'The one where it all went wrong'

Lesson planning is the one the most exciting parts of being a trainee teacher. It might not like sound it but being given 60 whole minutes and the complete freedom to do whatever you want with it, is like being given a blank canvas and being told you can paint it however you like. The blank canvas being the hour-long lesson and your paints being the lightbulb moments that flash into your mind when you are driving home, are on a run, or in the shower. It can be tedious, draining, and time-consuming, but it can also be a creative outlet for you to express every element of your passion for a subject you love, so much that you want to dedicate your career to passing that love onto the young people who walk in and out of your classroom every day. 

Sometimes, I get carried away planning lessons and have this wonderfully weird idea that I think is the best thing since sliced bread, that will make the most amazing, engaging lesson plan that even my hard to please, too cool for school year 9’s will secretly go home and enthusiastically rave to their parents about. This happened to me last week, when I was planning a sequence of lessons of which the second was my formal observation by my ITT coordinator. 

Admittedly, I was feeling quite smug because I taught the class on a Monday, so I thought I was onto an absolute win by planning an incredibly similar lesson to my observation so I could iron out the creases and have peace of mind that it would all run smoothly. 

To my absolute horror, my dream lesson quickly escalated into my worst nightmare when I realised that I’d tried to spin so many plates that I couldn’t even keep on top of which ones had fallen off. My starter was five simple memory and recall questions, which I barely had time to blink during before the class had miraculously completed them way before the timer even indicated they were halfway through. I’d fallen down the trap of making this too simple to avoid the dreaded Mexican wave of “I don’t get it”, even though the answers might as well be star-jumping on the other side of their page from the work they did last lesson. 

When it came to my main activity, I’d spent hours reading through class data on our assessment tracker to identify which pupils were below, on, or above target, comparing this with my own observations of this class as to who is actively engaged and contributing and who is staring out the window distracted by a pigeon outside, then creating three differentiated ‘quotation explosion’ worksheets which I colour-coded so I knew exactly who needed each sheet. I was delighted with these worksheets. They were clear, simple, and easy to follow. They linked nicely with my weekly target of differentiation. 

However, the whole activity went horribly wrong. On reflection, and having discussed this with my mentor, we are unsure why exactly this was the case. She still reassures me that it wasn’t as bad as I thought. But for whatever reason, perhaps the fact that the class had just had lunch and weren’t particularly focused or enthusiastic, the lesson did not go to plan. Everyone was putting their hands up and asking different questions that I couldn’t just address to the whole class as they all had different worksheets. Yet, when someone did ask a generic question about what ‘connotations’ meant and I stopped the class to explain to everyone, I still had five more hands up over the next five minutes asking the exact same question I had just clearly answered. The same thing happened with ‘annotations’ and I considered writing the definition on my forehead until I realised thatsomeonewould still end up asking me. 

Frantically looking at the clock, I realised that there was no way the class understood their quotation enough to write for ten minutes in silence about it, and that because of this my plenary of a self-assessment checklist was completely out the window. I’d be lucky if they could write a few lines. I have learnt that in this moment, it is very easy to become flustered, stressed, and feel your lesson plan falling apart in front of you. It would be so easy to gloss over how unsuccessful the activity had gone and just keep plodding along, even though you know that the class just don’t understand it and it’s not necessarily your fault and it’s not necessarily their fault either. But quality work is more important that quantity of work and if a class do not know or understand something, they need to be taught it. 

So, I scrapped the rest of my worksheets for that lesson which felt a little bit like wasting five hours of your life planning that you can’t get back, but I went back to basics and picked the middle ability quotation. I modelled under the visualizer how to ‘explode’ it and used questioning and probing to stretch and challenge the class to make their own connotations. I then ‘live planned’ an example answer to our question that clearly demonstrated how to construct the piece of writing and set the class off on writing their own using my model for reference. Everyone managed to writesomethingwhich was more than I thought I’d have achieved 30 minutes before. 

I couldn’t relax or celebrate this success though, because I’d essentially just tore up my entire lesson plan for tomorrow which had the added pressure of being my formal observation. After weighing up the pros and cons of changing my identity and disappearing off the face of the Earth, I did the right thing and went back to my blank canvas and started again. I planned a simple entry ticket for the starter, which was a good balance between straightforward and easy to follow but also challenging, and I created one big sheet with three differentiated quotations on instead of spending three times as long making separate sheets. I ranked these ‘bronze, silver, gold’ to add a challenge element and pitched the whole lesson around this league table system, using positive language to encourage the class to ‘go for gold’ whilst also ensuring they meet the basic requirements of bronze and have worked their way up through silver to get there. I built in ‘think, pair, share’ time to encourage discussion between the pupils so that they could bounce off each other’s ideas and develop more meaningful interpretations. Every single pupil knew exactly what they were doing and managed to write fantastic paragraphs that I was exceptionally proud of them for. I received excellent feedback from my ITT coordinator who was amazed by how well the lesson went and was so proud of me. 

‘The one where it all wrong’ allowed me to create ‘the one where it all went well’ and if that doesn’t summarise teacher training in a nutshell, I don’t know what will. 

Lucy Kennedy, English trainee