Unqualified Teacher - No Knowledge Handover - Why??

[drdomuch]

I have had a reasonably successful - though unfulfilling - career but looking to switch to teaching FT. Have spoken with teacher friends and I'm already working at a school (no QTS) and the query I have is around planning for lessons and sharing of knowledge between teachers and in handovers.

Maybe it's peculiar to my friends' schools (they work in a variety of teacher roles; primary & secondary) or the one I'm currently at, but I was surprised to find that there does not seem to be a culture of sharing lessons plans/materials centrally (for staff) in the cloud or creating manuals/sample lessons that can then be passed on or best practice shared. My qualified teacher friends always seem rushed off their feet and bogged down in planning so I was rather shocked to hear they seem to start from scratch when they take on a new year.
Why is this?

In every (non teacher) job I've had, that is what you do i.e. you access/create manuals, templates, SOPs, save material centrally so that it's accessible to all, which means that new staff can have access to these resources and saves them from having to start from scratch which ensures a smooth handover.

But it also means that instead of reinventing the wheel, newbies can work off something solid and instead using their energy to refining and making lessons better. It seems bonkers to me that teachers start from scratch with their lesson planning etc!

I'd like to hear the views from both more newly qualified and experienced teachers - how to you ensure that knowledge is passed on or is this something that just doesn't happen? I'm finding this one aspect incredibly frustrating. Hopefully not enough to turn me off but maybe!!

I teach primary and find it massively frustrating when I think of teachers up and down the land all planning different lessons to cover the same objectives but equally I don't have time to produce a decent written plan that anyone would really be able to follow. I have to look in old books to remember how I taught a lesson last time round. I think also when teachers talk about spending time 'planning' that's shorthand for lots of different jobs, not actually planning lesson content.

Also, I think it's easy to underestimate how much time printing things off for a day takes even if they're all ready to go. In a typical day I print off about 20 documents that all need to be photocopied the right number of times. Just doing that daily takes time and is part of what I mean when I say 'planning'.

In every school I've worked in, plans from the previous year(s) are always on the school server. They get reused every year, tweaked to suit the cohort and their needs, as well as tweaked to the new format that SLT suddenly decided they needed, and tweaked again to incorporate some other new initiative on the school's development plan, or tweaked again for whatever current focus is for Ofsted etc etc. And then tweaked again to add various highlights for different this that or the other.

That's reassuring to hear that there are schools that do this. It just makes sense, especially as teachers are rushed off their feet as they are. Bonkers not to!

Appreciate that but that means the wheel is reinvented millions of times across the country, such a waste of time with all that duplication of efforts, no?

Yes of course it is. But equally who am I sharing resources with? I teach in a tiny school so don't share planning with anyone and have no intentions to leave. It's likely by the time I do, the curriculum will have changed again (even from the last time I taught topics on a two year cycle things have changed) so I'd be spending time uploading stuff that would potentially never be looked at by anyone.

Fair enough in your situation, but there must be many schools with a much higher rate of turn over of staff (that's certainly the case at the one I'm working at; it's good and a good head on the whole but people leave for various reasons).

I think most schools have 'shared areas' where resources are stored and are accessible. Some departments share planning and the development of resources when changing schemes of work, specifications etc.

I do think, however, a huge part of the learning curve in the first few years is putting lessons together and seeing how they work out. One of my biggest sources of professional development is opening PowerPoints from the previous year's teaching and thinking 'well, that won't work that way round, will it?' and then tweaking and tweaking again. I work for a very large MAT and frankly the quality of lessons in our wider shared area is very poor and not particularly well sequenced in some instances. If you're an ECT relying on those, you really will have a steep learning curve. I know I found in those early years that I would open ready made stuff from TES and not understand what the hell to do with some of it whereas now, if I'm planning from scratch and have a look at what's out there, I can pick and choose and add in my own stuff, all without thinking too hard about it. But it was hard, and I remember it being hard.

I have worked with some teachers who do not share planning because they see it as their property. This results in reinventing the wheel time after time, and so much wasted planning time. I have also been in teh situation where I had split age classes, eg Year 4/5, so you couldn't use the same planning two years running, and in the meantime the Curriculum changed so planning was mostly new all the time! Teaching involves lots of planning unfortunately...
I have also found that sharing planning is not always as useful as it sounds. I like detailed, specific plans, others like simple, non-specific plans that I then have to spend ages fleshing out or adapting to my class's needs, and to be honest, I may as well have just planned it myself by the time I'm done!

Teaching with other people's resources never feels right - it feels like I'm not completely in control of what is going on in my room - which I don't like!
And as mentioned earlier , planning your own stuff is vitally important for learning how to teach things. The whole process of thinking about how to get knowledge across is key to being a good teacher, and that comes from planning.

