A 5Ps crib sheet

The 5Ps of effective lesson planning: purpose, preparation, pitch, pace and progress

The 5Ps - planning lessons that are fit for purpose

The ultimate purpose of any school leader, at any level, is to ensure that the pupils receive teaching of the highest quality. Some schools choose to be highly prescriptive about lesson planning but I believe that this makes teaching little more than a technical undertaking and not the imaginative, creative and exciting experience it ought to be for teachers and learners alike. Rather than providing a rigid proforma that must be followed I prefer giving teachers a framework within which they can create lessons. Starting with a sterile lesson plan sheet produces linear lessons where component B is considered after the construction of component A and so on through to the end of the lesson. The planning is linear and often the starter is set in stone by the time the main activities are planned. This can be avoided if the whole lesson is considered before a lesson plan is ever constructed.

A couple of years ago I introduced an approach I called the 5Ps. This suggested that before formally building a lesson plan teachers ought to consider 5 key areas all of which contribute to a successful lesson. The 5Ps stand for Purpose, Preparation, Pitch, Pace and Progress. For each one I ask colleagues to consider a set of questions regarding the construction of their lessons. These are:

Purpose

If a lesson is to be taught there must be a good reason for teaching it.

• What are you teaching? Why are you teaching this?
• Where does it fit into the curriculum/Schemes of Learning?
• How will it benefit the pupils?
• Will it increase knowledge, understanding or skills?
• How will you prepare the children for learning?
• How will the children know the Learning objective (give LO)?
• How will you remind the children of previous learning?
• How will the children know the Success Criteria (give SC)?

Preparation             

Are you ready to deliver the lesson?

• Do you have the right resources?
• Is the classroom fit for purpose?
• Do you need any special arrangements for the lesson?
• Are you safe (risk assessments)?
• How will you establish the appropriate atmosphere (behaviour for learning)?

Pitch     

The pitch of the lesson must ensure that all pupils can access the materials.

• Describe the type and range of differentiation required.
• Identify the range of ‘Levelness’ and what this looks like.
• Identify how extensions might be made if necessary (higher or lower).
• Are there any ‘Special Needs’ (higher, lower, vulnerable groups) and how will the needs be met?

Pace     

The pace must maintain interest and ensure learning.

• What are the activities for the lesson going to be?
• How frequently will the activities change?
• How will the pupils know the time frame for each activity?
• What ways will be used for recording such that pace is maintained?

Progress             

You and children must know that progress has been made.

• How will you know that progress has been made?
• When will pupils refer to and reflect on the Learning Objectives?
• How do you know progress has been made?
• How do the children know they have made progress?
• Will there be opportunity for peer assessment?

The first two areas, purpose and preparation, are the scene setting, contextual elements, whilst the other three provide the meat of the lesson. When these questions have been considered it is far more likely that a teacher will have a good idea of what their successful lesson should look like rather than undertaking a simple, linear lesson plan.

This approach also provides a powerful framework for lessonobservations and feedback. When I watch a lesson I tend to focus on one of pitch, pace or progress. It means that the observation can be focused whilst covering enough to be useful. In addition the feedback is couched in these terms and so observer and observed share a common vocabulary. This methodology was worth its weight in gold during a recent OFSTED where this underpinned our lesson planning. It came as no surprise that all teaching was seen to be at least good because the 5Ps cover all the bases of good lessons.

Teaching should be a creative process, feel free to use this to put some of the creativity back into your staff’s planning.

Update: please take a look at the 6th and 7th P which I describe elsewhere; hopefully they may provide the icing on the cake!

Looking after leaders (including you)

I have written many times about emotional well-being, stress and personal impact but that normally appears in my other blog "Teachers' Minds Matter" however this is the place to discuss the well-being of leaders. This article is simply a personal take on the matter and designed to ask you to reflect on your own actions and those of others. If you want a definitive view then I would recommend Staying Ahead by Viv Grant. In the posting "It's alright to be afraid" I talked about the courage that it takes to be a teacher and a leader. This post is largely anecdotal and may seem a little scrappy but I hope that the opinions and tales may be useful.

