This blog is Part 1 of 3.
Across the three blogs, I’m going to focus on unpicking the lesson, helping you to think about the core feature of all teaching.
In this blog, we’ll start off looking at structure and purpose, then touch on aims, objectives and outcomes, before moving onto content and lesson framework in Part 2, and starters, activities and plenaries in Part 3.
Introduction
Here, we are focussed on the unit through which teachers work: the lesson.
It is in the lesson that teaching and learning takes place.
It follows that the structure of the lesson – how it is planned and how it is designed – influences what the teacher does and what learners are asked or able to do.
Lessons come in a range of shapes and sizes.
But, in general, they are largely similar.
There is a purpose, designated by the teacher, that informs the structure.
This structure can be broken down into sections, and those sections help learners to learn.
(Ideally this involves an increasing level of challenge, pushing learners to work harder and to think more deeply so they maximise their progress.)
The Structure of Lessons
Think of lessons as being like a story.
They have a beginning, a middle and an end.
These three elements go together to form the structure of the lesson; the story the teacher is seeking to tell.
It is helpful to conceive of lessons in this way for two reasons.
First it allows us to keep in mind the fact that we are always working towards something.
This is usually the increased knowledge and/or understanding of our learners, or an improved capacity to do a certain thing (the practice and development of skills).
Second, stories are like journeys.
And learning is essentially a journey.
As we learn, we move from a starting point of existing ability and, once the learning is complete, find ourselves in a position where our abilities have improved.
When planning your lessons, you should always keep in mind a sense of where you are going.
Remind yourself that you have an end in mind – something you want your learners to be able to do or know.
Having this as your guiding light ensures the structure of your lesson helps learners to achieve the end you have specified.
Failing to take account of the end means aspects of your lesson may drift away from what you are trying to achieve.
To put it another way, the structure of your lesson should be subordinate to what you are trying to achieve.
When planning a lesson, always remember that the plan is nothing more than your way of ensuring learners achieve what you want them to achieve.
It is the framework through which learning happens, not learning itself.
This is an obvious point.
However, one of the most common pitfalls new teachers encounter, is the desire for perfection.
When planning a lesson, they want to create something that is perfect and without fault.
This is impossible.
No lesson is perfect, and no lesson can be planned to ensure all faults are avoided.
Succumbing to perfectionism is understandable.
It stems from laudable aims – the desire to create something that is good for learners.
But it is counterproductive and unrealistic.
It privileges the structure of the lesson – what you focus on during your planning – over the learning that learners do.
This is because you cannot plan the learning learners do in advance of the lesson.
You can only plan what you will teach and how you anticipate this will stimulate and facilitate learning.
And in this point, we find the crux.
No lesson plan can be perfect because no lesson plan involves any learner learning.
It is only when we put our lesson into action that learning happens.
Therefore, the perfect structure is a mirage, because how learners interact with that structure is unknown prior to us turning it into a reality by teaching it.
When planning lessons, the best advice is to think about your end point and to keep asking yourself whether the structure you are developing will give learners the best chance of achieving this.
If the answer is ‘yes’, you’re onto a winner.
If the answer is ‘no’, you can change things.
Either way, learning, rather than the search for a perfect lesson, will be the driving force in your thinking.
What is the purpose of your lesson?
Implicit in what we said above is the idea that great lessons have a clear purpose.
That purpose, in a broad sense, ought always to be the maximisation of learning.
(Others might disagree, but that is certainly my view on things.)
In a specific sense, it will vary depending on what is being taught and to whom.
So, for example, if we are planning a lesson for a Year 7 Religious Studies class, our general purpose will be to create something that maximises their learning, while our specific purpose might be to increase their knowledge and understanding of Buddhism.
We can see then that all lessons aim at the same goal, but that the goal does not always wear the same clothes.
An A Level PE teacher and a Year 3 teacher both have the same goal of maximising learning when they sit down and plan their respective lessons, but that goal is dressed up differently for each of them, the clothes being those appropriate for the age group and the curriculum.
