TM4T requires both high-level and low-level planning. There is a summary of the two techniques below. Note that these techniques are listed in the Background section of the website because understanding them is necessary to understand the TM4T method.
However, these are practical techniques, and this page reappears in the Techniques section of the website.
High-level planning involves:
- planning well in advance (usually months in advance) of the work itself;
- planning in outline, ignoring details and concentrating on the big picture; for example, planning a schedule of regular meetings without considering the agenda for each;
- focussing on what needs doing rather than how to do it: for example planning to 'assess HND students' progress' without worrying about how to achieve it;
- planning slots in which particular types of work is done, without specifying the task itself; for example, fifteen minutes 'office work' each lunchtime;
- guesstimating how much work is involved based on similar experience;
- putting down markers for work that we know about, even if it impossible to estimate it or plan it; for example, 'deal with parents' questions' after exams';
- planning notional deadlines and 'startlines' (which help with low-level planning and provide structure, though may get moved in practice); for example 'finish algebra, start geometry' a week before half-term;
- planning future low-level planning; for example 'plan parents' evening' two weeks before it occurs. This planning is explicitly intended to move work away from stress points in the school year;
- planning future high-level planning; for example 'start high-level planning for next year' in July;
- planning patterns of activity based on standard models. The most important model is the quality improvement model, which involves a plan-do-review pattern. This can be applied to virtually any major event on the school calendar (open evening, school play, etc). The discipline of routinely scheduling a review after every major event is commonplace in business, but is not practised enough in schools;
Low Level Planning involves:
- modifying and expanding high-level plans.
- planning immediately-or-shortly before a task or set of tasks takes place, using up-to-the-minute information on what is needed; for example producing a Weekly Plan showing which marking will be done when
- planning in detail: enough detail to remove discontinuity and uncertainty; for example, instead of 'office work', planning to do a specific tick-list of actions. If you don't understand the principles of discontinuity, read here.
- thinking about how tasks are done and how long they will (and should) take
- mixing planning (deciding what needs to be done) and preparation (starting to do it)
- choosing exactly when to do tasks (particular hours as well as particular days); for example, deciding to plan an exciting new group of lessons on Sunday morning (if that is when you are at your freshest)
- choosing how to do tasks as well as what to do; if necessary, breaking up activities and batching up tasks for efficiency; for example, planning 'go to Reprographics' on Thursday, when you know you will have a lot of photocopying to be done
- deciding where tasks will be done, what resources are needed, and who is going to do them (though of course, for a teacher in a UK secondary school, the answer to this last question is invariably: you).
Types of Planning vs Types of Task
We need to avoid confusing two distinctions, both of which apply to our work at the start of year. We have just looked at the planning work we do at the start of the year: High Level Planning. If we are working efficiently, we will be doing other tasks at the start of the year, as well as High Level Planning. We call these 'one-off' tasks, and distinguish them from 'routine' tasks.
We do things as one-offs for two reasons: firstly to improve efficiency and secondly to enable consistency. If we are going to have seating plans for our classes it is much more efficient (quicker) to produce them en bloc at the beginning of the year - and then modify them as necessary - than to produce them ad-hoc during the term. Doing work in one go also enables us to do it in one way. As we will discuss later, standardisation and routine have a number of benefits.
This type of one-off work is really important to reduce stress in a teacher's life. There simply isn't time to do everything properly just-before-it's-needed - you need to start each week with a large part of your decisions already made, with a large part of your resources already to use, and a large part of your work already done.
Routine tasks are equally important to a teacher. We do things in a routine way for two reasons. Firstly: if we do a task in a standard way, we have a much better chance of identifying the best way of doing that task, and of constantly improving our 'best' way. Secondly: stress can arise from an absence of routine, just as it can arise from a lack of variety. We therefore plan a standard schedule, aware that we can - and should - break away from it at our pleasure.
Planning can in principle be separated into High-Level and Low-Level Planning, but - looking at how these are defined - it's obvious that there are an almost infinite number of half-way-houses which could combine elements of both.
It's therefore important to consider how many levels of planning you need in your school, and when they need to be carried out.
The technique of magpieplanning is based on the concepts of cycles, and each cycle requires a plan of some kind:
each year requires a high-level plan, which deals with which courses are going to be taught, and which units in each course will be taught in which term
each unit requires a high-level-but-slightly-lower-level plan - a scheme of work - showing which groups of lessons will be taught when
each group of lessons requires a fairly-low-level plan showing the content of each lesson
each lesson requires a low level plan showing exactly what is needed for each particular class.
The key point here is that you need to be clear what type of planning you are doing, and what level of detail is needed. If you include too much detail too early, then your planning will be wasted.