This blog post is adapted from Teaching about planning in pre-service physical education teacher education: A collaborative self-study and is part of my evolving thoughts about how we teach planning to novice PE teachers.
The way we teach novices PE teachers to plan is problematic. There is a resistant taken for granted assumption that getting novices to constantly fill out lesson plan templates and get feedback on them is the best way to teach them how to plan. Whilst useful there are three issues to it that I can see. Firstly it is far removed from the realities of how planning occurs day to day within schools. Secondly the lesson plan is just the end product of planning, often used as a form of evidence for accountability purposes. Finally planning itself is a type of thinking process. It is a process of choosing and organising courses of action to bring about a desired set of outcomes, and for PE teachers these would be first and foremost educational outcomes. It is this process that we need to teach and help novice teachers to develop.
When supporting pre-service teachers to plan we provide them lesson plan templates and exemplar models of what good plans should include and the level of detail required. We get them to fill them in over and over again, often by themselves, in order to provide us evidence of their thinking, however we aren’t explicitly helping them to develop this type of pedagogical thinking. Their planning may end up improving, through repetition, but this is a haphazard way of developing their practice. Those who have responsibility for inducting novice PE Teachers into the profession – lecturers, teacher educators and subject mentors – need to not only ask for lesson plans to be completed in detail but also support the development of their student’s planning process. One way of doing that is by sharing their own and opening it up for analysis and professional critique.
In thinking hard about how I plan and trying to find a way to articulate it to others I have come to see my planning process as asking and answering a series of educational questions.
What is the purpose of the PE curriculum? Before starting any planning (lesson, unit, or curriculum) keep in mind the purpose of the subject you are teaching and whether your judgements and decisions are working towards this end. Always keep one eye on the big picture whenever making decisions about the details.
Who are the students? Good planning requires developing a deep understanding of who the planning is for. This is more than just who your PP/FSM/SEND students are, but also what do you know of them and their previous experiences and interests of both physical activity and beyond, that will need to consider ensuring your planning and teaching is responsive to their needs, demands and priorities.
Where are they starting from? What are your students’ current capabilities both within the wider context of your curriculum and more specifically within this unit of work? If you do not know, then you need to plan for a diagnostic activity within the first lesson as this will help inform future planning.
Where do you want them to go? This is about being clear what the educational outcomes of the unit or lesson is and how this helps them move closer to the purpose of your curriculum. You should be able to use this in every lesson to provide a coherent narrative of what they are learning and working towards. This can be a collaborative process by asking and consider the thoughts of these students and what they may want to achieve over the course of their learning.
How will you know when they are there? You need to be able to show/tell your students what success or progress looks like and what its relevance is. Consider what tasks you are going to ask them to do and what data you will you collect that will help both you and your students better understand their progress and how to develop further.
How can you best help them to get there? These are the more pragmatic questions about what you are going to teach and how you are going to teach it. It is made up of smaller detailed questions such as – How should the unit of work or lesson be structured? What is the best approach to help them achieve the educational aims? What adaptations do you need to make at class, group and individual level? What evidence do you have of this being a good approach and what alternatives do you have?
What is the purpose of your curriculum? Once you have completed your plan cast a critical eye over it to check that is provides a coherent map that allows you and your students to progress towards the purpose of the curriculum.
The reality is that my thinking process is much more messy and non-linear than this. I don’t always ask the questions in the same order. Sometimes I go back to them repeatedly in an iterative cycle, either refining on original thoughts or discarding them all together. Sometimes I get caught up in the “how can you best help them to get there?” question and then I have to remember whether those details connect to the wider purpose. The process of planning for me requires coming up with good answers that will guide my teaching, but that begins with asking good educational questions about the why, who, what, how, when and where.
The making of our planning processes explicit with novices is important. Not so they can just imitate us (although imitation is a good starting point for those learning something new), but as a means of inquiry into teaching and what it means to be a teacher. This requires helping them peer into the unseen elements that make up effective teaching, such as the pedagogical thinking and reasoning processes that silently underpin what we say and do in the classroom. We also want to support them in articulate their own planning process, so we can better understand what they do and why they do that. Articulation is hard, but without it we are unable to help them to analyse, reflect and critique on whether their process is useful or not. The teaching and learning of the planning process should be a much more collaborative affair between novice and expert, not just sending off the student teacher to fill in copious amounts of plans by themselves.
When teaching novice teachers to plan, there is far too much focus on the product of planning (the completion of a lesson plan), and not enough of the process of planning (the pedagogical thinking). There needs to be more of a balance between these two aspects, so that we can help them develop a deeper understanding of teaching. However that requires those who induct novice teachers into the PE profession to think about how they plan and then articulate and share it in ways that make that process explicit and useful.