The Lesson That Didn’t Go to Plan

The Question

Every teacher has one: the lesson you replay on the drive home. Mine was on conservation of momentum. It’s one of the toughest specification points to teach, and pupils really struggle with it if it isn’t taught well. I had taught it many times, so I convinced myself I knew it well enough to teach it without my usual level of planning, and went into the lesson unprepared.

My additional responsibilities had taken over. Meetings, staff issues and competing priorities had consumed my time, and lesson preparation had slipped down the list. I arrived with a broad idea of what to teach, but hadn’t properly thought through the sequence of learning, the tasks pupils would complete or the misconceptions I needed to address. I had planned the destination, but not the journey.

It showed almost immediately. I explained the principle and moved into worked examples far too quickly. Some pupils could use the equation, but others couldn’t yet tell which values belonged where, let alone which direction counted as negative. With no examples ready to bridge that gap, I was improvising at the board.

The independent practice was worse. Some pupils reached the hardest questions before they had secured the basics, while others finished with nothing challenging to move on to. Two problems at once! I tried to fix it by explaining the next question to the whole class, which interrupted those who were flying and did little for those who were stuck. I was reacting to the room rather than directing the learning.

So I was left with an uncomfortable question: how does a topic I know inside out turn into a lesson that goes so wrong?

The Thinking

Looking back, I believed that if I knew the content, the lesson would look after itself. I knew the physics and I knew the exam questions, so surely the planning could wait? In a week where every hour felt spoken for, it made sense.

Lee Shulman picked this apart back in 1986. He argued that subject knowledge on its own isn’t enough. Teachers also need what he called pedagogical content knowledge: “the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others”, including the examples that work and the misconceptions pupils bring with them. That was exactly the part I had skipped. I knew conservation of momentum. I hadn’t thought about how this class would learn it. Despite being (in my opinion) soundly invested in my pedagogy, the lack of forward planning was something that couldn’t be overlooked.

My questioning made it worse. I asked the class whether they understood, accepted a few confident responses and moved on. I hadn’t prepared questions to expose the misconceptions I knew were coming. Graham Nuthall spent years recording what individual pupils actually experienced in lessons, and one of the clearest messages in The Hidden Lives of Learners is how much of the learning in a room is invisible to the teacher. A few confident answers tell you very little about everyone else. I had mistaken willingness to answer for evidence of learning, and by the time I realised some pupils had misunderstood the key idea, we were too far ahead. The end was rushed too: no time to revisit errors, no exit question and little reliable evidence of who had understood.

The third piece is the one that stung. Viviane Robinson, Claire Lloyd and Kenneth Rowe brought together studies of school leadership and its effect on pupils’ outcomes. By some distance, the biggest effect came from leaders who promote and take part in teacher learning and development. Leadership is at its most powerful when it stays close to teaching.

That’s what the research says. Here’s what I took from it. My lesson didn’t go wrong because of a lack of knowledge, experience or teaching ability. It went wrong because of where I had chosen to direct my time. I would never tell a member of my department, or a teacher I was coaching, that knowing a topic well was a good enough reason not to plan, yet I hadn’t held myself to that same standard. I had allowed familiarity to become complacency, and competing responsibilities to become an excuse.

The lesson went wrong before I entered the classroom. The classroom simply made that failure visible.

The Redraft

Teaching MUST come first. Not because leadership is unimportant, but because teaching and learning are the purpose of educational leadership. If I’m not giving enough attention to the learning in my own classroom, I need to question the priorities I’m modelling to everyone else.

So here’s what I do differently now. My planning time goes in the diary like any other meeting, and it gets the same protection. (It doesn’t always survive a busy week, but it survives far more often than it used to!)

I now hold myself to that standard. Before any lesson, however many times I’ve taught it, I want to know the prior knowledge it relies on, the misconceptions to expect, the sequence, the scaffolding and how I’ll check understanding. If I can’t answer those, the lesson isn’t ready yet.

When time is tight, I don’t skip planning. I plan to a minimum, and my lesson structure makes that possible. Every lesson follows Do Now, I Do, We Do, You Do, Review, so I know exactly which decisions need making before I walk in. Here’s how I would plan that lesson now. Swap the physics for your own subject and the decisions are exactly the same:

• Do Now: retrieval on the knowledge today’s lesson depends on (for me, what momentum is and why direction matters), so I know the foundations are secure before anything new.
• I Do: one example modelled step by step, talking through every decision I make so pupils can see the thinking, not just the answer.
• We Do: a partly completed example, then questions on mini whiteboards for every pupil, written to expose the misconception(s) I expect (mine: has any momentum been lost when two trolleys stick together?), with my next move decided in advance for whatever comes back.
• You Do: practice that builds in small steps from the simplest case, with stretch questions ready for those who fly through.
• Review: time protected to revisit the most common error, then an exit question that shows me who needs support next lesson.

None of that takes hours. It’s the thinking I had skipped, done before the lesson so I’m not making every decision in the moment. And this is the part I find most interesting: planning properly is what gives me the flexibility to adapt. With all of that ready to go, I can respond to the room without losing the momentum of the lesson itself (pun very much intended!).

The Reflection

I’m sharing this one because I doubt I’m the only one it has happened to. If every lesson is a draft, this was a rough one (very rough!). I’ll be honest, I can’t promise it won’t happen again. Leadership and responsibilities in general don’t get any less urgent, and there will be weeks when the diary wins. What I’m still working out is how to protect my own teaching without letting something important slide elsewhere, a balance I suspect every teacher with extra responsibilities is trying to find.

In my first post, I wrote about an interview lesson where plan A wasn’t enough. This time there was barely a plan A at all, and both taught me that a good plan is where flexibility comes from. If your own planning has quietly been squeezed out, please don’t beat yourself up. Notice it, and take one small step back towards your planning.

So here’s my current draft: know your subject, then plan how they will learn it, however familiar the topic. I’ve no doubt I’ll redraft it.

I’d love to hear from you. When has a lesson gone wrong for you before you even walked into the room, and what did it teach you?

Every lesson is a draft. Share what you’d redraft in the comments.