As a serial over-planner, I am aware that I waste needless time making my resources as flash as possible and scouring google for things to add to my lesson. I hoped that this book by Peps Mccrea would give me some useful tips for my classroom planning and save me some valuable time for the year ahead.
Below my actual review is a summary of the salient points I learned from the book and some of the key arguments, practical advice and common mistakes to avoid that I made notes on. I would recommend reading this to get some ideas for yourself, but you will find these points explained in more depth if you purchase the book itself.
The review
My copy of ‘Lean Lesson Planning’ is now covered in highlighted sections and scribbles so I don’t think I’ll be able to sell it on anytime soon! I bought this book on the title and the positive feedback it was given on amazon. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lean-Lesson-Planning-practical-achieving/dp/1503241459
I must admit that this isn’t the book I was expecting based on the title and the blurb- “A practical approach to doing less and achieving more in the classroom”.
This isn’t necessarily meant as a negative, as there are some excellent aspects to this book that took me by surprise. It is also important to note that this publication was self-published and does not have the resources of a major publisher behind it. As such, the £11 price tag may be a factor due to a limited printing run (do let me know if this is the case Mr Mccrea). I hope this is the case, as I do feel the book is quite expensive considering the content within it. It would be great to see a kindle version of this in the future, with amendments and any new research that can complement the hard work that has already gone into the publication.
A real positive of the book is the wealth of research that has gone into the points that are being made. A wealth of additional reading can be generated from the sources provided and I will certainly be looking into them for further information. I believe its worth investing in the book for this alone.
There are also some lovely quotes throughout the chapters that I have shared with others and a great supplement to the central points being made.
In terms of the layout, I’m not sure if it was a deliberate choice but the pages themselves are quite sparse, or should I say ‘lean. The book could have been written/condensed into half the number of pages, with a number of diagrams taking up entire pages when they didn’t really need to. Perhaps this is unfair and is just a subjective opinion, but I did think the layout could be changed and it just gave the impression of the book being ‘padded out’ to fill more pages.
In terms of the content, my summary goes into more depth but essentially I found the book to be more theoretical than practical. I found some really interesting ideas (which again, I have outlined below the review) but each time I wished there was an example to illustrate it further or an example of a scenario where a teacher did one thing but could have done it more efficiently.
I’m aware though, that for some of you this might not be necessary and isn’t a criticism per se, just that with my learning style and relative lack of experience in teaching, I would benefit enormously from actually visualising the theory being put into practice so I could better understand what to do myself. This also surprises me because Mr Mcrea has a wealth of experience and has a huge amount of lesson observations to draw upon in his professional life. I would love to have been given an insight into specific examples of where he has seen things that could have been improved.
I would also say that this book will be useful to all educators, but will be more useful for new teachers who may not have ingrained habits that are harder to shift. They will also be in the mindset to absorb the information more readily.
Perhaps its a sign of my impatience but although I found some of the ‘bigger’ concepts in the book interesting, it was not what I had bought the book for. I would have rather had much more focused, narrower examples that I could put into practice right away alongside the useful habits I could adopt that were the cornerstone of the whole approach.
So, overall I would definitely recommend this book, but if you are expecting this to be a snappy, practical guide to help you save time in your planning, I don’t think this will live up to your expectations. However, use this book as a starting point for your own research and as a reference when you are sitting down to plan a scheme of work or end of topic assessment and it can give you some really useful reminders. I will be doing some serious planning this month, so in time I will give you an update on the aspects of the book that I have used and which have really helped me.
To purchase a copy of the book click here:
You can also download the first four chapters for free but I think the central part of the book I found the most useful so I would recommend you buy it for that.
Do let me know if you did buy it or you have already read it. Would love to hear your thoughts 🙂
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SUMMARY
The book is split into three ‘acts’,
Act 1- Is an overview of the ‘lean’ approach, what this means and the habits and mindsets you can form to help you achieve this.
Act 2- Goes into more depth about the habits of lean planning and explains them in more detail
Act 3- Illustrates strategies you can use on an individual and collective basis to improve your planning
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Summary of Act 1
What is this concept of lean and how can it help us to plan more effectively?