If you try to plan a lesson without a clear purpose in mind you will run into difficulties.
The first problem you will face will be a lack of direction.
The second will be a lack of criteria through which to judge the efficacy of the structure you are building.
Let us look at an example to demonstrate this.
A Year 6 teacher sits down to plan a literacy lesson.
They know they want to plan something around sentence structure but have no clearer purpose than that.
Immediately they find their mind pulling in different directions.
The creative aspect of this is neutered by the fact that no direction can be easily preferred because the purpose remains undefined.
Every judgement the teacher tries to make concerning whether an idea would be useful or not is undermined by the fact that they do not have any criteria to use when making their judgement.
Compare this to another teacher who decides the purpose of their lesson is to give learners practice in applying grammar rules to a series of different paragraphs before going on to create their own grammar challenges with which to test their peers.
Clearly this second teacher would be able to marshal their lesson structure to fulfil their purpose.
Every decision they make can be judged using the question: ‘Will it help me achieve my purpose?’
If the answer is yes, happy days.
If the answer is no, they can change things and do so with confidence.
This comparison illustrates the benefits that accrue when we define and clarify the purpose of our lesson before we start to plan.
In effect, we are working through the options open to us, settling on one, and then using this to inform all else we do.
It means our lesson structure is determined by our desire to reach the end we have specified.
Namely, fulfilment of our purpose.
In short, turning the general goal of maximising learning into a highly specific goal, relevant for our learners and the curriculum, gives us a clear purpose.
This then informs all decisions we make as part of our planning, allowing us to tailor the structure of our lessons so they help us to achieve our purpose.
The golden rule of lesson planning is thus to begin by identifying and clarifying your purpose.
Aims, Objectives and Outcomes
The purpose on which you settle is for you and your learners.
It is the driving force of your planning.
The lens through which you look at what you are doing.
Beyond this, you will be asked to specify other guiding principles, some of which you will share with learners and some of which you will not.
The three most common words you will come across in this area are aims, objectives and outcomes.
As a trainee teacher, the difference between these can be difficult to grasp.
This is because the differences are not great.
Think of them as differences of degree, rather than of type.
To assist you in your planning, let me provide a set of definitions from which you can work:
- Lesson Purpose
As noted above, this is what you are trying to achieve. It is the end point of your lesson. Where you are trying to take your learners.
- Lesson Aims
Aims are the specific things that make up your purpose. So, for example, you might break your purpose down into three aims. If these aims are fulfilled, the purpose has been achieved.
- Lesson Objective
This is what you want learners to be able to do by the end of the lesson. It is the objective you and they share. It will usually be the end point you identified as your purpose, rewritten into language learners can easily grasp.
- Lesson/Learning Outcomes
These are the things learners will be able to do by the end of the lesson. If they can do them, they will have achieved the objective, met the aims and achieved the purpose of the lesson. The extent to which any one learner fulfils the outcomes will vary (one may fulfil them to a high standard, another to a lower standard).
As clear as mud, then!
I joke. You can see, hopefully, from the above definitions, that there is a qualitative difference between each term.
But they do remain closely related.
The proliferation of terms is as much down to administrative developments as anything else.
Each one has its own history when it comes to lesson planning – a history it is not useful to go into here.
In summary, when planning a lesson:
- Identify your purpose
- Break this down into a series of aims
- Create a plan
- Write a lesson objective that learners can understand
- And, finally, consider what outcomes you expect to see if learners have been hugely successful, mildly successful and reasonably successful.
You will note that I advocate writing the objective and outcomes after planning the lesson.
This is because you will have your purpose to guide you and it is this purpose which, as we noted above, is closely bound up with the learning you are seeking to achieve.
Trying to design a lesson that fits a purpose, a set of aims, an objective and a set of outcomes all at the same time is difficult.
The number of things you need to satisfy is too great.
It stymies creativity.
Instead, work on the basis that your purpose is enough.
When the lesson is planned, look at what objective and outcomes it gives rise to, safe in the knowledge that these will be sufficient, because all your planning has been driven by the purpose you first specified.