The danger of super-heads and super-leaders (even if you are one)!
Take care with your workload, for 2 reasons, firstly the impact on you and secondly on your colleagues. Hard work is one thing but inevitably your colleagues will look at you working your 60 hour week and thinking that they should be doing the same. Your actions place pressure on others (especially if you are good at your job) to aspire to your standards and workload. Unwittingly you could be making the lives of your colleagues much harder as they attempt to emulate you. Guilt is powerful and they may feel that if they are not matching you hour for hour then they are failing. I have worked for "super-leaders", and I always promised myself I wouldn't be one.

The first point was about personal impact. Be careful that the price you pay isn't too high. I would suggest annualising your hours and then working out how many 37.5 hour weeks you would need to do this amount of work. I tend to come out at around 60-ish weeks without holidays; that is far too much and I know I need to practise what I preach but please be wary. It is also salient to see then what you actually earn an hour! These hours will have an impact on relationships and potentially on both physical and mental health. So please be conscious of the demands.

Quickly forgotten
I understand that we do want to make an impact of the lives of children, we want to make learning fun, memorable and meaningful, but we need to ensure that we maintain balance. We can't be brilliant all of the time, we can't be hero teachers for 39 weeks a year and at times we do need to do a wordsearch just to allow us to take a breath. In my second post I worked with a venerable old science teacher who had been in the school for 30-odd years. He was a great teacher, the children loved him and the staff valued his wisdom. He took me under his arm and guided my early career. I was once off for a few days with a bad cold and came back to work probably too soon. He took me to one side and pointed out that I was not indispensable and ultimately I would only make it worse for myself and disadvantage the children more by being off longer.

But that wasn't the point I really anted to make. The teacher retired and was soon replaced. Within 2 weeks of the beginning of term his name was never mentioned again at school. 30-odd years off service and a 2 week legacy. No-one is irreplaceable. No matter how much you do, how hard you work and how much it impacts you you will be forgotten (unless you are catastrophically bad!). Have pride, do your job well, but don't sacrifice yourself for a legacy you will not have.

Stepping back
Many years ago I was working as a head of department. I tried to be a super-leader, working very long hours, placing unreasonable expectations on others, ruining my relationships at home and basically being a total arse. I eventually realised, though "prompted" by my wife, that this was all going horribly wrong and that changes were needed. Without dwelling on my home life too much I knew something had to give. I gave up the responsibility, handed over the load to a willing successor and went back to mainscale. Yes I missed the money but all of a sudden my week shortened by 20 hours, home became happier and I became healthier. By the time I left the school the hullabaloo over my stepping-down was long forgotten and by now I am a dim and distant memory only to be found in old year books.

Looking after your colleagues
Your colleagues will look to you for leadership and direction. My leadership goes beyond education and I regularly take on a pastoral role with staff. Whether you like it or not, you set the tome and expectations, you become a role model and so you have a responsibility to your staff to be a positive role model in all ways. Think of their well-being when bragging about hours worked, books marked and schemes of learning written. It may be unintentional but this is added pressure.

Looking after yourself
You have responsibilities, to your staff and probably family. Leadership in schools at any level can be physically tiring and emotionally demanding. The effects of these builds up over time and if you are not careful you hit a wall where pressure becomes stress, productivity drops like a stone and so does your emotional and physical health. So please work sensibly, get enough sleep, give yourself down-time, eat well and spend time with others.

An ex-colleague of mine used to pint out on a regular basis that you are a long time dead, so make sure you get in plenty of life whilst you can.

Down with management speak, the contentment revolution starts here!

On a recent holiday I was sat on the hotel balcony mulling over various matters and my wife asked me what was wrong. I explained that "I've got a problem". Without hesitation, but with tongue firmly in cheek she replied "A problem should be seen as an opportunity". Well this was like a red rag to a bull, and in a stream of consciousness and "robust" language I issued forth with a rant against this sort of nonsense.This is that rant.

