The crucial thing at the heart of planning is the relationship between our aims and the things we actually do in lessons. To plan activities without aims is just doing stuff for the sake of doing it: filling up lesson time and keeping students occupied.
I am lucky enough to be involved with trainee music teachers through our local initial teacher training consortium. I enjoy this part of my job hugely – working with trainees forces me to keep thinking about what I'm doing and why, and the trainees themselves are a constant source of new ideas. They do not, however, seem to get much input on planning, and the emphasis seems to be on filling in hugely detailed lesson plan pro formas. So the poor trainees are agonising about three-level objectives starting with statements like ‘all students should…’, and providing a minute-by-minute account of what they and students will be doing. They end up asking questions such as ‘do you think seven minutes is long enough for this?’ and seem disappointed when I simply don't know. The lesson plan form – designed, I'm sure, to help trainees to be organised – ends up making them focus on all the wrong things. It's like having a sat nav, but no idea of where you're heading.
It is much more fruitful to talk to them about why they are doing each activity in the lesson. But in order to know why you are doing something, you need to know what your overall aim is. This is particularly important at KS3 – where you can pretty much do whatever you like. Some see KS3 as a preparation for KS4. I know of some schools that insist that KS3 units all have a link to GCSE areas of study. Others see KS3 as a more general introduction to the delights that music can bring to everyone's lives. I'm sure that there are some that don't really have an opinion on what KS3 music is for. This must be why some music teachers talk about ‘doing keyboards’, ‘doing blues’ or (heaven forfend) ‘doing dynamics’.
My own approach is mostly that KS3 is an opportunity to give students musical knowledge and skills that will enhance their lifelong relationship with music, with only the merest nod to the idea of KS4-prep. As a department we found it helpful to make a list of the knowledge, understanding and skills that we want to give our students, and use this to underpin absolutely everything we do in lessons.
We have a KS3 curriculum overview, and a huge bank of shared resources. There are no individual lesson plans. Let me put this right out there – I don't actually have a ‘scheme of work’ as such. The three teachers in our department do the same things in roughly the same order, but my colleagues are free to adapt things as they wish. I want them to respond to each individual class: the real fact of the matter is that teaching is a messy business, and things go differently with each class. Just as cricket is affected by humidity, the state of the wicket and the ball, as well as human factors, lessons are affected by the time of day, the weather, what just happened in science, what students have had to eat, and a million other factors.
If keeping overarching objectives in mind is one end of the planning bargain, being responsive to events is the other. There is no way anyone could ever say whether seven minutes is the right length for any particular activity. It all depends on how it goes. One of the things I try to get trainee teachers to understand early on is that the lesson plan is only a guide – it is absolutely fine to diverge from it if that is what students need. Being reflective and responsive is much more important than following a plan for the sake of it.
Trainee teachers do need to plan in more detail than more experienced ones: it is the rehearsal that enables skilled teacher improv later in your career. But the lesson plan itself is far from being the be-all-and-end-all.
So as the year starts, we start on our voyage with a firm idea of where we want to go, but a flexible approach to getting there. Perhaps it's more like a treasure map than a sat nav. Less ‘prepare to turn left in half a mile’, and more about following a star and slaying dragons along the way. However, without an X to mark the spot, we are just messing about. We may be having a good time, but without an educational purpose, the treasure chest may prove to be empty.
