TM4T NQT - Formal Lesson Planning

This page looks at 'formal' lesson planning. This means that you are not just trying to get your kids to learn; you are also trying to impress and bedazzle some onlooker: an inspector or some God-like figure from your leadership team or education authority.

We have a guide to formal lesson planning, in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. It is interactive, with a lot of information on Notes Pages, so you really need to download it to make any sense of the process.  At the end of this section, you will see the first slide. Click on this, and you will see a preview of the presentation. Click File/Download as shown on this screenshot.

Here is the first slide, click on it to see the preview:

You'll hopefully notice one distinctive thing about this method of lesson planning: There is a heavy focus on the notion of 'reviews'. In this method, before we even write down our lesson objectives, we review our idea to ensure that it meets the 'other objectives'; that this idea will enable learning and tick the necessary boxes.

The reason we do this is because this is a time management website, and the most common waste of time is to persist in developing a lesson which really doesn't work and was never going to work in the first place. Don't do it. 

Make sure that you review your lessons at each stage to ensure that your students will learn and that your observers will see that learning. There is, in fact, a couple of arrows missing from our diagrams...

If your idea isn't going to give you the results you want, then recycle it immediately. In another lesson, another class, maybe another school, it will have its day.