The lost art of planning

On my travels, I speak to hundreds if not thousands of experienced teachers and school leaders and there’s a common conversation in an, “all roads lead to Rome” way, that always seems to crop up in most conversations. This is the seemingly, “lost art of planning”.

When I first started training in the mid 90s, and teaching in the late 90s, much of planning was akin to the “one foggy day” variety, in that for some teachers their planning consisted of what they fancied teaching that day, hence the, “one foggy day” stories being written after a misty commute. But that obviously wasn’t everywhere; one foggy day was set against a mixed landscape of spidergram planning, some use of textbooks or workcard schemes for maths, and the odd set of photo prompts for Geography or RE but that was pretty much it. Most schools had a photocopier, (although I had many teacher friends who were issued one ream of paper for their class at the beginning of a year and told that was the total number of copies they were allowed to make), the fanciest maybe a laminator, and some still had the unique whiff of the banda machine floating about. Your resources were yourself, a board (probably still chalk), a pen and the National Curriculum. Nobody had Powerpoint, a projector or a visualiser. OHP acetates were usually the preserve of assemblies only, and the laptops for teachers scheme was yet to be rolled out, so virtually no teachers had a computer or laptop, and there were definitely no mini whiteboards.

Sounds pretty archaic, but, it was, as we would say in KS1 History, “within living memory” and definitely well within the professional memories of many experienced colleagues. There were rarely centralised resources and when these were available, were often photocopies of hand written spidergrams, charts or vague “topic” titles like, “All around my town”.

As an NQT (ECT) I had to write all of my units of work for 12 subjects from scratch for a full 5 days per week of teaching. I was given unit titles and a copy of the National Curriculum documentation, but no support to plan them. I had a mixed age Year 4 and Year 5 class in a ramshackle mobile all by myself and no one else in the school had that mix of year group so I had no one to plan with. There was no PPA time at that point and only a couple of hours once a fortnight for the first couple of terms as NQT (ECT) time. There was definitely no PPA room or planning space other than the staff room which  had no tables and was only ever used for sandwich consumption, wrestling with a cantankerous urn, and the odd diary dates staff meeting.

This meant I had to plan everything myself. I had to plan the year, the units and the individual lessons for every subject for every lesson for 5 days a week for 38 weeks. That’s a hell of a lot of planning, especially when there was also… no internet, as this was in its infancy and downloading anything via dial up took approximately five business days. But that was just how it was. That wasn’t unusual or odd and I definitely wasn’t being expected to do anything out of the ordinary whatsoever

Now, I know this has an air of the Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch Monty Python – Four Yorkshiremen (youtube.com) . It is, with hindsight, a far from ideal situation for any new teacher to be put in but it was fairly standard practice for every teacher in most schools to design the sequence, structure, delivery and associated resources for every lesson they taught. The lack of digital presentation tools and digital shared files meant that file sharing and pre prepared resources simply couldn’t be used. The only resource you had in the room really was yourself. You then had to decide the focus, structure and flow of the lesson as it hadn’t been crafted via Powerpoint or similar beforehand, and you had to do it all live with chalk in real time.

What this meant though was that teachers had to become effective within the art of planning. It meant that they had to set the direction of travel, were making decisions both at the point of design and delivery and had to have a zoom-out, long-term, big-picture overview of what was going to be taught over time, as well as the individual lesson pixels. By having to make these design decisions and knowing the whole curriculum not just the individual lesson, this gave colleagues a rich understanding of how curriculum and teaching worked. By having to design the units and their objectives it meant that secure curricular narratives were developed and that the direction of travel as well as the shape of a lesson were developed as mental models.

Towards the end of the 1990s, the new National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy documents landed. These landed generally in two ways, the first being an outcry amongst some that this was overly prescriptive and crushed autonomy and destroyed well established practice. The other way was where they were fallen upon in a way not dissimilar to a pack of professionally starved wolves which was the way I fell upon them. In the empty wilderness of curriculum planning, here was a potential oasis giving a little shape, structure, and coherence to whole school curriculum design and implementation.

However, those initial strategy documents were not a panacea. Anyone who taught in primary in the early days will still get an involuntary flinch if you mention the word “carousel”. Let’s face it, there was some mad stuff going on in its early days; “tiara” anyone? If you know, you know; f you don’t, be thankful. But what the strategies didn’t do is give a day by day set of fully resourced curriculum materials. They gave, as they were self titled, a framework. This meant that teachers still had to decide which objectives they should group together; how often to revisit elements; which order to teach things in; which texts to use; which manipulatives or representations to use. It still left room for critical professional thinking. In order to ensure the framework was implemented you needed to read pretty much the whole thing. You needed to read and get comfortable with the whole range of objectives for your year group and work out how to carve these up. You had to, and again this sounds so archaic, photocopy the big A3 sheet with all of your year group’s objectives on and then physically cut them out with scissors and rearrange them into units that matched your year group and sequencing then glue them onto another sheet of paper. Because you had to interact with them at this organisational level, you gained insight and overview into your longer term teaching and curriculum design. You were a landscaper, a curriculum cartographer and a curator of content and not only did you have ownership but you had authored the entire narrative.

