 Hello, this is the five minute lesson plan webinar designed for further education settings. My name is Ross Morrison McGill. I'm an experienced school leader. I've been teaching in schools across London for the past 20 plus years. Some of you may know me as Teacher Talker on Twitter. I also blog on teachertalker.co.uk. I've been doing this for almost a decade now and to the point where it's led people to ask me to write books, to speak at events and to teach a train and I'm lucky enough that the social media influence I have also helped shape government policy. So that's just a little bit about me and my background. If you want to connect with me, give me some feedback or follow up on a resource that hasn't quite worked. You can use the hashtag TT webinar. You can tweet that to me. I'll respond whether you're watching this today, next week, or in six months time or you can also email me on support at teachertalker.co.uk. The brief for this webinar is to support your lesson planning and to also offer a time-saving solution. But from my experience, it's also more important to shape your cognitive load and I'll come into this shortly in terms of how I can reduce your time but also sharpen up what you do for lesson planning to improve the quality of your teaching. So we're just going through a general welcome. I'm going to start off a little bit of theory leading into a bit more depth and then into some practical. I'll then finish off with some reflection and then finally with what next and how you can get in touch with me towards the end of the presentation. So I'm going to be talking about 30 minutes. You can pause and play throughout. I'll give you some indications throughout the presentation. So I hope you enjoyed and I hope you find it useful. So let's get started. There are three ways of lesson planning. Now I'm not expecting to see the graphic on the left-hand side. That is just an example of a lesson plan I wrote 10 years ago where it was focused on groups of students here, all the activities and all the resources that I needed and top middle bottom and all the different objectives and I was essentially focused on the activities and students but far away from the lesson content in terms of what students were learning. On the right hand side you've got an image of a doorknob, someone touching a doorknob. So we're all very busy people. There might be an incident before your lesson. You might have got a very busy week with looming deadlines etc etc. We literally touch the doorknob and then our lesson plan begins. So we've got two extremes. Detailed lesson planning, doorknob lessons and then there's the five-minute lesson plan which I'm advocating here which sits perfectly in the middle in terms of how you can plan lessons without too much detail but with also giving it some thought. So sitting perfectly in the middle. So throughout this session I'm going to ask you to think about what you're teaching, why and how and also advocating or promoting that lesson planning is not filling in a form. It's a thinking process and by using the five-minute lesson plan this can become a habit of thought. Before I do I just want to dispel some myths. First one students being busy in your lesson doesn't mean that they're learning nor does it mean that they're learning if you're teaching them. Now in my experience secondary education 11 to 18 years old we were told to have starters, mains, plenaries, ask certain questions, whatever else may be. Now there is a lot of research which I'll talk to throughout the presentation but context is key here and it's also king. We all have our different settings and advocate a certain approach will work better than some other examples or ideas in other settings. So the five-minute lesson plan from experience and sharing this over seven or eight years ago and having feedback from all different types of education settings as well as the nursing industry and the medicine field. So I'm pretty confident that this template can work in your setting which is why I'm advocating it. Now it'll take a bit of practice certainly doesn't take five minutes at the very beginning but if you make it a habit of thought and not a form for the exercise then hopefully it will make you a lot more confident in terms of your lesson planning, reduce your workload but get you to think about the learning rather than the doing. So we're trying to move away from your you focusing on what students are doing in lesson to more fine-tuning your thoughts into what students are learning and what you hope for the lesson to kind of pan out throughout your lesson plan to the actual doing of the plan. So we're going to go into an activity. Now before we do I'm going to keep coming back to these two questions. Where are your students starting from? Where do you want them to get to? So before I show you the next slide I want you to just think about a lesson that you're going to teach tomorrow next week whatever it might be and we're going to keep coming back to these two questions where your students starting from where do you want them to get to. So I'll advocate getting a bit of paper and a pen to hand pause this video and have those to hand because you're going to need them. Before you do take a look at this image. Now this image has got three simple objectives on it. I'm not going to give you five minutes but I'll give you a couple of minutes. Pause the video before you pause it just let me say this are these objectives designed to be for an activity or are they designed to have learning in mind so pause the video give yourself 30 seconds jot down an answer and I'll come back to you shortly. Okay so you've given yourself a bit of time you've got to know 12 times tables understand how rain works and then spell weekly vocabulary. So the one at the bottom spell we can weekly vocabulary is an activity. Now it might be learning if it was