Everywhere you go, you find leadership teams demanding a `teaching by numbers’ approach,” a former head wrote to TES recently. “They expect all teachers to complete a lesson-planning form detailing a `starter’, a `main part’ and a `plenary’. Straitjackets come to mind.”

The predictable three-act lesson of modern teaching has become a template that many educators in England and Wales feel forced to follow.

It grew out of the national literacy and numeracy strategies, brought in after Labour was elected in 1997. The literacy hour came first in 1998, although it was, in fact, a rigid four-act lesson: 15 minutes of whole- class reading or writing; 15 minutes on word and sentence work; 20 minutes of group work; and a 10-minute plenary. The literacy strategy framework said teaching needed “a sense of urgency, driven by the need to make progress and succeed”.

It was the numeracy hour, which arrived a year later, that cemented the three-act format: a whole-class “starter” activity, the main lesson and a plenary.

To their credit, the strategies appear to have had a strong impact. Those children who began Year 1 in 1998 took their A levels last summer, clocking up the highest pass rate for the 29th consecutive year.

The national strategies were scrapped last year. But the three-act lesson has taken on a life of its own. In some cases, heads insist on it because they think it is what inspectors want.

But two recent pronouncements from Ofsted show this is no longer true. The first was in Ofsted’s report Moving English Forward, published in March, which suggests children are being hampered by the “myths” of what makes a good lesson, saying these lead to “excessive pace, overloading of activities, inflexible planning and limited time for pupils to work independently”.

Last month, the chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, was even blunter in an article in TES (“We can do better”, 30 March). “I want to lay to rest the myth that inspectors want to see a certain kind of lesson,” he wrote. Lessons, he said, should be planned but not “formulaic”.

“If an inspector walks into a classroom and the pupils are working on an extended task for the whole time, that’s fine,” he argued. “If a teacher is reading a play with the class and they are all engaged, that’s fine too. There should be no prescription about lesson structure.”

So is it time to ditch the three-act lesson? Or does the plenary have life in it yet?

The starter

Pie Corbett, a respected consultant on primary education, believes there is nothing inherently wrong with the classic three-part lesson, where the teacher introduces a topic, the children practise it, then there is discussion about, and assessment of, what has been learnt. But he is keen for teachers to realise this is not the only way to teach.

“Some sessions may not start with teaching at all,” he says. “The children might enter the room to find there are floury footprints everywhere and the bin has been turned over - what has happened?”

Enquiry-based approaches like this have certainly proved popular in primary schools. Hence, around the country, pupils arrive at school to discover that aliens have crash-landed or dinosaur eggs have appeared overnight.

Meanwhile, other pupils put their coats on to go out and interview people for their class newspaper or do research for tourist information leaflets.

If you are taking a more standard approach, and starting a lesson by saying what you are going to do, Mr Corbett believes it can also be worth asking pupils what they already know, to help shape the lesson and avoid covering old ground.

Teachers should also be careful about assuming that the start of the lesson is the best place for something exciting and attention-grabbing. Research from Dan Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in the US, shows that, while teachers often look for a hook to begin the lesson, this is not the only place - indeed, not even necessarily the most suitable place - for the attention-grabber. Instead, what about at the end of the lesson, to help consolidate what has been learned?

The middle

In his book Visible Learning for Teachers, Professor John Hattie of the University of Melbourne in Australia recommends that lessons contain just two vital sections. Teachers should start by helping pupils to understand the intention of the lesson and show them what success might look like at the end.

However, he also points out that the middle needs attention, too: open- ended activities such as discovery learning and preparing PowerPoint presentations can make it difficult to keep pupils focused on what matters. Any teaching method needs prompt feedback to teachers so they can see whether the pupils are thinking about what is being taught in the right way.

Ian Worthington, head of Castle View Primary in Runcorn, believes it is important to ensure that teachers do this throughout the lesson, rather than leaving it to a plenary.

The school runs regular “writing workshops” for pupils, structured around the importance of teacher feedback. These begin with a starter activity linked to that day’s task, lasting perhaps five or 10 minutes. Next, the teacher introduces a particular type of writing, such as suspense writing, encourages pupils to come up with ideas of their own and draws their attention to factors such as paragraph structuring.