This cutting up of photocopied objectives is of course, not a process or a moment in time I would advocate going back to; quite frankly elements of it were utterly hatstand but the outcome was a swathe of teachers who had internalised a progression model, who knew the direction of travel and had a common and shared understanding of a curriculum both at long and short term. And that knowledge has somehow been fractured. There is often a professional fault line between colleagues who have been trained in or have experience of curriculum design and development in this way and those who have never had the professional luxury of curriculum curation and have instead only ever been receivers of pre prepared materials.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that supporting colleagues to have time to think about actual teaching by removing the burden of reinventing the wheel is a bad thing, far from it. What I’m saying is that in the rush to ensure we have processed the curriculum into easily accessible and digestible products for colleagues to use, we have potentially removed in that processing some of the professional nutrients that are needed for a rich and robust professional understanding of how teaching and curriculum work symbiotically. Many colleagues I speak to bemoan this “lost art of planning” and how it can lead to atomised teaching or an over reliance on pre prepared, often digital, resourcing. This lost art encompasses everything from a robust mental model of the wider curriculum to knowledge “of” a curriculum – how it fits together, how it ebbs and flows, where its tricky and tangly bits are and where are the little diamonds within it to add sparkle are located. To only ever be a professional recipient of the thinking of others is not teaching in all its fullest, especially if you are in possession of experience or curiosity or a want to view a wider vista. Having opportunities then to plan more than for next week or next lesson, to think more about longer term design as well as shorter term delivery are becoming luxuries and an associated lost art. Very often when I ask colleagues what they are doing in planning sessions they are tweaking pre existing slides made by someone else. They are acting as pedagogical tailor not curriculum couturier.

I also know that learning to plan takes time and that time is a finite commodity both in ITT and ECT and established teachers’ days. Deep thinking about planning and the time to explore, tinker with a mental curriculum sketchpad is all time consuming. When I think of the hours and weeks I spent learning how to plan at single lesson, weekly, medium and long term it formed a significant part of my early career. But, just like anything hard won, it’s never left me. It’s a way of thinking, a professional mindset and format that now forms part of my teacher toolkit DNA.

I do worry that colleagues in all phases may now not be getting the opportunities to immerse themselves in the richness that is developing critical and professionally creative and responsive thinking around planning both at individual lesson and longer term level. I am concerned that this skillset and associated knowledge is a dying art, replaced by resources prepared far away from individual classrooms with their quirks and local nuance. I worry that the professional curriculum critique of what works and why, and the associated rich mental models are being replaced by identikit resources predicated on efficiency but with a potential longer term erosion of professionalism.

Fully resourced curriculum materials have often been tried at scale. The old QCA unit plans and the later fully resources aspects of the NNS to name but two. And they didn’t work. Teachers became hung up on ensuring coverage and keeping pace with an externally determined schedule and spent more time adjusting existing plans to fit their context rather than on designing contents and sequencing that matched their school’s organisation, staffing, resourcing and needs of the children. In the rush to give everyone everything, we can therefore seemingly end up taking away something crucial.

Knowing where you’re going is a key part of any journey. Knowing why you’re going that way, using that route is essential and requires a conscious understanding of the route to be travelled. If we only ever end up somewhere because a satnav got us there, then no matter how skilful our driving it will always be a happy accident that we did indeed reach our destination. The lost art of planning is exactly this. Yes, we need to free up orienteering space to focus on the road ahead and drive well, but not to the detriment of a deep understanding of exactly where you’re trying to get to and why.

I’d therefore love to see colleagues afforded the opportunity to reengage with planning. To see it not as simply one P in PPA time but as a critical roadmapping of the direction of travel of their professional pedagogical efforts. I’d love there to be time to really analyse content, sequencing, timing, emphasis, and the why we teach what we teach in the order, way and emphasis that we do. It takes a long time to read through and adapt a powerpoint. It also takes a long time to talk about and develop a deep and secure knowledge of how and why planning at different scales works. In the rush towards efficiency we mustn’t forget that some things take time and that understanding how to plan is one of these pedagogical slow cooker dishes.

This is also not about rose tinted teacher glasses, believe me, no one wants to return to an ECT planning 5 days’ worth of teaching with no PPA or ECT time and no support, but we do need to ensure that we’re not deskilling through over scaffolding. The long arc of planning is as important to understand as the short term trail of a lesson or week.

If we don’t know where we’re going, and the pre prepared satnav breaks, what will we do and where will we go?