made more explicit it certainly is it might be for a test but it's looking at recalling knowledge that has already been learned. The other two equally the same to know so you've obviously got to know your type 12 times table and understand how rain works are a bit more focused on learning but throughout the presentation I'm going to ask you how we can unpick these objectives to make them a bit more clear and targeted to learning rather than to an actual activity so it shifts students and yourself in terms of lesson planning away from doing exercises to learning. So let's get into a bit more detail in terms of theory so that's just a little warm-up. There are three classic traps of lesson planning I'm going to go through the three I wonder if you can recognize yourself falling into any of these traps. The first one the activity focus planning you come across an activity you then re-engineer the entire lesson around this object or this idea that you've got to try and match the outcomes to actually what you want the students to do. Now using experience and some work from staff in my school we discuss this quite a lot in some of our training exercises and we try to move away from students being busy or being students appearing to be learning because they were busy. If you work in tough situations where you got difficult students it's quite easy to design the entire lesson around an activity or an object and then backfill the lesson by keeping students busy with with extra exercises. So for an example I'm gonna ask my students to design a child's first toothbrush one or two students finish very quickly for whatever reason whether they're gifted or frustrated with the lesson or can't be bothered. I then say as the teacher at the front right you need to draw another five or ten more color them all in annotation etc etc and therefore I'm expanding the work to fill the time available for its completion rather than focusing on the learning. The second trap is coverage focus planning. This might start we've all been there you know we want to reduce our own workload we take a schema work off a shelf or resource online or somebody else gives it to us as we teach a new class and then we cover their content rather than considering our own teaching style or our students that are in our class so I might design a schema work designed for my students who may be low ability working in challenging situations and then this would not work in another school where students have higher outcomes or progress and attainment where they can actually be further challenged with a bit more refined curriculum content. So it's important again to keep context key when you're downloaded other people's resources or using other resources that being handed even if it includes a colleague in your own setting where you teach in the same students but you might have different different preferences in terms of your teaching or you might actually be teaching in a different environment where you've got limited resources. Secondly over time this can become an exercise and getting through the curriculum so you might pick up someone else's schema work there might be 40 individual lessons throughout the academic year of a 38-week year or whatever it might be and you want to get through all the content rather than focusing on the needs of your students where they might get stuck on a particular concept you might have to go back over it and go into detail so that it really is understood before moving on whereas you might find another topic actually has three or four weeks of work because that teacher might have been not very confident in delivering that content so that's maybe explains why they've given more time aside to deliver the material so context is key particularly when dealing with another person's learning objectives or a schema work. The third track we've all done it I might have done it in this presentation you know I've planned 30 minutes we've only got through the first part in 10 is over planning too many activities too many objectives you don't break them down and they're not differentiated you don't give students a choice you might have a starter or an object or something linked to the lesson in terms of the learning and then it gets over complicated it might lead to a distraction and then what that does it generally leads to under learning so there was some truth in the saying keep it simple or less as more we've all been there so it's important to keep that in mind so back to our activity before we go in these two questions and I'm out of the third where are your students starting from where do you want them to get to how will you know they're there so I've left a couple of slides in here that I'm going to ask you to pause and play read through these questions in terms of how do you set an objective and how do you plan for effective learning and then also pause and come back to this slide in terms of how do you achieve goal-setting now my experience we might have to ask teachers to write three different types of objectives almost some what could should what I'm advocating is rather than having various goals written down to cover all your bases and all your students just focus on an objective that considers probably number five on this screen so I'm going to ask you to pause next slide you might want to download this particular page slide here and print it off and I would like you to just think about a lesson that you're going to be teaching so again this keep the same lesson I'm going to ask you to keep coming back to and design a series of goals for that lesson so it starts off with I will XYZ so whatever that might be linked to your curriculum or it might be design a Charles toothbrush jot down three or four ideas on this on this slide or on a bit of paper to hand and we're going to come back to it throughout the presentation so pause it spend a