Thank you to everyone who has been following the Planning Workshop here on BETN over the past few weeks. This is the final post in the series, where I will address some of the questions I’ve been asked by readers. 

 

No questions is too big or too small when it comes to planning, as our lesson plans are the starting point of everything we do in class. It is important to plan well in order to get the results we are looking for.

 

Check out some of the questions I’ve been asked below. If you have asked a question that has not made it into this post, or if you have any that haven’t been asked yet, feel free to get in touch and I’ll do my best to answer them as quickly as possible. 

 

 

“My plans are to be followed by my whole team, so how do I create plans that everyone can use?”

 

This is a situation very common in schools where there are Class Teachers (those who teach multiple subjects to one class of students) or where there are multiple teachers teaching the same subject to the same year group. 

 

When we lesson plan, we tend to plan activities that suit our own way of teaching. If you enjoy drama, for example, and are very confident, you may want to do a dramatic reading to students as part of a literary study. However, not all teachers are brave enough to do this, and so it is important that they receive a lesson plan that they can work with effectively. There are several ways to go about this.

 

• In your team meetings, discuss the activities and see what your team members would be comfortable working with. The plans should be a mixture of your own ideas and theirs. 
• Mark some things in the plan as ‘optional’. For example, all teachers have to read the passage, but it could be optional to do a dramatic reading, or the option could be there to ask a student to do the dramatic reading. So long as the material is covered in a way that meets the standard, allowing some flexibility allows staff to choose what suits them. 
• Allow flexibility in group work situations. You may have large group work in mind for your lessons, but some teachers know from the outset that managing group work isn’t their forte. Writing ‘group work’ but allowing staff to change the group sizing is an effective way to ensure group work is included, but that it suits individual teachers. 

 

If there is a teacher in your team who flat-out refuses to do activities etc, then that’s something worth mentioning to your Head. Lessons should be engaging and fun, and it isn’t fair that one teacher can hold back the whole team from achieving their goals. Keep following BETN for the upcoming post on Managing Effective Group Work. 

 

“What do I do if I run out of time in a lesson?”

 

Despite our best efforts to plan our timing in lessons, it does sometimes still happen that we run out of time. We may get caught up in a discussion or find a topic takes longer to work with than we expected, so what do we do when we have five minutes to go and thirty minutes of material still to cover? 

 

What we should NOT do, is assign everything else as homework. We planned it to be done in class for a reason, usually because it needs teacher support, and so sending it home is a waste of precious resources. There’s a good chance that the work will come back to school either incomplete or littered with mistakes, thereby wasting that fantastic worksheet. Instead, stop the lesson five minutes before the end and do a quick recap for students. The way, the lesson has come to a well-rounded end. Any work not done can be added into the next lesson by moving some things about in the plans. Depending on where you stop, it may even be possible to use the missed content as a starter activity for the next lesson. 

 

If you have run out of time, and you are not the person who planned the lesson, speak to the teacher who did and see what you can skip in the next lesson to accommodate the missed work. If you are the teacher planning, you should expect this to happen, as we all fall victim to it at one time or another.

 

 

“What do I do if my resources don’t arrive in time?”

 

I assume that the teacher asking this question was referring to photocopying, as it’s something that has effected us all at some point. We have all been standing at the classroom door waiting for that glorious pile of crisp worksheets to appear, only to find that they are nowhere in sight.

 

You should always have one copy of the worksheet yourself, attached to your lesson plans. If it is a simple worksheet, you can write the questions or problems on the board and have students do the work in their copybooks. Worksheets that involve matching sentences etc are a bit more difficult, however you can put the worksheet on your smart board and either have students write in their copybooks, or complete it together as a class. The most important thing to remember is that ‘the show must go on’. You cannot waste a whole lesson doing nothing just because you didn’t get copies, and after all, being resourceful is part of being a teacher. 

 

“What do I do if my tech stops working?”

 

This is another frustrating issue that teachers often face, but again, the show must go on. Things like videos to be displayed on the smart board are additional resources, and so skipping them won’t effect the lesson. If, however, the students are to do an activity like gathering information from a video, it can be problematic. In cases like this, the best thing to do is just to move on to the next activity or even the next lesson. The same goes for sound files. 

 

Most schools will provide a white board in case it’s needed, and so if your school doesn’t have one, it’s a good idea to suggest there is at least a shared one in the staff room for when tech does fail. 

 

“What do I do if there is a student disrupting my lesson and I can’t get anything done?”

 

This really depends on what your school’s behaviour policy is. Most schools will allow students to be sent out for a few minutes, and this can be helpful in these situations. After warnings have been given according to your behaviour policy, if the student is still being disruptive, ask them to step outside for a few minutes. Assign work, and when your students get on task, go out and deal with the behaviour issue. Never get into a situation where you are arguing with a student or where the lesson has to stop for more than a few seconds. You can spend a whole lesson arguing with a student, and find that nothing has been achieved on your lesson plan. 

 

I have students who are below level, but I can’t assign separate work as the school doesn’t allow it. What can I do with my plans to help get them up to level?

 

This is a situation in schools where parents compare their child’s work with other students, and so schools decide that all students must receive the same tasks. It’s frustrating, but is often a part of international school policy. 

 

The good news is, you can still assign extra work, but it has to be assigned to everyone. You can either assign it to all students as compulsory, or make it optional work. For students who struggle, sending a note to the parent that this work is compulsory for their child will ensure that your lower level students do it. 

 

By using differentiated objectives, you can assign multiple level work within the actual class, and so meet the needs of these students. Higher level students will zoom through it, but lower level students will take longer. This way, everyone is receiving the work, but higher level students will work through it more quickly and get to the harder stuff within lesson time. Check out the second article in this series on differentiated objectives, for more information. 

 

If your school offers additional support classes for lower level students, incomplete work from standard lessons can be completed there. If there is a child who consistently fails to meet the basic standard for the year group, your Head should be informed. 

 

 

Thank you again to everyone who has been following the Planning Workshop. If this is the first post you have read, I recommend you go back to the homepage and check out the other parts. 

 

Stay tuned for the coming article on Managing Group Work.