“The children feed back and teachers share these ideas around, so children can steal ideas from one another,” Mr Worthington says. “Then we go on to individual writing for 20-25 minutes with a lot of input from the teacher. The teacher may work with one group or walk around looking over shoulders. I expect them to be assessing how every child is responding to the task.”

This approach means that all the work in that lesson, whether it is talking, writing or reading, is aimed at feeding into the final piece of writing.

The plenary

One of the largest pieces of research into the impact of education in England, the Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) study, comes out in favour of plenaries.

For the study, observers watched teachers in 125 schools impart - or fail to impart - knowledge from 2004 to 2005. The resulting EPPSE report, Effective Primary Pedagogical Strategies in English and Mathematics in Key Stage 2, says: “Organisation (of classroom routines and the structure of lessons) is almost universally accepted as an important element of effective pedagogy.

“Regarding lesson structure, observed practice was rated more favourably in classes where plenaries - an essential part of each lesson as outlined in the National Strategies - took place.”

The plenary is supposed to be an opportunity to draw together what has been taught and highlight the most important points. Pupils should reflect on and summarise what they have learnt, giving teachers the chance to rectify misunderstandings and assess progress. However, in many schools it appears to have turned into something else: teachers standing at the front, telling children what they have learnt.

Ofsted inspectors say that effective plenaries are not just about summing up, but going forward. In one Year 1 lesson they highlighted, in which the class had written half a story together, the teacher used the plenary to ask pupils: “I wonder if you can tell me tomorrow what Molly Mouse did next.”

Planning

Planning and pace are important. The EPPSE study found that excellent teachers maintained a good pace and ensured that every second counted.

But, as Ofsted has indicated, if you go overboard and hurry through an overly detailed plan, this can lead to formulaic and ineffective teaching.

Mr Corbett agrees. “There is a real problem with `overplanning’ in many schools,” he says. “The difficulty is that young teachers feel they have to stick rigidly to (the three-act lesson), so they spend hours drawing this plan up and end up not teaching, but going through a plan.

“A strong and detailed medium plan is essential. However, weekly teaching notes need to be adapted as (teachers) move through the sessions, so that what happens on Monday determines Tuesday and what happens on Tuesday shapes Wednesday.

“Teachers have to `read the class’ rather like a conductor working with an orchestra - slowing down, speeding up, pausing for thinking time.”

Mr Worthington agrees that primary teachers should think more in terms of a week than a single lesson. He has helped to support schools in writing and has seen well-structured and pacy lessons, where children were asked to complete a whole series of tasks during the week and then expected to write a story that had no relation to any of those tasks on Friday. The lesson structure was there, but the lack of a week-long structure confused the pupils.

Mr Corbett is wary of anything that distracts teachers from their core purpose of teaching, whether that is feeling that they have to stick to an over-paced, inflexible lesson, or trying to do something more flexible but without the preparation needed to ensure that all children benefit.

“I think, like many teachers, that some of my most effective sessions have been when a thought has come to me and I have `invented’ something totally unplanned, on the spot with the children,” he says. “Of course, I have internalised patterns for teaching, but it is true that following a hunch, teaching instinctively, can be very powerful.”

PIE CORBETT ON TEACHING PATTERNS

1. Classic three-part. The teacher introduces and teaches. Children practise and apply. The threads are pulled together at the end and the teacher checks what has been learnt.

2. Two-day lesson. On day one, the children keep working. The plenary is held on day two. It begins with feedback from the previous day, often using a visualiser (a modern version of an overhead projector) with a few children talking through their work. Not only do children spend more time working on day one, but the teacher can look at the children’s work and use it to think about how to run the next day’s session.

3. Some sessions might not start with teaching at all. For instance, the children might enter the room to find that there are floury footprints everywhere and the bin has been turned over - what has happened?

4. Some sessions might start with the teacher saying, “This is what we are going to do,” but then asking the pupils, “What do you already know?” In some subjects, eliciting prior knowledge is vital as it helps the teacher to shape what needs to be learnt next and avoids covering old ground.