Teaching Standard 4: “Plan and teach well structured lessons”

The standard

4. Plan and teach well structured lessons

• impart knowledge and develop understanding through effective use of
  lesson time
• promote a love of learning and children’s intellectual curiosity
• set homework and plan other out-of-class activities to consolidate and
  extend the knowledge and understanding pupils have acquired
• reflect systematically on the effectiveness of lessons and approaches to
  teaching
• contribute to the design and provision of an engaging curriculum within the
  relevant subject area(s).

The framework

Learn that…

1. Effective teaching can transform pupils’ knowledge, capabilities and beliefs about learning.
2. Effective teachers introduce new material in steps, explicitly linking new ideas to what has been previously studied and learned.
3. Modelling helps pupils understand new processes and ideas; good models make abstract ideas concrete and accessible.
4. Guides, scaffolds and worked examples can help pupils apply new ideas, but should be gradually removed as pupil expertise increases.
5. Explicitly teaching pupils metacognitive strategies linked to subject knowledge,
   including how to plan, monitor and evaluate, supports independence and academic success.
6. Questioning is an essential tool for teachers; questions can be used for many purposes, including to check pupils’ prior knowledge, assess understanding and break down problems.
7. High-quality classroom talk (sometimes referred to as oracy) can support pupils to articulate key ideas, consolidate understanding and extend their vocabulary.
8. Practice is an integral part of effective teaching; ensuring pupils have repeated opportunities to practise, with appropriate guidance and support, increases success.
9. Paired and group activities can increase pupil success, but to work together effectively pupils need guidance, support and practice.
10. How pupils are grouped is also important; care should be taken to monitor the impact of groupings on pupil attainment, behaviour and motivation.
11. Homework can improve pupil outcomes, particularly for older pupils, but it is likely that the quality of homework and its relevance to main class teaching is more important than the amount set.

Learn how to…

Plan effective lessons, by:

• Using modelling, explanations and scaffolds, acknowledging that
  novices need more structure early in a domain.
• Enabling critical thinking and problem solving by first teaching the
  necessary foundational content knowledge.
• Removing scaffolding only when pupils are achieving a high degree of
  success in applying previously taught material.
• Providing sufficient opportunity for pupils to consolidate and practise
  applying new knowledge and skills.
• Breaking tasks down into constituent components when first setting
  up independent practice (e.g. using tasks that scaffold pupils through
  meta-cognitive and procedural processes).

Make good use of expositions, by:

• Starting expositions at the point of current pupil understanding.
• Combining a verbal explanation with a relevant graphical
  representation of the same concept or process, where appropriate.
• Using concrete representation of abstract ideas (e.g. making use of
  analogies, metaphors, manipulatives for counting, examples and non-examples).

Model effectively, by:

• Narrating thought processes when modelling to make explicit how
  experts think (e.g. asking questions aloud that pupils should consider when working independently and drawing pupils’ attention to links with prior knowledge).
• Making the steps in a process memorable and ensuring pupils can
  recall them (e.g. naming them, developing mnemonics, or linking to
  memorable stories).
• Exposing potential pitfalls and explaining how to avoid them.

Stimulate pupil thinking and check for understanding, by:

• Planning activities around what you want pupils to think hard about.
• Including a range of types of questions in class discussions to extend
  and challenge pupils (e.g. by modelling new vocabulary or asking
  pupils to justify answers). Elaborate on and query pupil contributions to support pupils’ oral language skills and knowledge development.
• Providing appropriate wait time between question and response
  where more developed responses are required.
• Considering the factors that will support effective collaborative or
  paired work (e.g. familiarity with routines, whether pupils have the
  necessary prior knowledge and how pupils are grouped).
• Providing scaffolds for pupil talk to increase the focus and rigour of
  dialogue.

The text above is taken from the Teachers’ Standards and the ITTECF Combined Framework. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v2.0 and v3.0.

Discover

• ‘Nothing will work unless you do’ (Laurence Holmes)

Deepen, develop or extend

References and research

• Using whiteboards to support college students’ learning of complex physiological concepts (Caron Y. Inouye, Christine L. Bae, and Kathryn N. Hayes)