For as long as I can remember, I’ve had my doubts about the planning templates offered up by teacher training institutes. I think planning is one of the most important things we do as teachers. I’m just not persuaded that long-winded templates are the best way to do it.
But I’ve given universities the benefit of the doubt: I don’t train hundreds of teachers every year - and I haven’t dedicated my career to researching effective strategies for teaching.
Well, except, I sort of have. I’m not alone in that. Part of what makes the profession what it is, is the need to be reflective. I’ve never met a teacher who considered that they were the finished article upon leaving their training college. In fact, most of us look back and cringe at some of our practice in the first years of teaching.
It’s for that reason that I have continued to read around the subject. It’s the reason so many people subscribe to this magazine: in an effort to keep up with the latest practice and become better teachers.
I’m just not persuaded that teacher training colleges are always keeping up.
Just as schools are trying to shift their focus towards “mastery” approaches that aim to keep whole classes moving broadly though the curriculum together, universities are expecting students to set out their “personalisation strategies” for every single lesson.
It might not be so bad if templates offered something a little more innovative. Twitter and the Tes forums abound with discussions about knowledge organisers and retrieval practice. Teachers are trying to design a curriculum that makes the best use of cognitive science by building in a daily review and considering how to best use visuals to complement oral explanations. Yet training planning templates have hardly changed.
Bound by plans
The trouble is, student teachers are bound by these plans. As much as we want to advise new teachers to feel confident to “abandon the lesson plan” when the circumstances require it, we can’t realistically expect them to while also setting out planning requirements that demand hours of time. If you’ve spent an hour writing out a detailed plan of your 50-minute lesson, you probably haven’t had time to think about variations on the theme.
The antiquated thinking isn’t limited to planning either. It seems that training partnerships are still bound by concepts of grading. True, they might call them “high” rather than “outstanding” or “minimum” instead of “requiring improvement”, but the principle is the same. It seems that the evidence about grading has passed training institutes by.
As, presumably, have the discussions about the removal of levels. Teachers have spent the last five years coming to terms with the change, but university grading templates still cling to the vague descriptors that are increasingly a thing of the past in schools. The same “adverb problem” arises, with mentors having to decide if a student is “able to encourage pupils to participate and contribute in an atmosphere conducive to learning”, or perhaps “constantly encourages pupils to participate and contribute in an atmosphere highly conducive to learning.”
It turns out that the addition of those two adverbs is enough to move a trainee from a “minimum” to a “high” standard. Who knew?
One of the reasons schools often welcome trainees in is because they can bring the latest of educational research and thinking from their up-to-the-minute training. I wish I felt confident that university departments were upholding their side of the bargain.
Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979