In my first school and during my pcge placements there were basically no shared resources at all which was a huge strain in terms of time taken for planning, especially when you are still learning how to do it.
At my current school we have a complete set of fully planned lessons, fully resourced with powerpoints, lesson plans and worksheets in my department ( not all departments do bizarrely)
we make these during gained time in the summer and update them regularly
this cuts down on planning time massively and then it’s easy to just tweak if needed for your class. We have high standards though and anyone who planned a shoddy set would get short shrift, agree with a pp that the stuff you see on tes, or that other schools sometimes share is really poor.
I have no intention of moving but it would definitely be something I asked a potential school

At my current school we have a complete set of fully planned lessons, fully resourced with powerpoints, lesson plans and worksheets in my department ( not all departments do bizarrely)

I am working towards this within my own department (secondary school here), but we do not have the luxury of being able to buy in ready made resources as the publishers do not have them for our subject area. SLT were a bit shocked to discover that we have to do it from scratch! Or adapt other people's resources...

We don’t really have any recently bought in resources, we don’t even have text books until KS5, but the benefit of being a large department is that we take one or 2 years each summer and carve it up and that makes it ok in terms of making our own resources
i hate the twinkl ppts anyway

But agree its mad where none actually even exist, we run a ks5 course for which there are no published resources at all !

A lot of schools do have shared resources, but there are a few issues:

1. Some schools are very picky about the format (not content) of resources to be put on the shared area. If I have a lesson on a topic which I know works well, I sometimes don't have the time to reformat it to make it acceptable for the school's shared area. (I'm not talking about things like having a non white background to reduce visual stress, but about e.g. having lesson objectives displayed on every slide which I don't agree with anyway).

2. The issue of sharing all of your stuff, and getting nothing in return. Personally, I don't actually mind this- I mean I had to make the resources anyway, but some people really dislike this.

On a related point, there's the issue of intellectual property- if you upload resources onto a school system, they can own/retain them even after you are gone. A lot of people really don't like this, and it does lead to reluctance to upload things.

3. Sometimes, experienced teachers don't have resources/a lesson plan for every lesson, and there's nothing to share.

I'd also add that in my opinion, learning to plan lessons is a really important skill, at least for teachers with QTS. If you're happy delivering other people's content forever, then great, but personally I don't really consider that high quality teaching.

To be honest, I'd suggest doing an ITT course if you want to stay in teaching long term, and then you'll have the skills to produce your own resources that suit your own style of teaching!

sample lessons that can then be passed on

Something like this actually concerns me a bit. Really, we should all aim to be adapting our lessons to the classes we teach, and to our own teaching style.

Teaching identikit lessons to everyone isn't good practice.

Very interesting insights. Of course it's important to learn how to build lessons and you don't want identikit, but actually drawing from what has been before and building / improving from that, can surely only benefit the school and children.

I'm still surprised there's less sharing. I can't think of another industry where, frankly, this would be tolerated. What an enormous waste of time!

Teaching identikit lessons to everyone isn't good practice

and yet there is more and more of it happening. I can only assume that the growth of on-the-job training pathways is driving it - producing teachers who might be able to tweak an existing plan but who have increasing difficulties in starting from scratch.

You may be on to something here.

I trained via a uni based PGCE not that long ago, and we were very much taught to plan, not to "resource" lessons. We were very clearly told a powerpoint is not a lesson plan, and we were encouraged to teach lessons without powerpoint, and without reliance on resources. At the time, it was very hardcore, and I've seen trainees on other programs get a far easier ride!

We were also taught how to plan in the medium and long term, so when I worked for a school where we had to change our whole scheme of work (move from 3 year KS4 to 2 year) I felt confident in assisting with this (which was good, as otherwise for my science, at the time, it would have all fallen on one member of staff).

It's obviously anecdata but in my current school, I feel like there is a massive resistance to change, in part because people are not confident replanning a whole scheme of work.

I do think there's a push to have a centralised resource bank in many schools, where you can just pick up the powerpoint and deliver, and in some schools, it's even frowned on if you deviate. Which I don't think (personally) is good teaching.

I know people on here don't like Daniel Kebede, but when he talked about the dangers of centralisation in Schools Week, people were absolutely tearing him to shreds on twitter talking about how he didn't care about workload etc etc. But I think he raised some pretty valid points.

(article is here for anyone interested: schoolsweek.co.uk/teachers-must-resist-the-squeeze-on-their-autonomy/ )

"But the idea of delivering ready-made lessons runs counter to what brought many into the profession in the first place – a commitment to teaching as a dialogue with students, starting out from their unique needs and interests to develop their learning further."- this really resonates with me to be honest.

My absolute favourite lessons are the ones where Y7 drag me off topic talking about what would happen if earth had two moons, or Y9 want to spend the whole lesson talking about earthquakes, or Y12 want to explore why medicines get patented and what the impact of this is (etc etc). But it feels like there's not much room for this in teaching.

