In my transition from PGCE student to NQT one of the big changes I have had to get to grips with is that of going from producing Osfted style lesson plans for every lesson, to a real world situation where time is at a premium and less detail is possible.
In the last few weeks I have been teaching forces to year 4,revisiting the topic which comprised much of my teaching on my first PGCE placement. I remembered being really happy with the outcomes of those lessons, and thought it might be useful to return to such detailed plans after a term of more real world planning. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but on reflection these ‘perfect’ plans that I spent hours writing seemed no better than the recent occasional lessons when circumstances have forced me to plan on a post it note during the preceding lunch time.
I have always struggled with the idea of unplanned lessons being hugely successful. On the one hand a lot of my teaching values are based on early years practice, and I believe that fundamentally if we just let Primary age children do what they want, whilst providing them with high quality opportunities and intervention at the point of learning, then they would achieve success appropriate to the stage of development they are at. As the research of Ferre Laevers suggests, as long as children have a high level of well being and are provided with opportunities for tasks they can engage with to a high level then they will learn. This supports the suggestion that a more ad-hoc and ‘unplanned’ approach to the curriculum will promote children to work in their own zone of proximal development for the greatest amount of time, and with high quality interactions with teachers produce the most profound learning.
In my own experience it is when my classroom operates like this that the most exciting learning opportunities happen. On a very basic level, in the unit on explanation writing we are just finishing I allowed my class to choose their own subjects for explanations in a very free way. I began by allowing them to explore a range of high quality explanations on the BrainPOP website, discussing the usual structure for explanations with them and giving them totally free choice as to what they wrote their own explanation about. I exerted no control on the subject matter they chose, and they could easily have chosen something which was not appropriate to the genre of explanation writing. However, because they all had a high level of involvement and interest in the topic based on their free exploration of high quality examples, not one of them chose a subject that was not appropriate to the task. The vast majority chose examples that were appropriate to their own level of development, with those who find writing challenging opting for something along the lines of a playground game they were comfortable with, and those who are more confident writers choosing a subject that challenged them.
Despite my base experience in teaching being based in a forward thinking Early Years setting, I was trained to be a follower of the Primary Strategies, and this is where my difficulty with ‘unplanning’ the curriculum occurs. As someone educated to deliver the ‘three part lesson’ I find it a challenge to convince myself I am ‘doing the right thing’ when I allow lessons in my class to occur in a more freeform way. There is a fine line between genuine child centered learning and ‘messing around’, and through my work on Learning Agreement Time this year I have been challenged with locating where this line actually lies.
The problem I have with ‘unplanned’ lessons is that when one occurs that I feel has gone really well I always find myself questioning whether it seemed good because there was a genuinely high level of learning going on, or simply because there was some learning going on in an unexpected way. If you tightly pre-plan a lesson and the expected level or learning occurs then the lesson ‘feels’ good. If you do not rigidly plan a lesson and some learning occurs, does the excitement of unplanned learning lower your expectations and make you ‘feel’ that a lot of learning has happened when it is actually below the level you would have expected had you tightly structured and planned the lesson? Now I am not suggesting that those following Early Years practice are not planning, just that the planning of providing provocative resources and situations which they children are free to engage with or reject is hard to square with conventional practice in key stage two.
I can’t help feeling that some of this thinking is a hangup created by the strategies oriented focus of my recent teacher training. However, if we are going to move towards a more ‘negotiated’ curriculum, it has to be one that builds on the academic rigour of the ‘three part lesson‘, and not simply a return to the more woolly practice of primary and early years schooling of many decades ago. I have spent much time looking for information online regarding schools that are taking this early years approach to key stage two, and so far have come up with very little. However, I am convinced of the merits of ‘unplanning’ (in the conventional sense) the key stage two curriculum in order to provide every child with the genuinely personalised learning experience that even those advocating rigid planing say should be our aim.
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