I really had no idea that this would be a topic for an article – until, that was, I was looking for examples for yesterdays lesson plan article.
When I investigated further it seems there is a whole industry out there online where you can buy not only lesson plans but long term plans, medium term plans and even as one person wrote “great lessons for OFSTED”
Let me put this very bluntly to those of you who are actually spending your money (£3 per lesson plan seems about the going rate) or those of you who are thinking about it – don’t waste your money!
Now I don’t want to hear people bleating about how hard they are working and how bad it it and how overworked they are – if this is the case then quite simply you are not doing things correctly. Buying lesson plans will not help you.
So why do I say this?
One of the great things about teaching is the skill of taking difficult concepts and making them easy to understand for children.
This means that you have to understand the concepts yourself and then translate them into a form that you can both express and demonstrate to children and also involve them in the understanding and learning process.
In order to do this you have to have gone through the process yourself in your planning. You know or should know your own class – so you will know what they will respond to in the learning environment and also how you will need to differentiate the lesson to allow access to all pupils.
For some areas of learning , you will find, that your class just doesn’t latch on to what you are trying to teach them. Yes you will see a class full of blank faces and various accompanying noises which let you know ” Miss, we just don’t get it!”
In situations like this you can either try another approach at the time or leave the lesson and come back to it having had a re-think. I do remember teaching one lesson where the class just didn’t understand what I was trying to convey – I tried 3 different approaches in the course of the lesson to explain things but with no success. Finally I said “ok lets leave it there and we’ll have another go tomorrow”…..I went home and had a rethink and approached it from a different angle in another lesson and hey presto….we got it !!”
In planning and writing your own lesson plans you are part of the process in which you both understand and structure the learning. If you simply buy someone else’s lesson plan then all you are doing is delivering without the accompanying ownership and ownership is what is necessary for you as a teacher.
Lets take a simple analogy…..maybe you have been away on holiday and seen “diving experiences” advertised. Leaders (we hope) will kit you up with all the gear and take you on a diving experience. Its easy and simple to do – basically if you can swim then you can do this experience. The next part of this I can say with authority as I am a trained diver with advanced qualifications and speciality areas…so I know. If I say anyone can do this then yes that is correct up to the point where something goes wrong… (its the same for a lot of things here) for the trained diver when something goes wrong then he / she know how to react and what to do – it is not a dangerous situation. But for the “trip” diver it becomes instantly a life / death situation. Being trained and having experience makes the difference and that’s important.
Lets look across and compare analogies here…well we are not going to be in a life / death situation in class if something goes wrong so that aspect doesn’t carry across. But the comparison of training and experience does. As we progress in our teaching career we build on our basic training and gain more and more experience in all sorts of situations and all sorts of subjects – it is this culmination of experience that ultimately makes us the teachers we would like to be.
Anyone can have a go at delivering lessons – if I buy a plan online I can give it to “Michelle” the T.A and she can deliver the lesson …in fact anyone can deliver the lesson. But that’s not the point. The point is to create a learning environment in which the children understand and achieve and you don’t do that if you buy in !
Aside from the generic – one size fits all lesson plan – lets consider you as a teacher.
If you’re in the profession for the right reasons (and I hope you are) then you will understand that its a sharp learning curve from training to having your own class. I would say that for the first 2 years you better be prepared to knuckle down and take the hits as you find your feet. But hey welcome to the world of work….it happens in every profession.
Every day is a learning situation and this continues (not the workload because we learn how to deal with it) right through your teaching career. Its the culmination of all this experience that makes great teachers. Teachers who have worked with, and through, a vast array of situations have a depth of experience that they can tap into at any time.
But there are no short cuts to this….with every class you have and every topic you plan and deliver you build up your own personal bank of resources which you take with you. Throughout your teaching career you will be put into situations or positions where you have to learn new things ….subjects you have to coordinate but are not an expert in….management roles you have to fill and guidance you may be asked to share.
Each and every day in every situation you not only bring your personal talents to your class and school but you receive and build your own teacher resource bank. Lesson planning is just part of this journey but its a vital and very important part.
As a teacher you have to be true to yourself, true to your class and true to your chosen profession. The apparent shortcutting of purchased lessons takes all this away – Michelle the T.A is waiting to take your place !!
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Charles
Whilst I whole heartedly agree with the sentiment. If teaching was as simple as following a plan it would have been cracked quickly some time ago. However, I think you are being naive in thinking every lesson of everyday needs that depth, skill etc. When a primary teacher has 10 different subject, give or take a few depending on your particular circumstance, to teacher in a week, sometime a helping hand is needed. This is not a teacher bleating. The mistake comes when someone chooses to follow it word for word or dictatorially. Surely you are not suggesting it is a waste of money to get a hand in preparing a lesson on the factories act in the 1800s for a history lesson so that the teacher spends more time thinking about how they can maximise the group work time during that session to develop a group of children’s inference or writing skills.
What is is you suggest teachers are doing wrong when they are trying their hardest to plan quality lesson and resource them with a new set of topics if they look for a starting point rather then going from scratch?
I agree it is in the delivery and the quality of how you use the resources but let’s not make this any different from what teachers have always done,: buy resource books to help them.
Please counsel advice but let’s not make our colleagues feel they are doing something so dishonourable.
Hi …thanks for your comment. I am not suggesting that teachers should not use sources for planning and preparing lessons – nor am I suggesting that schemes of work are not to be used…in fact most published schemes are superb. However what I am saying is that researching and planning for your class is part of an important process in the development of a teachers career and experience. However I think that unfortunately many teachers are buying lesson plans online as a way to avoid the planning process and there is a danger that they are being delivered instead of being taught. With all the requests to borrow planning from lessons to topics to termly planning I do think that we could be in danger of undermining quality. – Anyway thanks again for your observations.