I do think there's a push to have a centralised resource bank in many schools, where you can just pick up the powerpoint and deliver, and in some schools, it's even frowned on if you deviate. Which I don't think (personally) is good teaching

yep, seeing/hearing about this a lot now. All in the name of workload reduction. The frowning on teachers who deviate from the pre-planned PowerPoint ignores the need to differentiate for classes, let alone individual students, based on class personalities, the time of day you're having the lesson (first lesson Monday is very different to last lesson Friday) etc. etc. etc. It means teachers are excused getting to know their classes. That classes are just treated as some kind of collective that is unchanging and totally predictable. It might reduce workload but it doesn't make for good, reactive teaching and whilst I agree with differentiation by outcome at some level, you can't start all classes from the same place and expect them to arrive at the same place within the same timeframe.

It seems to me that this will only result in increasingly frustrated teachers who can't see that poor behaviour can very much be a result of their input and the work on offer. And whilst it might ensure that content is delivered, it doesn't ensure it is understsood.

So yeah, in a nutshell, centralised planning is helpful but is not a cure-all for teacher workload and will absolutely not help ensure good quality teaching which takes into account the needs of all learners.

As I've gained experience, I definitely fall into the chalk and talk model of lesson delivery, so what would I share? My concern with PowerPoint is that there's a temptation to just read from the slides. There's often too much information on the slides, and it results in cognitive overload in the learner. I only really have MCQs, questions, PPQs and model answers on my slides now. I guess that could still be helpful, but it's not a whole lesson. For central resources, Oak Academy is actually not too bad, as they have quite a lot of quizzes in their resources. But all the explanation is just from me, and I'll be drawing on the board as I explain. If there are shared resources, I think it's better if they're minimal, there's no point in teachers searching for the same PPQs for example, and that teachers are trained in their use, so lessons aren't just death by PowerPoint!

I used a lot of other people's stuff and textbooks when I started but now 12 years on, I rarely use other people's stuff. For one thing, it's not up to my standards...even bought resources often have major mistakes in and the spelling and grammar isn't great.

It actually takes longer to rewrite a poor PPT or worksheet than to create your own and you can't always work out what they meant by aspects of it, or you have the questions but not the markscheme, or the video links have been deleted, etc.

I do zip whole teaching sets of lessons and share them with desperate non specialists (I am secondary Economics, a subject that often gets dumped on whoever doesn't run away fast enough).

I did once see some excellent resources made that were correct, adaptable and flexible - significantly, these were made by a tutoring organisation and not by an ITT provider.

Yes, I find when I'm going through a maths skills question or some aspects of chemistry, it is much more effective to model my process on the whiteboard than just flash up a worked example on a PowerPoint. You do have to have confidence in your own maths skills though, or else have made notes beforehand!

Or, alternatively, for things like graph drawing, I will do it under a visualiser, or just model to the group of students who need it.

I actually really like gathering the students who don't know where to start in one area of the room and they can follow along step by step until they feel comfortable e.g. some only need to see how I'm going to draw the scale, some get confidence when they've plotted a few points with me, and some want support with the whole thing (hopefully as they progress through the year/ school this group gets smaller and smaller).

I don't have any data to prove this is more effective than just showing the steps on a PowerPoint, but students tell me they like it.

There are lots of reasons why the centralisation of plans and resources is not a good thing:

• ensuring the quality of the plans and materials is incredibly difficult,
• always teaching from the plans of others, or from schemes, massively deskills the teacher in lesson planning / creation and their ability to design an effective and meaningful learning journey. This is particularly true if it's been that way over time,
• the more experienced teachers (who often deliver the higher quality lessons) are typically the ones who don't use full written plans and certainly don't produce highly detailed documents that would be useable by someone else,
• you lower the degree of ownership a teacher has over his/her class. Less ownership means, ultimately, a lower sense of responsibility and, in time, a lack of care,
• drawing from pre-existing plans / schemes means that the teacher doesn't have to improve their own knowledge of a topic in order to plan meaningful lessons. It's a shortcut and means that the teacher often cannot handle more complex questions from the children as their own knowledge isn't where it needs to be for the unit,
• there's no personalisation for the classes, their prior learning, the point they are in their learning journey, or for the teacher's own individual style.

In short, teaching from someone else's plans is, generally, shit.

I agree. I took on a year 11 class this year and while there is a full set of teaching material on the network, it's just not usable for me.

I dipped into it the other day. 2 hours rewriting their worksheet and the PPT had a calculation error on it I didn't notice till a student pointed it out!

I've learnt a lot about the course and how to simplify complex concepts for this age group from planning it, although it has taken ages.

Something that hasn't been explicitly mentioned is that behaviour management becomes difficult with someone else's stuff. You need to be totally confident in your material so you can pay attention to what the kids are doing/saying/asking.

It's bad enough having to deliver a mystifying PHSE every week -- at least I can do Economics my way!