TM4T LP-Squared: The Waffle
Before we dive into details, let's explore the TM4T philosophy of lesson planning. Well, maybe 'philosophy' is too big a word; but just let me waffle a little. First, here's a statistical breakdown of the lessons I've taught in my career.
Of course, this is entirely unscientific evidence and I have made it up to illustrate a point, but I hope you can accept its general validity. The mathematicians among us can quibble about whether it should be a Poisson or a Normal distribution, but that doesn't matter: all I am claiming is that I tend to teach in kind of a bell curve, and I'm also claiming that the average teacher does so too, and - more importantly - you will too.
This graph says that during your everyday teaching, you will teach quite a few really good lessons and a few pretty crappy lessons, but most of your teaching will be somewhere-in-between. Note that this applies regardless of how good or bad a teacher you are: in this graph 'great' means 'great by your standards' and bad means 'bad compared to your usual lessons'. Average means 'average for you'.
Now, one of the things that is unusual - remarkable to those outside educat
ion - is how little attention is given to this average lesson. Of course, there is no definition of an 'average' lesson, and arguably it doesn't exist in a global or national sense; but every teacher will know what we are talking about: not a triumph or a stinker, just an average everyday kind of lesson.In fact, I did a bit of (very unscientific) research and looked at how much written support was available , and how many fancy texts had been published, to address the different parts of the bell curve. The graph on the right shows where traditional lesson planning tends to focus: the fact is that when school leaders talk about lesson-planning, they tend to focus overwhelmingly on 'planning to teach an outstanding lesson'; after that the emphasis is down at the bottom end of the scale, dealing with fundamental problems which prevent learning. The bit in the middle (remembering the basics) is almost neglected.Now this, to me, is just plain silly. Of course we need great lessons. But for the purposes of everyday teaching, we also need lessons which can be planned quickly and planned routinely. TM4T - and all good time management methods - are based on the notion of Opportunity Cost. Every time we decide to do something - anything - we are simultaneously deciding not to a variety of other things.
To see how this applies to lesson planning, consider a teacher who spends 120 minutes each day planning six lessons for the following day. Logically, it will take longer to plan a great lesson than it will to plan a bad one - all other things being equal over a period of time. In fact, let's give some numbers:30 minutes to plan a great lesson, 20 minutes to plan an average lesson,10 minutes to plan a bad lesson.
Now, 120 minutes and 6 lessons means that the standard approach should be to spend 20 minutes planning each lesson. Fine. However, throw in an observation (which demands 30 minutes planning) and you automatically get either a bad lesson (10 minutes planning) or a longer than usual working day.
Of course, 95% of teachers choose the longer-than-usual working day (I'm really getting the hang of making up statistics now) and that is one of the reasons our working days are long and sometimes stressful. We spend w-a-a-y too much time trying to plan outstanding lessons (for Ofsted or SLT), sometimes, in a blaze of optimism, trying to transform our 'bad' lessons into outstanding lessons; and not nearly enough time looking at the 80-90% of lessons which represent our regular teaching routines.
As you can guess, this is not what TM4T recommends.
In fact, we have an entirely different graph. In this graph, we show our focus: 80% of our effort is spent on 80% of our lessons, using a technique we call BBL1[ Maths teachers please note: I know that +/- two standard deviations doesn't equate to 80% of a normal distribution, but I'm sure you get the point. ]15% of our effort is spent down the bottom, using a technique called BBL2.
And... we pretty much forget about the top-end, on the basis that there is already plenty of advice around on how to plan outstanding lessons, and - even if we provided guidance - it would be out of date within a year or so because of the latest fashionable initiative. We refer to this part of the graph as GGP, which stands for Grooming Golden Ponies.
If you want to understand why we are so sniffy about GGP, you'd need to study the history of Quality initiatives in manufacturing. The British car industry is the classic example of misapplied quality standards. Talk to grandad and he will tell you with pride of a time when walnut-trimmed Jaguars smelling of leather were the pride of every Englishman, and British Formula 1 cars with British engines led the world. All true. Unfortunately, these were the 'outstanding' examples. The average car was tacky and unreliable, and the bad ones were downright dangerous.
Some of the reasons why British cars were so bad, and why Japanese companies came to dominate, involve different ideas of quality. Rolls-Royce quality demanded an investment of time and energy to strive for perfection, tailoring a product for only the most discerning customer. Toyota quality demanded that every component, in ever car, was fit for purpose. I think it goes without saying that TM4T methods are underpinned by Japanese quality principles. Though we authors all drive Bentleys, obviously.
Enough waffle - let's look at the practicalities of LP2 here