couple of minutes writing down three or four examples okay so it's important that teachers are clear and precise about the knowledge and skills you want students to learn not what you want them to do so again it's coming back to that learning trumps activity and we want to focus on the learning at all times so how you can do that with these words there's some command words if you go back to your objectives if you add in I will and one of these words you are starting to link and a command and being very clear and precise about what you want the students to learn not we want them to do but then I would also then consider the so why test so what I mean by this is you might say I will design five children's first toothbrush and I would then question why you want them to do that what that does is then it unpicks the justification for your lesson objectives so I'm going to come into a bit more detail here pause the next slide this one and go back to your original four or five objectives your goals that you set and then by adding in the why use the connective so that so here's one example designer Charles toothbrush so that and then if you think of your success criteria or your curriculum or your specification by using some of that vocabulary in there you can then start to link your objective to an assessment criteria and then suddenly you start to have very clear and precise objectives that could be perfectly pitched to assessment criteria that to goal-setting and learning rather than just an activity so pause and play these slides as you want to go through but here are here is a good way to break down objectives I won't go through them all now and but if you can pause the slide and work them work your way through the answers then you'll be starting to get very clear goals set at the start of your lesson which I want us to use when we come to the actual five-minute plan which we're moving into next so a little bit of practical before we start some practical I want to just reference the work of Mary Myatt who's a an officer inspector or an education consultant she's a speaker and author she's written this brilliant book called High Challenge and Low Threat and Mary talks about pitching your lesson to a point where there's a sufficient high challenge and a low enough threat where the students can flow between anxiety and boredom now if we can get our objectives right and are delivering the classroom where the students aren't feeling low in apathy and bored and they're not feeling anxious because the pitch is a little bit too high but you can do this between your 5 10 30 students in your class to get them all into this area then you're pretty much going to start to be very successful in the classroom and students learning attitude and skills will start to develop as you challenge them according to their needs so how can you do this from a lesson pot planning point of view well let me let me demonstrate so in our activity before we begin again I want you to think of a lesson that you've got tomorrow or next week and get yourself a blank piece of paper you might want to actually download the five-minute lesson plan from this resource so there should be a link that's been shared with you if you can't locate it you can go to teacher toolkit.co.uk or type in the five-minute lesson plan on a search engine or on my website itself and you should be able to find the template you can download and what I'd like us to do is just spend a bit of time working through this together so that you can understand how this lesson plan template can form your lesson planning thinking and if it became a habit it can improve your thought process in terms of lesson planning so pause the video print off a copy grab a pen and we're going to dedicate five minutes to this part of the presentation okay you'll notice on the five-minute lesson plan there are several sections or areas what I would like us to do is leave the stickability section zone blank until the very end and I'm going to come back to that later and there's a reason for that and then I'm going to work through all the different sections and explain what they mean and give you some examples in the presentation there's a video so I'm not going to play it now but it's the five-minute plan again you can go on to YouTube you can go on to my website and you can watch this digital version or the recording of me filling in one of these online now you can get this lesson plan on available online at the five-minute lessonplan.co.uk with a number five and you can complete one online you can download it as a PDF or you print one off and fill it on paper which would probably be my preference to people that are new to using this for the first time so here's our explanation so going step by step throughout the plan and again keeping the stickability box to the very end we start off with the big picture so here's the screenshot this is the part on the top left of your five-minute plan this is the lift pictures at work what's happening in your lesson so if you're speaking to someone else what did you last lesson what they're doing today what might they be doing next lesson this is a series of six or eight lessons or an eight-week course you can sum it up very quickly in this box with a short sentence or a couple of keywords that's all you need to describe what's what's going on it's just set the scene the next box is the objective so going back to the early part of the presentation about goal setting I would definitely advocate you frame an objective in terms of I will so that I would not advocate having students write them down it might be their preference that they want to write down your objectives you might prefer as a teacher to speak your objectives rather than write them down yourself you might want to give students a printed copy and but knowing the nature of teaching things change rapidly daily