After the first flurry of excitement planning for the year ahead, the drudgery and grind of planning 'exciting' lessons, day in, day out, is probably beginning to hit. As a new teacher, lesson planning seemed to suck up pretty much all of my available time and energy. Looking back over those frenetic early years it’s become increasingly clear that I wasted an awful lot of effort designing activities rather than considering what my students needed to learn. That is to say, I put most of my effort into things that had only a marginal impact on students’ learning.
If you have the misfortune to work in an environment where the expectation is that you will have minutely detailed planning for every lesson, it's worth remembering that Ofsted (who are often used as an excuse) have made it clear for some time now that they have no expectation of teachers writing lesson plans; they only want to see evidence of a planned lesson.
And if that’s not enough of a relief, please dip into the resource tips for some practical and thoroughly road-tested ideas to ease your planning burden.
Download the teaching tips now.
(This article was first published on 12/1/15 as a newsletter.)
