The Times Education Supplement (TES) today reports a battle between teachers and management at a City Academy in Middlesborough. Teachers are taking industrial action against the Unity City Academy senior management team, following a demand that each teacher hands in a lesson plan for each lesson.
Whilst a plan per se, rather than off the cuff, turn and up and teach lessons, is definitely desirable, the bureaucracy of very detailed plans for the purpose not of teaching but external scrutiny are not. Firstly, writing out exhaustive lesson objectives, learning outcomes and resource lists can be a huge waste of time. For a teacher to explain the details of a lesson to someone else, will generally involve a lot more description than the teacher themselves would need.
Secondly, a fantastically detailed plan in no way guarantees either a fantastically planned lesson or how the actual lesson will be realised. As a teacher in the TES is quoted as saying: ‘Lesson planning is very important. But lesson plans themselves are not a particularly useful or truthful indicator of what has happened in a lesson.’
For these reasons, a school management team which is interested in tracking teachers’ performance, would be much better off not collecting in plans, but dropping into lessons. If nothing else, however good it may be the plan itself is immaterial if the delivery is poor.
Real live teaching has however become somewhat secondary today to filling out forms about teaching. The schools inspectorate, Ofsted, for example, now has so little time to inspect within the new “short, sharp” inspection regime, that it has become considerably more reliant on paper trails in judging quality than on observing teachers.
One of the arguments for paper trails such as lesson plans is that they provide more transparency. However if the classroom door remains closed as lesson plans are digested in the management team’s offices, this transparency can actually be a smokescreen of sorts. Furthermore, compliance rather than transparency is often the real aim of the game. Are teachers following official diktat to the “t”? This second issue can lead to contradictions. What teachers should be doing according to Whitehall has over the last ten years, frequently been found to be ineffective. When compliance is necessary in a tick-box system, teachers can - and do - end up in the perverse scenario where they are jumping through the official hoops on paper, but actually teaching to a plan which is more effective. The obvious difficulty with this, is that it involves a pointless charade beneficial only to those who want credit for the policies.