How much planning do you actually do?

[MrTumblesCrackWhore]

In the days as a new teacher in a sixth form, I had a timetable of 24 lessons a week. I worked in the evenings and the weekends but i still had to walk into lessons, knowing what I was about to teach, just not with a structured lesson plan either mentally or on paper. I have to say, I was a pretty ok teacher in those more spontaneous lessons ...roll on a decade and I have less hours on my timetable and I'm physically unable to walk into a lesson without lesson objectives, structured Paul Ginnis type activities planned to within an inch of their life, plenaries, differentiation, refs to SMSC and employability etc. My students achieve as well as they did when my planning was much more skeletal in the early days but my enjoyment of the job and the challenge has diminished. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I could ever walk into a lesson and totally make it up in the spot but I do miss the freedom and flexibility to go off on a tangent and just talk to the class or experiment with another teaching method. One of my best lessons ever (and this has been corroborated by two ex students who cite this lesson as their reason to become teachers) was when I felt the students had had enough of my teaching from the front that day so I asked them in pairs to each teach an aspect of the topic they were studying. They did brilliantly. Does anyone else wing it a bit?

Isn't it funny how many teachers have mentioned not yet being 'caught out' by their planning being insufficiently detailed for scrutiny? Not being caught out because their planning wasn't sufficiently detailed so the kids failed exams or there was no lesson to teach. Priorities all wrong. The planning should be for the teacher not for SLT. SLT seem to forget that.

It's like ridiculous 'verbal feedback given' stamps in books to prove that you've given feedback because you aren't trusted to simply do your job.

It is like the long winded marking you have to do in Year 1s books when the vast majority can't read it! Who are all those words for?

Yes, year 1 only want a stamper in their books! I read my comments to them.

Can anyone in your school plan in that much detail Friday?!

In my last job our weekly planning went up on a notice board for the parents to look at each week. It was pretty annoying to have to do this. As a parent myself, I do see that this is nice to know, but I would have preferred a less detailed approach for the parents. Except that would have meant another bit of paper to produce! Woe betide you if you deviated from your planning in any way when the acting head dropped by.

I was doing a mat leave for a school in special measures due to management failings. The experience has meant that I have now left teaching.

I must confess I haven't asked. I think pre-new curriculum we had more detail on our planning as it was built up year by year and edited to match each cohort. I had taught that KS1 year group for many years so had built up a lot of plans and resources. Also we are a four form entry so lots of collaborative planning. Now I'm in Year 5 and the other teachers are all job-shares with differing days (and "personalities") so whole team planning means much less sharing of workload .

Oh, HumphreyCobbler! My planning names children and their needs so there is no way that could be shared.

I work in an EBD school and spend 10-2 most holiday week days in school planning (I don't have children and most of my friends are in 9-5 non teaching jobs so not avaliable. My current partner is a teacher in the same school so we operate the same schedule). This means I do very little planning during term time (adapting here and there when something doesn't go to plan- maybe 2 hours a week). Our school only has 50 students so I know them and what makes them tick/kick off quite well.

I know I won't be able to keep this up when I do have children but hopefully I will have 2-3 years of plans behind me then to help.

I was always uncomfortable with displaying planning for parents to look at when talking about SEN provision and ability groups/levels. We write a summary of the week for parents instead.

What it meant was that we had to add sensitive stuff in afterwards. MOre work.

Previous school I worked in expected an upto date file on our desks for inspection at any given time. Head was an utter psycho and I left. New job doesn't require any formal planning but I need to think through each lesson or I wouldn't be hitting all the key areas like a4l or differentiation. Thus I have spent 5 hours today planning which should get me to Wednesday and annoyed I ran out if time/steam before I got any marking done.

This why I'm so glad I don't teach in the UK any more. I plan my lessons, taking into account SEN, etc. No-one has asked to see my records, which are an account of what really happened, as opposed to some aspirational mince to satisfy bean counters. No-one has ever inspected my lessons.

Are my lessons worse than the UK? No.

Are there less than good teachers in the system. Yes. But then there are in the UK with its oppressive regime of inspection and surveillance.

Do students do less well than in the UK? No.

I teach in a state school in Australia.

I do mine in Excel for KS4 & produce fancy teaching folders, which SLG drool over (but I quite like doing them...nice relaxing, mindless task for my Friday afternoon free).

For KS3 I use our departmental schemes of learning & scribble on them when I can be arsed. I worked out some time ago that you can use the same paper copy for three years' running & it acquires enough scribbles in year 1 that you can safely ignore it by year 3.

None of this impinges on my actual teaching!

Incidentally, current Union 'action short of strike action' means NUT/Nasuwt shouldn't be submitting planning for scrutiny (although we can if we like) or feeling we have to follow a specified planning format:

instruction 12

'Members should therefore make their own professional judgement
regarding the nature of their planning of lessons.'