Effective lesson plan helps teachers ensure that their students will have a productive school year, full of interesting and engaging lessons; however, putting together a lesson plan that works is not easy. Lesson planning is a learned skill, and new teachers especially need guidance and resources to help them learn how to align lessons with the curriculum.
In a recent study in the United Kingdom (Mutton, Hagger, & Burn, 2011), researchers conducted a series of 10 post-lesson interviews with 17 beginning teachers over a three-year period to get an understanding of what these new educators learned about lesson planning and how they developed their own plans. The purpose of the study was to get at the thinking behind lesson planning, not to look at individual lessons, says Trevor Mutton, one of the researchers behind the study.
The researchers, Mutton and Hazel Hagger at Oxford University and Katharine Burn at the University of London, observed the subjects during their one-year Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course and then the following two years of teaching. They conducted four interviews with the educators during the PGCE year and three interviews each of the following two years to see how the teachers were coping with lesson planning.
The educators, who were math, English, and science teachers, answered questions about how they plan and execute lessons in the classroom. This allowed the teachers to critically think about their decisions, reflect on those decisions, and ponder what they might or might not change in the future.
The study also examined the areas of focus of teachers' professional learning. Researchers found that lesson planning was the main focus the PGCE year, it dropped slightly the following year, and by year three it was nearly half of the amount of the first year. After the first year, the educators began shifting toward other areas of professional development, such as teaching strategies, specific aspects of subjects, and assessment.
Planning also occurs on several levels, according to the study results, but beginning teachers are most likely to develop their first actual plan for an individual lesson. The educators end up planning weekly, daily, and single lesson plans throughout the teaching year and, for newer educators, the planning is usually more formal compared to that of their experienced colleagues. Often new teachers write out the plans are written to make it easier for them to follow accordingly. Educators also needed a strong knowledge base for the material they teach and must be flexible when it comes to drawing up their plans.
To make the first few years of teaching easier, the researchers say, it is important for veteran teachers to help guide the beginning teachers.
"Such assistance needs to be in providing the beginning teacher with the opportunity to talk through their goals for their teaching, interrogating those goals effectively in terms of them being realistic and achievable, and then to develop a way of helping the teacher to translate those goals into classroom practice," Mutton said. "Co-planning—the experienced teacher and the novice teacher working together—is a key strategy in achieving this."
The researchers say that "it is through planning that teachers are able to learn about teaching and through teaching they are able to learn about planning." As the teachers learned to develop plans, they also became more confident with what works and what doesn't and developed their teaching styles while becoming more comfortable and confident that their students were learning the material properly.