hourly in many cases so it might be a huge workload to try and write all those down prior to the lesson but by using the five-minute lesson plan you can consider what your objectives are there's no harm in sharing them verbally and asking students to record their own version down and but offer one or two choices then you start to deal with some differentiation in your lesson and then you can start to link this to the success criteria for all levels of ability engagement now this part of the lesson plan not every lesson needs to be engaging some lessons require very hard work but lessons can be engaging with hard work and the term engagement is a misnomer for having fun in lessons now and it gets a bit of a bad name now and then to term engagement but what I mean by this is a hook so how do you hook students into your lesson it's not always required every lesson we know that you might have a very interesting object you might have a story to tell that links to the learning you might have students learn or sorry you might have students pitch a particular part of the lesson and increase engagement students might deliver parts of the lesson whatever it might be something meaningful and exciting that just changes the dynamics of the lesson can be enough to make a lesson last a long time in terms of learning how do we get those lessons that we all remember as children to be embedded in our minds for the next 20 years we can't do it every lesson but there's certainly something for us to consider in terms of how to make lessons more interesting the next part of the box AFL stands for assessment for learning so hopefully you've got your specification to hand you've got your assessment criteria you've got your lesson in mind that you're teaching how can you link the different learners in your class to the assessment criteria in terms of what you're delivering for this lesson what AFL strategies assessment strategies could you use in the lesson to gauge the student progress there are many examples you could have students with a whiteboard in the screen so they give you back in some answers you can do thumbs up thumbs down red yellow green cards to show understanding and you can use questioning techniques pose pause pounce bounce which is a technique described with another resource on teacher talk at dot code at UK there's also a great resource called the question matrix which you download which also gets teachers to consider what questions they'd ask students to gauge the learning throughout the lesson but give some assessment for learning some consideration in terms of your lesson plan so you consider what students are doing in the lesson and how they could assess themselves in terms of making progress the next box now this is not exclusive to literacy it also includes numeracy but you might want to break down the etymology of various words so that students understand the root meaning which might then help extrapolate the background or how words are then defined it's very good to reference subject terminology help students understand keywords that need to be spelled to score marks in an exam it's just something that you should consider in terms of subject curriculum content including numeracy so that you've got that part considered in terms of how students will learn it's important to keep literacy as a high profile you can do this by asking students to read out objectives or to read materials in your lesson but again Context is king you know what works in your lesson so give it a consideration when it comes to your own lesson planning the next part is probably the hardest to achieve differentiation now differentiation it's key here that it's it's approached over time over a large number of lessons rather than the one-off lesson you've got your class data the hand you've got the prior data the targets you've got different student abilities SCN students English as additional language you need to consider all your students as well as the context of your subject and the lesson itself as well as your environment to consider a seating planner if I was teaching you know when I talk students at a level age 16 to 18 years old they were always given a seating plan I would even consider this in an adult setting too because it puts you in control it allows you to understand where Johnny Sarah and George are sitting or Ahmed Sarah and Fatima and then you can consider their high middle and low abilities you can pitch them together or at random or by gender and then you start to put differentiation at the heart of your lesson planning and then it starts to make learning more meaningful to you from a planning approach but also to the individual in the classroom when they're learning they'll understand that you've got their best interests at heart the final box I want us to consider as the learning episodes now there are four boxes at the bottom of this template it doesn't necessarily mean there should be a four-part lesson far from it but you might want to change the titles on here on the digital version you can change these to whatever topic that you want or heading I always consider last minute changes so if I've scribbled all my lesson plan down I might leave one blocks blank so that five or ten minutes before the lesson itself something has changed or resources not available or there's an additional bit of support and then I can just consider how the lesson might change before it actually takes place but in the learning episodes consider what parts of the lesson will be led by the students or led by the teacher what's going to happen when you transits from one part of the lesson to another you might shift from the front of the lesson we do in a bit of theory to the back we're going to do some practical and you want to consider different resources and different transitions throughout the lesson and then how this impacts on the dynamics of