My initial problem with her response was very simple, a problem is a problem, if it had been an opportunity I am sure that I would have said "I've got an opportunity". I am reasonable bright and I know the difference between the two, one is positive and one is negative. Maybe I'm being negative but I see a flat tyre as a problem, a nuisance, an inconvenience, rather than an opportunity to spend my time getting grubby and frustrated.

I have heard this trotted out on many occasions, so-called motivational speakers telling me (not discussing and debating, just telling) about opportunistic problems, but this is a case of the Emperor's new clothes, it isn't there. This is an opportunity to work harder and sort out something that someone else has done to make your life more challenging. In reality these management aphorisms have created their own mythology, a mythology which at its heart is designed to pile pressure on people, make workers compare themselves to each other, and to apply pressure to fit the mould of being an effective manager. Failure to turn a problem into an opportunity is seen as a failure.

I am not completely dismissive of all of this, there must be some wisdom here. Stephen Covey's "7 Habits..." states as Habit 7 that we should "sharpen the saw", in other words look after ourselves. But even this is still business focused, look after ourselves to make us more effective rather than for the sake of personal happiness. Unfortunately most of these maxims seem to be regurgitated junk or manifesto statements of sociopaths trying to squeeze the last drops of juice out of the orange by playing on feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

Behind the language is an implicit relationship between employer and employee. Business success and personal economic prosperity are at the heart of a majority of the books which populate the management bookshelves in airport bookshops (just an aside why are there 10 times more of these books than science or 100 times more than poetry?). I must admit that during my leadership career I have read many of these books, both general business management and specific educational management. My worry is that most of these books seem to ignore the humanity of colleagues, they are about the individual and just see others as cogs in a machine, cogs that either drive you or cogs that you drive. These cogs are generally not seen as a mutually beneficial machine, cogs are metallic and hard, impersonal and unemotional, but the reality of organisations is that the cogs are organic, these cogs are emotional, vulnerable and unique. Relationships are seen through an outcome-focused lens, a lens that equates professional success with output and profit. I would question if such a belief is sustainable and certainly whether everyone comes out on top.

This may sound like a socialist take on leadership, and may be it is, though for me emotions are as important as economics. At the beginning of the Bruce Springsteen's live video of Born to Run he says "remember in the end nobody wins unless everybody wins". When I first heard this as an idealistic teenager it stirred me, but now as a gnarled middle-aged man I still see it as a plausible maxim for ethically sound organisations, and especially schools. [A small aside I suspect staff at my previous school feared that it would be renamed Bruce Springsteen School].

Most schools are not profit making machines (even most private schools just break even and are charitable concerns) so why would we be wanting to use the language and philosophies of business where the raison d'etre is rarely the betterment of the whole community? Whilst schools operate within tight budgets, have expensive outgoings and often struggle to get to the end of the year, they are not businesses is the sense that the local supermarket is. I therefore feel that we need to be a little sceptical about adopting the philosophies of profit-making organisations where success is often judged in terms of profits and dividends. Ultimately what I am calling for (and also actively promoting) is a different metric of success. Can we see beyond the power, ego, personal gratification and wealth that apparently makes us "happy"? Can we aspire to be content? Can we make our ambition to achieve contentment? That contentment may be achieving good exam results with your classes, seeing low ability children make excellent progress or seeing a colleague thrive, none of which will make you richer. Could we have a simple ambition, to be content? Could school leadership set its main target to achieve whole school contentment?

We need to do something, teachers are leaving the profession in droves, there is a crisis in leadership and stress is going through the roof. Let's be brave, let's be content.

GCSE results 2016

It is not really a leadership development thing but I have written a piece about GCSEs, about why students should look on the bright side and why its time for parents to take responsibility.

Please take a read HERE.

