Lesson Planning

 As we head into a new academic year, I thought it might be useful to share how I plan lessons as an experienced teacher.

I plan in two different ways, either lesson by lesson or as a unit. I much prefer planning a unit at a time and do find in the long run it saves time, but I have old habits of planning a single lesson at a time that kick in.

 Lesson by lesson planning

The pros of this are that you can be immediately flexible based on last lesson as you are directly planning for one specific lesson based on their performance the previous lesson.

The cons are that you can easily end up just re-using an old resource or find one online. Which sounds fine, but it needs adapting! With the lesson at a time planning the lure of "well, I've got a lesson so I'm fine" is there. There's also the issue of timing. Some days of teaching are long and difficult and draining and the last thing you want is to do deep thinking and planning afterwards. Which means either you end up with a pick up and use lesson that you haven't adapted or you decide to do it in the morning with no time or even you put yourself through late night planning.

When I am lesson at a time planning, I tend to search for a base lesson I like the feel of (either from my own bank or from TES or a few other go-to sites) and then open up my preferred style of PowerPoint and pull in the slides I want. I like this better than just adapting what exists as I am then actively opting in to every slide rather than just deleting what I don't want.

Unit at a time planning

The pros of this are that you have the whole thing planned out so you are day to day just tweaking it as needed. It's also easier to find next time you teach an equivalent class because it's all one document. Finally, the biggest pro for me is that you can weave a coherent narrative between lessons. I think for a lot of more narrative subjects it's more second nature to plan a unit at a time but the narrative is just as important in maths, it's just less obvious.

The cons are that it takes a lot of time up front. I also find that sometimes what I've planned doesn't fit for the class and I have to do a lot more adapting after lessons than expected meaning it's not even saved me time in the term. The last con might just be a me thing, but the worst thing I find when I do this is when I think I've planned the whole thing and it turns out I've planned all but one or two lessons leaving future me a nasty surprise.

When I'm unit at a time planning, I start by looking at the content I need to get through in a unit and splitting it into small pieces. I then consider what the declarative and procedural knowledge will be for each lesson. Declarative knowledge is (essentially) the core fact they remember while procedural is the process. Learn that and learn how. Sometimes I'll have the same declarative knowledge but different procedural knowledge. I find that doing this helps me avoid "just get some practice" lessons as it sharpens my focus on what I'm getting the class to do.

So, once I've mapped out the lessons with the knowledge for each one, I fire up a PowerPoint and set up sections for each lesson and write the knowledge on the first slide of each (mainly for me to remember and focus on). Then I go through and set up starters for each lesson because that's quick and easy. I might adapt these as I teach to focus more on certain things, but it's a quick win for me to have these 4 questions already sorted. I tend to use a question generator such as maths whiteboard to get these or maths box for post 16.

Once I have my starters I then go lesson by lesson. I start with a concept slide that focusses on the declarative knowledge. I'll consider the core concept I want them to know and either use a representation with e.g. geogebra or I will set up a key word and definition or a thinking question to prompt the conceptual thought. It depends on the topic and the class as to which I think will work better.

Then I roll on to a good old example problem pair - Craig Barton has loads of writing about that so do go read that if you want more details on it. I make sure that there is a section where the students are giving me information on their progress through mini whiteboards or if unavailable then through a carefully chosen multiple choice question.

Sometimes (class and topic depending) I'll then put in a think pair share. Usually that will be a question that will prompt students to confront a misconception so that we can explore it as a class and emphasise why it doesn't work like that. The NCETM taught me that if you don't confront the misconception and get them to state it first then it can flourish in the dark and come out at unexpected times. Like my year 13 who was adamant that integers were only the numbers 0 to 9.

Finally, practice. Lots of it. Starting with some straight forward questions and then moving to applications. You need both. If there's no straight forward ones you'll get false negatives where students think they can't do the topic, but actually it's that particular question they can't do which is demoralising for them and adds workload for you to fix. If you don't have the application questions then you get false positives where you (and the students) think they can do the topic and get the marks in the exam and then the exam comes along and WHAM, it's a tricky question and they (and you) get demoralised as they thought they were acing the topic.

I hope that helped a bit. I'm going to put some more blogs out about planning and various bits over the next few weeks, but feel free to contact me at @mathsmuse.bsky.social on bluesky or comment here!