The idea of ‘lean’ has been adapted to the purpose of lesson planning from the software development industry via manufacturing originally.
To quote:
“Lean is about optimising productivity, about maximising the impact of every unit of input. It achieves this by raising the status of high impact inputs, eliminating waste, and making continual, incremental improvements over time.” (P13)
So in regards to the classroom it is about:
Maximising the time you have spent planning and teaching to produce as much actual learning in the classroom as possible.
Focusing your attention on the things that actually matter, and make small and subtle changes to your everyday routine that will add up to bigger gains in the future.
>>>>>>>DOING LESS TO ACHIEVE MORE<<<<<<<<<
What is the lean mindset? (P15)
There are 4 key mindsets illustrated in the book although I won’t delve into all of them in detail. Essentially the book is saying we are commiting 4 grave errors in our ‘unlean’ planning and 4 ways to resolve this.
1) We see planning as a chore and a tick box, form filling exercise. We should see it as a THINKING process.
2) We try and do as much as possible in the time we have. We should do less but do it better.
3) We assume that some people are just naturally better at planning and accept our way of doing things right now. Actually, anyone can become a great planner with enough practice.
4) We only get better by trying out new things in the classroom. Yet, making systematic changes in my planning will lead to a greater improvement in my teaching.
So this all sounds great, but how can we actually use this information in our planning? Details are fairly limited at this point but the explanation for point number 2 resonated the most for me.
Mr Mccrea uses the ‘Pareto principle’ to illustrate this point. This is the theory that 80% of our impact comes from only 20% of the actual inputs. Here’s a little diagram for you visual learners out there 🙂
So the key is to spend some time looking at what your currently doing that’s having an impact in the classroom and seeing where you can minimise wasted time. It would have been useful to have some examples of teachers doing this in the book to illustrate the point but although they are nowhere to be found in this chapter, this would still be a useful exercise to do when planning your scheme of work for the year and on an on-going basis.
A useful 4 point framework is provided (P27) to consider as a framework for your planning
* Where are your learners starting from?
* Where do you want them to get to?
* How will you know when they’re there?
* How can you best help them get there?
Mccrea lists a further 9 lean habits (P31) split into planning and growing. The points listed in growing sound good but sound a little wishy-washy to me but the planning aspects are interesting, as they can often be overlooked. Some examples include:
* Starting with your end goal in mind
* Selecting efficient activities that shortens the path students need to reach their goal
* Building tasks that will help students remember and recall what they’ve learned in future
* Ensuring you have methods of checking student understanding built in to your lesson
* Linking your lessons together to help your future planning
Again, an illustration of a teacher doing this in action would have been a great way to bring the points home but nevertheless they are a good starting point to use in your own planning and as a self-checking tool.
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Summary of Act 2
Act 2 explains the lean habits in much more detail.
Chapter 4
First we look at the idea of ‘backwards design’.
Teachers often find themselves falling into two different traps and I admit I do this myself quite a lot
1) Focusing their planning on activitys
So first you find a great idea for an activity and then work back to try and match up your lesson objectives to the outcomes of the activity itself. The danger of this is that in time, you end up producing lessons that merely keep the children busy and genuine learning becomes limited.
2) Coverage focused planning
For example, using textbook activities or a lesson plan designed by someone else for a different class, rather than considering the individual and specific needs of your students.
The argument in the book is that both these methods can produce results in the short term but the long term benefits of both create a ceiling for student learning.
What we should be doing instead is spending more time looking at what we want our students to achieve by the end of their lesson. We should spend far more time looking at our lesson objectives than selecting activities to become better teachers.
We should aim to use excessive clarity in our lesson and to do this we should set up learning milestones in our lesson. A useful tip is to select between 2-5 milestones depending on your class to maximise their effect. Students need to know what they mean and what passing them actually looks like or they won’t be effective.
They could take these four forms: (P39)
Cumulative- Do they build on each other and does passing one move you closer to the next one?