Remember your colleagues have brains as well or "why I hate ice-breakers"

Over the years I have undertaken many activities which have induced terror in me, most often as a result of altitude and the potential death-inducing effect of gravity experienced on high mountains. But nothing compares to that feeling of terror I experience whenever a course-leader utters the word "ice-breaker" resulting in a tail-spin of fear and loathing as I descend to depths of misery! Why do I hate these apparently innocuous preliminaries? There are a variety of reasons so here are just a few.

Firstly I don't want to share details of my life, loves, hobbies, achievements, failures and so on with a bunch of strangers. Then I don't want to play silly games with a bunch of other people who also don't want to play games. Thirdly, do your job; I've come here to learn something, not bugger about. And fourthly (and in this list most importantly), I have a brain, I'm a professionally and academically successful and intelligent teacher, so treat me like one.

Before I go further here's a true story. Many years ago I attended a course (no idea what on) and I ended up on a table of relatively young female teachers (this was simply luck-of-the-draw). The ice-breaker was to share our most memorable days. My table-mates were either dim-witted or genuinely nosey since they all robotically poured out fond memories of recent wedding days. Utterly disinterested in the activity, and by now the banality of my colleagues, my turn raised some eyebrows. I happily explained that my most memorable day was seeing Stoke City beat Brentford at Cardiff's Millenium Stadium in a football playoff final. They struggled to comprehend how I placed this above my own wedding day, and their collective sense of humour failed completely when I explained that it was possible I would have another wedding day but I would never get to see Stoke win a playoff final again! Ice-breakers: treat with contempt!

In my list of objections the last one is the one I want to spend a little time discussing as I believe it is at the heart of good INSET as well as at the heart of good leadership, don't forget your colleagues have brains as well! 

I have now worked in every phase of education from nursery through to Universities and what I'm about to say is an observation rather than scientific fact, but by and large I have seen more primary colleagues treated as being brainless than in the secondary phase. This may be for a raft of reasons, none of which can be properly justified but I suspect that because there are far more primary heads than secondary that it stands a good chance that there are more poor primary heads than secondary (I'm not implying that the percentage is different), and also that secondary teachers, with their subject degrees (rather than education degrees), are a tad arsier! Please don't have a go at me over this point.

Here are some tips:

Discuss, debate and justify: if you can't justify your actions you are on slippery ice. Your colleagues will see through you and be asking what book did you get that idea from. Be prepared to discuss and debate your ideas, your colleagues may not agree with you but they will respect a cogent argument, supported by theory and evidence, and with a plan in tow. You must put in the leg work. Understand your subject and be ready for counter-arguments. Before I present an idea to colleagues I always make sure I have come up with a list of negatives and have thought about these viewpoints and how I will talk them through.

Listen and adapt: do you really know it all? It isn't a particularly appealing trait and it is highly likely that there is lot more experience in front of you than you have. Acknowledge and listen to concerns, recognise that there may be a multiplicity of opinions and be prepared to incorporate ideas from the staff. This has many benefits, staff will realise you will listen, that you are treating them as professionals, that you want to share and not simply impose, and that you are also aware that you do not know everything. This is a sign of strength and not weakness.

You don't know everything: it is true, you may have been doing the job 25 years but there are things you don't know. It will do your credibility no harm to (occasionally!) admit this and to use the knowledge and experience of others. Also be prepared to admit when you are wrong or to change your mind. I have done this on several occasions especially when as a secondary trained leader I had to lead a middle school with KS2.

Appeal to colleagues on an intellectual level: they are intelligent people and they will mostly appreciate you recognising this. Explain to them the research findings, the studies and the current developments. Don't assume that they do not want to know, if you are asking someone to change their established practice you had better have a good reason for doing so!

If you are an aspiring leader then reflect on these points and try to remember any situation in which you have been treated as if you are a wiles five year old. These negative experiences are crucial in the development of good leaders, you must remember how it feels to be led badly before you can lead well. I should also add that I am far from perfect, I know I have done exactly what I'm suggesting you should not do, but I hope I have learned from my actions and that I am now a better leader for it.

