TM4T Background 4.1 - Planning - What is Planning?

First: if you are not clear on the distinction between 'planning' and 'preparation' click here.

This website is, of course, aimed at providing practical advice. However, planning is a complicated topic, even though the concepts involved are very simple. We therefore need to have a sound grasp of those concepts, and we need to use vocabulary which is unambiguous and crystal clear. We are therefore going to break the subject of 'planning' down into several distinct aspects, and it is important that you understand the distinctions between them. Take a look at the following diagram.

Most teachers equate 'planning' with 'lesson planning'. In this method we are going to deal with a much broader topic, which we will call 'Planning to Work'. We will divide this topic in two: Planning to Teach and other work planning. Planning to Teach is focused on “lesson planning”, behaviour planning, planning of student assessment, planning of differentiation, and any other planning that is directly related to the preparation and management of classroom contact with students.We will treat Planning to Teach separately to the other stuff. 

If you are new to teaching, you may wonder what else there is to consider, apart from Planning to Teach.

Well. First of all, you need to plan your life. You need to decide when you are going to work and when you are going to do other things (eat, sleep, relax, for example). Then, considering your work life, you need to consider when and where you do different kinds of thing particularly well. For example, I find that my creative work is best done in the mornings, ideally where it is quiet; while I find that my boredom threshold is higher in the evenings, so that is when I do more routine work. Next you need to decide how you are going to spend your non-teaching school-work time - this includes time at home, time before and after school as well as your non-contact time (your 'free' lessons) - some of it will be spent 'planning-to-teach' of course, but a lot of it will be spent in dealing with e-mails, liaising with other staff, performance appraisals; with photocopying, with parental contact, with clubs, with pestering students (pestering as an adjective), with reports, with filing and other minutiae. You need to decide exactly what activity to do when, where it is best to do it, and how to do it efficiently. You also need to step back periodically from the day-to-day routine and consider yourself, your life and the future. This, using the technical jargon that we all love, is termed 'other stuff'.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed the quotation marks I have placed around “lesson planning” so far on this page. I have flagged it like this because we need to treat this term with care: it means different things to different teachers, and its meaning can vary depending on context. To avoid confusion, we will be using different terms on this website to describe different stages in the process. From here on, the phrase 'lesson-planning' refers only to the frequent – usually daily - activity of planning specific, individual lessons for specific groups of students, usually considering only lessons for today and/or tomorrow. We will be using the more general phrase Planning to Teach to describe the broader process, which includes lesson planning, but also includes drafting schemes of work, identifying and preparing set texts and lesson resources, behaviour plans, and any other work which can done well in advance of classroom contact. We will be considering Planning to Teach in detail and in isolation, entirely separate from other planning. The diagram below summarises how we will look at Planning in TM4T – the key point is that there is more to Planning to Teach than lesson planning and there is more to Planning to Work than just teaching.

These distinctions may seem rather theoretical, rather abstract. There is, however, a very practical reason for introducing this breakdown right at the start of our introduction to planning. In many cases teachers are already expert at lesson planning, and even if they are not, believe that they are. Teachers invariably have clear ideas about the best way to plan their lessons. The good news is that I don't intend to interfere with any of that; in fact, even if I wanted to, I couldn't realistically cover the planning aspects associated with all the differing subject disciplines. I will happily bow to your expertise in these matters, and concentrate on the other aspects - because that, for most teachers, is where the problems lie.

I will also acknowledge that you may well have your own excellent methods covering much of Planning to Teach, and I will assume that you will continue to follow those methods. For consistency of illustration, however, I have chosen one specific method, called magpieplanning which is unusually thorough regarding the steps leading up to lesson planning – this method is explained on the sister website to TM4T, which is called FT2T: Finding Time to Teach. There is another, more complicated, reason for treating planning-to-teach separately, which is explained here...

As well as making a distinction between planning to work and planning to teach, we will also be making a distinction between high-level and low-level planning. In practice, high-level planning is planning work that is done once, at the “start of the year”, while low-level planning is done regularly – every week - during the course of the year. Note that we are going to keep it as simple as that: work is either inherently one-off (if so, we treat it as start-of-the-year stuff), or it is inherently routine (if so, we treat it as weekly-stuff). We don't need any concept or consideration of months, terms, modules or any other time-cycle.

To understand the distinction between High-level and Low-level planning, click here.

Observant readers will have noticed those pesky quotation marks again in the description of high-level planning: “start of the year” is not as simple as it sounds. If, for example, the School Play takes place in April, it does not mean that you are expected to plan it at the start of the school year – the preceding August. What we are talking about is a mindset, an attitude, a psychological decision. In August, you should consider the School Play, but only to the extent of considering what tasks might be involved for you, and putting a note in your Yearly Plan, maybe in January, maybe saying something like 'clarify who-does-what for School Play'. If, however, you are a drama teacher, the Yearly Plan you make in August might show a different action in January: 'plan what needs to happen for School Play'; as well as tasks or time-slots throughout the first Quarter. In this example, the drama teacher is doing high-level Planning in August, but – depending on circumstances – she may also be doing either High-Level Planning or Low-Level Planning in January.

This website is not explicitly about lesson planning - there is already too much complicated and contradictory advice available; however we do need to have a common understanding of what is involved. I have therefore chosen one particular lesson planning method - called magpieplanning - in order to illustrate how these things fit into a teacher's daily life. magpieplanning is by no means the most widely used planning method, but it is the most widely based, and its scope is comprehensive enough to cover all aspects of what we need. Obviously, if magpieplanning is not the chosen planning method in your school, you should substitute alternative corresponding tasks from your own favourite method.

Before we finish our introduction to planning, it is worth revisiting one critical point. We teach so that students can learn. We plan our lessons well so that our students learn well. It therefore follows that everything we do is focused towards that objective: the only type of planning which adds real value is planning-to-teach. Other planning - work planning - is necessary, to protect our sanity and ensure our schools are well-run, but if it not directly contributing to the learning of our students, we need to do it as quickly and painlessly as possible. That is what efficiency means.