Distributive- Spread out and differentiated in such a way that most students can pass the first one but very few can pass the last
Measurable- Clearly designed so you know when students have actually passed them
Clear- So your students understand what is being asked of them
Chapter 5
introduces the idea of conceptual understanding vs technical proficiency, defined as:
…”The act of building tools in our head is equivalent to conceptual understanding and the act of mastering them is equivalent to technical proficiency”(P43)
So the question to ask ourselves in our planning is:
“Is this lesson about building tools, or learning to use them better? What is the best order and interplay between these activities?” (P44)
Chapter 6
I found this to be one of the most useful chapters in the book. SImply put:
“Improve how you check understanding and you will immediately increase your capacity for impact”. (P52)
Mccrea looks at some examples of common strategies in the classroom and their effectiveness:
Single student questioning- This can give you a depth of insight into individual pupils but is an inneficient way to help you get a picture of whole class understanding
Traffic lights- Can help build student awareness of higher order thinking but isn’t as reliable for assessing student understanding
Multi-student questioning- For example, asking a clear question to the whole class that they can answer on mini-whiteboards would be a good way to gain useful data on the impact of your teaching.
Diagnostic questioning- Developing this further, for example using the whiteboards to show how students have reasoned their answer and as a teacher you can use this to spot patterns in student mistakes and a mental note for who may need further support.
So the trick is knowing when to deploy each method as efficiently as possible.
Assessment at the end of a lesson is also discussed and the two practical considerations of when teachers may simply run out of time to do so or will take the easier option of letting students continue are both mentioned.
A stark warning is issued:
“Not creating the space for exit assessment will limit how well you can evaluate your own teaching, and constrain your ability to plan effectively for future lessons” (P56)
Some good tips mentioned are setting a timer to go off at a certain time before the end of the lesson and the idea of a ‘timeboxed exit ticket’.
You can give students a slip of paper with questions the students need to complete in a certain amount of time to hand to you as they walk out the door. Practically this might be difficult sometimes, and I could see myself having the same questions on a powerpoint screen on the board but the principle of the idea is a good one.
As well as an exit assessment, we can also assess at transitions in the lesson. This can help us as teachers to see how many students have ‘got’ our explanation and if the majority have not, then its a chance to review what we have done so far.
It is an opportunity to “…adapt your lesson to cater for what’s unfolding around you, rather than blindly following a pre-determined path.”
Mccrea also talks about the idea of an entry assessment. He does not see it as particularly useful, his argument being that it’s too late to adapt your teaching if you discover student’s prior knowledge is more limited than you first thought. By forgoing an entry assessment, you can free up time to recap previous lessons instead. I am interested to know from you readers about this idea, as I can see benefits to both sides of the argument.
Chapter 7
This chapter looks at how we can make our activities more efficient.
“What is the least that needs to happen for my students to make progress towards their next learning milestone?” (P61)
It’s certainly a question that I need to ask myself more. In doing so, we should try and eliminate clutter and unncessary activities because they will serve as additional obstacles for students that will slow down their learning. We need to take the most direct path possible.
Some useful tips that I think are things I see many teachers implement in their planning already, but are still worth reminding ourselves of:
* Teacher led talk should be limited to snippets of no more than 5-10 minutes
* Limit activities to around 15 minutes but be mindful of the impact that switching tasks will have on student attention
* Avoid activities where students are multi-tasking where possible
* Use the structure of the activities you are using instead of explicit instruction where possible
Mccrea goes on to shatter one of my other long held ideas that I need to make learning as fun as possible. In fact, success is what students will enjoy the most and this will help them to develop a more positive attitude towards their learning. Fun should in fact be treated as no more than a by product.
So how do we give students a chance at success? Give them a task that sits somewhere out of their comfort zone but not too challenging they cannot attempt it.
Two useful example activities are: (P63)
Low floor, high ceiling- An accesible task that all students can complete. These are best designed as open ended and investigatory as a chance for each student to showcase their skills.
All start, no finish- Questions gradually becoming more difficult with the aim that all students can answer the first question but the last is nigh on impossible!