At the heart of this is a concept I have discussed in an earlier posting, that of authority and power. I have claimed that authority, the true stamp of leadership, is granted to you by others, unlike power which is simply a contractual undertaking. Please click HERE to read that article.

Some of the worst leadership I have encountered has been from those who treat their colleagues as simply worker-ants, they treat them as their proletarian labourers rather than as trusted, intelligent and professional colleagues. Why is this? I only have opinions but I believe it comes down to possibly two main reasons, the first being that they are leading simply because they want to be in charge and the second because they are actually the dim-wit!

Finally I do have a confession to make. In my leadership INSET package I do use an ice-breaker, it goes something like this. "Go and grab a coffee and a biscuit and chat to your colleagues. Come back in 10 minutes."

Jelly Baby Leadership

I'm currently planning an INSET day for middle leaders with a national schools association and I was wracking my brain for a gimmick. As often happens I put it to the back of my mind and went shopping and just as I was heading into a supermarket the penny dropped, I knew what my gimmick would be, jelly babies!

Look at the picture, what do you notice? Well there are red ones, orange ones, green ones and so on. Different colours but look beyond that and what do you see? They are all basically the same. A sugary goo has been moulded to ensure that in fact they are all the same shape, all that is different is the colour. Unfortunately I feel that this is a pretty good analogy for current models of leadership training in schools, both at middle and senior level. Aspiring leaders are forced into moulds, the "colour" or contexts may be different, but basically they are all the same. For red jelly baby read secondary leader, for yellow read primary, for green read curriculum leader and so on, the colours change but they are all the same shape.

This is the what I believe has become the fundamental problem, the state-directed leadership training is designed to produce identical leaders, forcing teachers into moulds, stripping away the individual personalities of aspiring leaders and replacing them with a formula. The courses and criteria has produced a generation of generic leaders most of whom define school success in similar ways and lead by numbers. I am not dismissing the quality of these leaders, I've done one of these qualifications myself and know the right things to say! However I constantly question and have never taken these courses at face value. My worry is that many leaders simply believe all that they are told or if they don't they do toe the party line because they feel that that is what is expected.

My approach is the complete opposite to the jelly baby model. Rather than forcing the aspiring leader into a uniform mould I believe that you should identify a potential leader and mould leadership around them. We would do well to remember that leadership is a personality-centred undertaking, it is undertaken and transmitted through the personality of an individual. Given that everyone has a different personality I would suggest that this implies that everyone's approach to leadership should be different. But why? Your leadership comes into focus once your knowledge, understanding and experience has been focused through the lens of your personality. It isn't just about knowing about "delivering sustainable change" or "transformational leadership", it is about working with people, it is about understanding the needs of staff, their strengths and frailties, it is about people first. Ultimately a future leader should be moulded around their personality rather than the other way around.

Personality is akin to a lens through which leadership is projected. The lens is personal and unique to every leader. That personality is a complex and ever evolving thing. There are so many factors that form an individual's personality that I cannot do justice to it here but it is fair to say that family, values, community, experiences, health and personal history must play a part. Once again given the unique nature of everyone's experience it is little wonder that personality is unique.

Leadership training should help develop the self-knowledge of aspiring leaders and helping them realise their own potential. It shouldn't be about a core curriculum, every school is different, every teacher is different, and the corollary of these facts is that it is impossible to completely teach someone to lead. Instead leaders should understand themselves and how they fit into school structures. They should understand what motivates them, what inspires them and what their values are. They should know how to communicate these to others and when they believe what they say they become authentic and others will follow them.

The best leadership training I have undertaken has been a Master's degree. Read, reflect, synthesise, analyse and adapt. Leadership is a human pursuit, it relies on your personality, it is an intellectual pursuit and your colleagues deserve to be led by someone who has thought about leadership, it is always unique and never the same twice.

Don't be a jelly baby leader, be unique, be yourself.