The Project
Learning to plan lessons has long been seen as essential in learning to teach but practices now vary. Many schools expect teachers to use pre-prepared plans or standardised PowerPoints. This approach may address workload pressures, but it raises concerns about teacher autonomy, professionalism and long-term retention. Other schools encourage teachers to adapt shared resources or to plan afresh within broad guidelines. New teachers must therefore learn not only how to make sense of existing plans but also how to plan from scratch and respond to curriculum reform. If novices have no chance to plan for themselves, how can they learn to interpret plans created by others?
Focusing on history teaching, this research asks how lesson planning is currently understood and carried out in schools and what this means for how new teachers should be trained. It seeks to generate and test ideas for new approaches to learning to plan within university-school partnerships, examining how feasible and valuable they are for different stakeholders.
The study begins with interviews in 15 local schools, involving senior leaders, heads of history, mentors and student teachers. The findings and participants’ reflections on their implications will then inform a national survey across 300 schools. The outcomes include academic and professional articles and will underpin a grant application to design and evaluate new ways of preparing history teachers for the real planning demands of their careers.
This project is linked to a wider Teaching Enhancement and Development Project (co-directed by Katharine Burn with Judith Hillier and Liam Guilfoyle), looking at learning to plan across a range of subjects, to inform not only the PGCE but our Masters in Learning and Teaching and in Teacher Education.