The importance of feedback is also mentioned, and that we should ensure opportunities for feedback are ‘baked in’ to our activities. They needn’t always be time intensive on our part and we should encourage peer and self assessment as long as it is well structured and takes into consideration the following: (P66)
* It narrows the gap between where the students are and the next learning milestone
* It emphasises how students can move on to the next step and not just what went wrong
* Students are given plenty of opportunities to practice to get it ‘right’
* Focuses on the most important element of what will help them make progress
* Formative comments are given rather than just marks/percentages
Chapter 8
This chapter looks at how we can make learning long lasting.
Our brains naturally have a ‘limited bandwidth’ (P70), i.e. we can only think of so many things at one time.
We also experience a delay to reach full efficiency again whenever we switch between tasks So we should avoid students constantly switching tasks where possible and only where it will be of benefit to them.
If students are able to build on the knowledge they already have, they are more likely to remember what they have learned in that particular lesson. We should use this as a starting point and help them build connections between what they already know and what they are learning now.
Our memories have a half-life and decay over time. However, if we revisit key information, we can extend this half life than if we merely left it untouched. In practice this means we can: (P76)
1) Introduce students to a new topic/concept during a lesson
2) Revisit and recap this a few days/a week later
3) Revisit again a few weeks later
We should also consider altering the learning experience slightly but not too much so it is unrecognisable from its initial introduction.
We need to also give students an opportunity to practice what they’ve learned to gain fluency (P77)
Core practice- Practice the most important aspects in more depth
Practice first- Consolidate existing knowledge by practice before learning new information
Feed forward- Provide feedback on how to improve and opportunities to practice this
Bright spots- As well as the things you need to improve, keep on practicing the things you are good at
Drill the basics- Practice drills on the basic ideas to gain mastery of them and leave more ‘bandwidth’ for the more complex ideas
Practice success- Practice the LEARNING from your mistakes rather than making them
So what does this mean for teachers? If we don’t consider how students remember, this will cause us future headaches in our planning and lead to us spending longer retroactively tracing our steps.
Crucially, and I’m sure many teachers will see these with students who are at significantly behind their peers: (P79)
“Poor fluency in lower level topics can hinder their ability to learn higher level concepts and processes”.
On the flip side:
“Fluency in the basics will allow your students to devote a proportion of their limited bandwidth to making progress with the harder stuff.”
Chapter 9
“The relationship between lessons is just as important as what happens within them.” (P81)
A useful point to consider is what you need to assess in this lesson to help you plan for the next one.
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Act 3
This part of the book is really a reinforcement of what has preceded it. It’s about taking the steps to make sure you can plan effectively. To be aware of your habits and behaviours and implement the most efficient ways to become a great planner. Examples include using mindfulness techniques, and the 5 I’s exercise which I won’t list here but recommend you check out in the book: (P91)
An important point to note for people like me who don’t like change and are naturally quite disorganised is that changing these habits should actually make you more creative and excited about your planning and teaching.
The final few chapters are devoted to ‘growth teaching’ and ‘collective improvement’. Discussions around how we can develop our practice for gradual, incremental improvements abound as well as how we can use evidence to inform our teaching. While interesting, I didn’t find this final section of the book particularly useful for my own needs but a few interesting quotes stood out for me:
“Don’t try to evaluate too soon. Give your approach a chance to fully unfold.”
“There is little value in exploring new teaching strategies until you’ve got a firm feel for the impact of existing ones.”
Although common-sensical at first glance, its still worth mentioning because we need to consider what the impact of our approach is and how well it is working before moving on. Mccrea gives a few good examples of approaches that can be used for evaluation: (P104)
Progress indicators- e.g. data from class results, tests and mini assesments mentioned
Observational perspectives- Feedback from other adults in the room or video footage of classes if this has been taken
Student surveys- Targeted questions, exit tickets as mentioned previously or even face to face questioning at the end of a lesson
The final chapter deals with collective improvement and a few suggestions for mutual sharing between teachers and organisations but this will be more useful if you do pick up a copy of the book.
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Sandbox Education 