e.g. Tales of Two Cities, VCE literature guide, membership...
No one denies the value of a well-designed lesson. Without careful curation, the experience of the classroom can be fragmented, confusing, busy without purpose.
Lesson planning involves the ongoing development of capacities that go beyond organisational thinking and preparation. As English teachers move through their careers and gain more experience, they develop a keen sense of how a plan will enable learning for diverse students; how things can unfold so that there is exploration, meaning, and clarity; how lessons build upon what’s been done prior and link to where the learning is heading. A single lesson plan is part of a map; a personalised map that says something about the curator as well as the students and their community.
Lesson planning combined with being responsive to learning opportunities as they arise requires expertise and is central to the nature of effective teaching. These complex capacities are refined over time through opportunities for critical reflection on practice (Loughran, 2010). A recent international study (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017), focused on the features of high-performing systems around the world, found that opportunities for collaborative, contextualised curriculum planning and approaches like Lesson Study support teachers to think through their reasoning and are central to highly effective teaching and learning.
Lesson planning is currently in the spotlight (see the Victorian Lesson Plans and the AERO Practice Guide) and it is a good time to ask why. Sequences of endorsed English lessons are now provided by the Victorian Department of Education. They align with the new Victorian Teaching and Learning Model (VTLM 2.0) and, for this reason, there is pressure in some schools to use them. Supplying teachers with externally prepared lesson plans can also be understood as a response to unmanageable workloads in schools and to the perception by teachers that there is limited support from schools and systems (Longmuir et al., 2022). Providing English teachers with script-like lesson plans can also be seen as a reaction to the urgent shortage of English teachers in this state where there are increasing levels of out-of-field teaching (Hobbs et al. 2022).
Externally produced lesson plans are also widely available on the internet and produced through AI. While US research has found that AI-generated lesson plans are uninspiring, traditional and fail to promote critical thinking, challenging workforce conditions can mean that teachers have little choice but to rely on such resources.
It is timely for us to investigate our practices in relation to lesson planning, to examine systemic expectations, to highlight the tensions we experience, and to unpack the approaches that enable success. Share the theme.