scenario is also possible. Imagine that
during a discussion phase a student suddenly says something really interesting,
something which could provoke fascinating conversation or suggest a
completely unplanned (but appropriate and enjoyable) activity. In such a
situation - when this kind of magic moment suddenly presents itself- we would
be foolish to plough on with our plan regardless. On the contrary, a good teacher
will recognise the magic moment for what it is and adapt what they had planned
to do accordingly. Magic moments are precious, in other words, and should not
be wasted just because we didn’t know they were going to happen.
There will always be a tension between what we had planned to do and what we
actually do when magic moments or unforeseen problems present themselves. It
is the mark of a good teacher to know when and how to deal with unplanned
events, and how to balance a proposal for action with appropriate flexibility.
Lesson shapes
A good lesson needs to contain a judicious blend of coherence and variety.
Coherence means that students can see a logical pattern to the lesson. Even if
there are three separate activities, for example, there has to be some connection
between them - or at the very least a perceptible reason for changing direction.
In this context, it would not make sense to have students listen to an audio track,
ask a few comprehension questions and then change the activity completely to
something totally unrelated to the listening. And if the following activity only
lasted for five minutes before, again, something completely different was
attempted, we might well want to call the lesson incoherent. Nevertheless, the
effect of having a class do a 45-minute drill would be equally damaging. The
lack of variety, coupled with the relentlessness of such a procedure, would
militate against the possibility of real student engagement. However present it
might be at the beginning of the session, it would be unlikely to be sustained.
There has to be some variety in a lesson period.
There are other methodological reasons why a 45-minute drill is inappropriate,
too. Drilling concentrates only on the study aspect of our three ESA learning
elements (see page 52). In effective lessons, the teacher has thought (and is
thinking) carefully about the balance of engagement, study and activation, and
how one can lead to the others in a variety of different sequences such as the
straight arrows, boomerang and patchwork sequences we discussed in Chapter
4. The moment we think of lessons in this way, both variety and coherence are
almost guaranteed.
The ideal compromise, then, is to plan a lesson that has an internal coherence
but which nevertheless allows students to do different things as it progresses.

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Reasons for planning

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