Messy Planning: Part Three

If you don’t use PowerPoint, what do your lessons look like?

In this final blog post on Messy Planning I want to convey a sense of what my lessons look like. The best way to do this, I think, is to take you through a typical lesson from start to finish, segueing into deeper explanation if I deem it necessary to do so.

Recently, a student told me, “It looks like you just decide what to teach on the day.” This disappointed me, because it’s not true. (I’ve talked about that here.) But, nevertheless, it worries me that the way my lessons ‘look’ leads students to think this way, given that student perception of a teacher’s capabilities goes some way to building those all-important relationships necessary for optimum learning. (Andy Tharby covers this in some detail, in Chapter Two of his new book, How to explain absolutely anything to absolutely anyone: The Art and Science of Teacher Explanation.) As such, what follows should not be read as an example of ‘How to do it’, but rather as simply an honest reflection of what a typical lesson looks like if you are a student in one of my classes.

1. Start of the lesson

Students will walk into the lesson and more often than not, there will not be a pre-prepared worksheet on the desk in front of them. Instead, students stand until I tell them so sit and then I’ll declare firmly, “Back of your books.” Students know right from the off that what’s about to take place is a low-stakes quiz. This means:

• They’re going to be asked to remember something they’ve been taught previously

• They’re going to be asked difficult questions

• I will not ask them for their answers

• I will not mark their answers

• I will not look at what they write

At the start of every year I talk to students about low-stakes quizzing and the importance of retrieval practice, and because they know what’s going on, they’ll carry out the quiz honestly. Typically, I’ll ask them a few questions about content learned in the previous lesson, with a few questions about something they did the previous, week, month, year etc. Sometimes, I won’t do this, but will just ask them to write down as many quotations as they can remember from a text we’ve been studying.

I’ll always give feedback on the quizzes and tell kids the answers to the questions. More often than not, this means re-teaching something. For example, if none of the students remember that ‘Look like the innocent flower / But be the serpent under’t’ is an example of antithesis, I’ll have to teach them the definition of antithesis, using examples and non-examples (from memory – I can do this because of how I spend my Planning and Preparation Time), again. I’ll make a mental note to question them on antithesis again later in the week. 9 times out of 10 I’ll remember to do this.

2. The Lesson

I give out the books and start reading. If we come to a section of the text that I think worthy of deeper analysis, I’ll put my own copy of the text under the visualiser. I use a relatively cheap one from Ipevo. I’ll question kids on the extract and I’ll annotate it on the board for them to see. If I’m asking them to annotate, I’ll encourage students to write annotations in their own words if at all possible.

Sometimes, it becomes necessary to use images. I rarely rely on pre-prepared images (unless I’m teaching something new for the first time). Often, a student will ask a question that will require an answer that uses images for elucidation and I’ll have to do a ‘live search’ there and then. For example, in a recent lesson with Year 11, as we were analysing some post-war poetry, many students had an uncertain grasp on the concept of Modernism. Thinking on my feet, I googled an image of the Mona Lisa and then another of a Picasso. I explained to students that the De Vinci represented a traditional view of the world, whilst the Picasso could be said to be modernist. I then went onto explain Modernism in more detail.

This sort of ‘live searching’ occurs often. It’s not perfect, and I’m sure it can be one of the reasons some students may think I’ve not ‘planned’ a lesson. For many students a planned lesson is a PowerPoint lesson. However, the fact is, I simply cannot anticipate every single question or misconception that all the individuals in any one lesson might present. Nor can I anticipate which extracts or texts from my long term memory will be necessary to draw upon to make clear these misconceptions up and so, often, students will see me darting to my office to come back with a dusty book to whack under the visualiser to aid learning or understanding.

Generally, I talk lots. My talking is great at times – I think I can stretch kids pretty far and I think over the years I’ve developed some pretty good explanations. At other times, I talk too much and I rely on humour too much. As I get older I think it seems a little desperate. I need to work on this.

I’m pretty handy at drawing so I like to occasionally draw on the white board to aid kids’ understanding. For example, I’ll draw Ozymandias as I’m teaching it. That looks like this.

Once I’ve done my talking I’ll ask kids to do a written task. Generally, before they get on with it, I’ll model a live example on the board. Live modelling is important. After all:

When kids get to work I’ll try and be silent, but again, I need to get better at this. As kids are working I’ll keep an eye on who’s struggling and I’ll talk to kids about their work as they do it, asking questions to prompt students to think about mistakes they may have committed. I’ll always find the time to stop the class and read out examples of good work.

Ideally, everytime students conduct written work, I’ll take the time to see each kids work individually, and I’ll give verbal feedback to the whole class, before setting them DIRT tasks aimed at rectifying common errors. But this doesn’t always happen. It happens, but not always.

At the end of the lesson a bell will go and I’ll realise I haven’t set homework so I’ll ask kids to finish off what they didn’t do during class, or, as is usually the case, I’ll set them a question that they need to answer, based on what’s been learnt in lessons. Today, me and Year 8 read and watched Act 1 Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Their homework was:

‘Harold Bloom said that “Bottom is Shakespeare’s Everyman.” What do you think this means? Tell me why you agree or disagree.’

I hadn’t planned this homework before the lesson, but it seemed the right thing to set based on what we got covered in class.

Told you it was messy.