your planning but also the dynamics of learning that take place in the classroom so we've gone through that very quickly just under five minutes we haven't quite finished yet we're going to just go into a bit of reflection in terms of the cognitive part of this template so I'm going to come into the stick ability shortly so this is not teaching to suck eggs I want us to look at cognition in terms of lesson planning and more importantly the why so on your lesson plan look back over you might want to pause it look back over and think about what you're teaching the students and then I'm going to actually the why test why are you teaching these objectives why are you differentiation for those students why have you got this keyword on your lesson plan and not another and if we consider those why questions in in all aspects of your plan you can start to break down what where we're actually going to go in terms of stick ability now I'm going to bring in a bit of research here from professor John Hattie so there's John Hattie here he's well known for right invisible learning for teachers and these ranks teacher effects there's about 137 or 145 now now to put it into context an effect size of 1.0 is the equivalent of two grades leap at GCSE over the same period of time when compared to other students an effect size of 0.5 is equivalent to one grade so we look here the quality of your teaching in the classroom and not labeling students in between here this is where we make one grade over the course of an academic year I call stick ability teacher clarity where you're concise about the objectives and your success criteria if you're always doing this in your lessons whether it's written or verbally and consistently you can start to have a significant impact on on student outcomes in your class breaking this down a bit more detail how you use questioning if you can't see this here we do that how you goal set how you are providing direct instruction using keywords using techniques such as a goal setting which is a teaching strategy all these overall has a positive impact on student progress over the course of the year more importantly met metacognitive strategies so by me asking you to think more cognitively about your lesson planning not what you're doing but why we can start to address this then we can start to refine your lesson planning and start to have more clarity in terms of your delivery in the classroom so how do we do that so let's go back to those four question three questions and then the fourth one added here where are your students starting from in terms of your lesson planning where do you want them to get to how will you know they are there and how can you help them get there so to finish off we're going to look at the stick ability box and I'm going to recommend what you can do next so stick ability what is it well it's here on your lesson plan we know that so much at this point and I would like to pause the next slide before we fill it in because I'm going to offer you three or four questions I want you to think about and I'm actually going to move on in terms of the lesson webinar itself so if you pause this slide here let me now explain what stick ability is so think about what you're asking the students to do now we've thought about why it's the why I would like you to record it in the stick ability now I've been using this for 10 plus years I can pretty much put one word in here to sum up what I would like students to bring back to next lesson so if they were designing a child's tooth brush which I've kept referring to throughout this presentation the reason for that might be because I want them to consider the materials or to learn how to annotate to then reach the next assessment criteria in terms of their assessment so in this yellow stick ability box I would write an assessment keyword which I would then also list in the keywords section of the planet itself this keyword let's call it ergonomics or anthropometrics whatever it might be in terms of a design terminology once I've broken that word down and students understand it and I'm questioning it to kind of gauge the learning I would then write the word in this box and this is the word I want students to bring back to next lesson before we move on so that's stick ability and that's the struggle zone there's lots of great blogs online I'm just going to reference here Lev Vygotsky as Soviet psychologist if you look at this diagram here on the right this is what the learner can't do in terms of the zone of proximal development this outer green ring is with your assistance as a teacher you can guide students to learn specific things so I would teach anthropometrics or ergonomics once I've embedded this into less or broken it down in terms of success criteria and a learning goal and considered the why to make a stick ability section of the plan I can then start to test if the learner can do this alone and then we're starting to get the students stretched and keep them in the struggle zone so there's again this great graphic you look on the left hand side you've got the comfort zone on the right you've got the panic zone so again thinking back to Mary my it's high challenge low threat we want to keep students in this struggle zone where there's high challenge and low stress where they have to think but also effective learning can take place not limited learning or cognitive overload but where the thinking is required there are challenge sufficiently and I appreciate that teachers teach in a very mixed ability setting many of many occasions but by considering the struggle zone perhaps offering a choice or differentiated objectives you can start to pitch your lesson where you can keep your students in the struggle zone so that they make progress so in terms of your lesson plan to finish the webinar go back to what you've scribbled down on your paper or on your