Effective lesson planning is a fundamental feature of successful behaviour management.
This is because the behaviour learners exhibit in your classroom is always within the context of a lesson you have planned.
Therefore, effective lesson planning is more likely to encourage good behaviour.
For example, we could imagine a poorly planned lesson in which the teacher has not given sufficient thought to the level of challenge or to what learners will be doing.
On top of this, the teacher is not entirely sure themselves of how the lesson structure will play out.
Two points follow.
First, the better planned your lesson is, the more freedom you have to attend to what is happening while you teach.
Your mind is not caught between trying to work out how the lesson is going to move forward and what there is in front of you.
Instead, you can focus on the latter, allowing you to do all the things necessary to ensure behaviour remains at a high level.
Second, having a clear understanding of what you expect learners to do during a lesson, the learning this will involve, and the level of challenge underpinning it means you know in advance the rough route the lesson will take.
Therefore, you also know how to identify, in terms of behaviour, anything that deviates or takes away from this journey.
Keeping behaviour in mind when planning your lessons will help you to realise these benefits.
Forgetting about behaviour means decreasing the likelihood of realising the benefits – you might achieve them, or you might not, but you will not be working actively to make them a reality.
Lesson structure has a key role to play here.
When first sketching out your lesson, you should think about how the structure will influence the level of pace and challenge your learners will experience.
In general, low pace and low challenge have a negative impact on behaviour.
If your structure causes either of these, you can look to change it.
And making changes in the planning phase is nearly always easier than making changes on the fly.
For example, you might sketch out a Year 7 lesson.
You decide that learners will need to do a lot of listening to you during the first thirty minutes.
They’ll need to take on board the information you convey, so they can apply this in the activities that follow.
On reflection, you realise that this structure may give rise to disengagement.
Both the challenge and the pace will end up being too low.
Thirty minutes is a long time for Year 7 learners to sit and listen.
Picking up on this point early means you can rectify things.
Making changes before you get into the meat of your planning makes life easier.
In this case, you might decide to break up that first thirty minutes into three ten-minute sections, with short, paired discussion activities in between.
This plays to learners’ strengths, giving them time to regain psychological energy they can then apply during each subsequent section of teacher-led explanation.
Thinking about lesson structure means thinking about how the framework of your lesson can support or work against your behaviour objectives.
As noted through the example, this rests in part on an analysis of the psychological impact of the lesson structure; the kind of feelings and responses it is likely to provoke in learners.
The point is not to plan lessons that are endlessly responsive to the whims of learners – that would be impractical.
Rather, it is to consider the relationship between your lesson structure and the experience learners will have – and to which they will respond and react. Thinking about this will help you to prevent lots of behavioural issues before they arise.