five-minute lesson plan template look at the what what what you want students to learn your objectives think about how you're in gonna engage and then this feeds into the stick ability the why so what are you doing how you're gonna hook the students in and then why and this is what you want students bring back next lesson so pause the video you might want to record a sentence in here over time once this becomes a habit of thought not a form for the next size you might drop down just one word here and then you've got the art of lesson planning the cognition side starting to be developed in your own thinking process in terms of lesson planning so I believe the five-minute lesson plan saves teachers time it focuses on what matters now it takes a bit of practice certainly can't fill it in in five minutes the first time that you do it but if you keep practicing this work with colleagues in your own institution practice it together download some extra resources on my blog I'm going to be some further reading to look at to you might want to think about how you can refine this to make sure that you can scribble down your thoughts on a template such as the five-minute lesson plan in less than five minutes it supports your workload and actually focuses the teaching on the learning rather than on the activity so to finish off here's my takeaway seven points to give you be clear be precise consider the so why in terms of what you're learning look at your curriculum plans that maybe someone else has given you then how would you match this into your own individual lesson plan how do you develop and refine this so that it's relevant to you to your own strengths and to the needs of your students always consider differentiation but as a disclaimer consider it as an overtime method rather than an individual consideration or a teaching strategy for every lesson it's not sustainable you've got your student data you've got your seat and plan you've got the targets you've got some key techniques that you use in your lessons you've considered the engagement you considered the stickability then you're already in a very strong place where you're considering the needs of your students regardless of number of students in your class and needs and number six use a seat and plan I don't care how old the students are it puts the teacher in control it makes students know that it's your domain and you start to have student names written on a seat and plan on a bit of paper in your diary you can start to target key questions you can start to look at the data as you teach and you can start to make sure that you've got the best interests at heart rather than them turning up to your lesson where they think they're in control after all they're in the lesson where they're here to learn and to try and achieve a qualification and by using a sitting plan you can start to consider all those factors above from one to five the final one we all like engaging lessons we all like teachers who show that they take their teaching and learning seriously who like being in front of the students who like being in the class you plan whether it's an object or an interest in activity and you reengineer that into your lesson plan then you're going to fall into one of those classic traps that I've mentioned at the start of the presentation but if you plan a flying start or an interesting object to hook the learning in that then links in with the learning that's taking place as part of the main body of the lesson then you're going to start to get students engaged you start to consider the cognition and the stickability and then you're starting to get on to the right track in terms of reducing your workload and making learning much more feasible and attainable in your lessons so I hope those are useful I have some further reading here to finish off I've got three links so you've got a five minute lesson plan here so five minute lesson plan so from teacher talk at dot code UK if you're interested in other templates there are over 30 different versions you can get students to self assess the work there are ones for assemblies coursework and behavior there's all sorts of variations on the website so take a look and if you're still not sure what I mean by stickability then there's a blog what is stickability there that you can read it takes you through a bit more detail than what this webinar offers in terms of what it might mean and but again as I would advocate this takes a bit of practice for you can get it below five minutes but hopefully the template itself will help you shape your lesson planning processes and refine them so that it becomes a habit of thought not a form for an exercise so that's it everybody my name is Ross McGill you can find me online at teacher talk it if you're interested there's my website here and then you've got my email address you want to get in touch again on Twitter use the hashtag TT webinar if you've got any immediate questions or you want to follow up on some resources if you're interested in some new ideas my first book 100 ideas it's got all sorts in there that you can consider applicable further education settings if you're a new teacher you might want to consider a teacher toolkit which considers the first five years of teachers and the process of you going through being resilient in your first year then thinking more intelligently in your second year and reducing your workload etc and then my new book out in September 2017 mark plan teach which considers 30 ideas back with evidence and with some psychological insights as to why things work better than others so there you go that's me there my books if you'd like to book me for some training you can at teacher talk at dot code at UK thank you for watching and this presentation has been designed to be given as a webinar thank you for reading the resource thank you for tuning in and goodbye