This year I have been inspired by Geoff Petty and Trevor Wright. Both are readable authors who express credible studies in terms of what can be changed in the classroom.
I aim next term to combine the following:
Geoff Petty: ‘Expert Teachers do not plan daily. However, they have a complex rationale behind the lesson’.
Trevor Wright: ‘A brilliant teacher knows what the focus is in their lesson.’
Therefore, my planning wants to distiguish between that which the students will see, that which I will see, and that which I will provide to outside observers.
What the students will see: the L/O, rubric criteria, the homework, entrance activity,
Essentially, I think my markbook needs to be the data/planning that I will see. It needs to be useful. Therefore,
What observers will see: It’s difficult to see how this will be more than the replication of my data elsewhere.
How can I make my markbook useful for my planning? Before I can do anything, I need to have great MTPs. That is my focus.
So, to make a MTP, I need to look at the AFs…
I think I need to plan what I will mark, and when I will remark. Therefore, I need to revamp my weekly lesson planning in line with my LTPs.
Marking Diary http://www.teachit.co.uk/custom_content/newsletters/newsletter_feb07.php
10 hours of marking a week, which leads to about 50 working days (of 8 hours a day) of marking. I often do not schedule this, which does seem a little mad.
Therefore, I have been scheduling two types of planning. The first is a ‘planning for students’. This allows me to avoid unnecessary repetition – I plan onto a PowerPoint the nature of the entrance activity, the plenary, so on and so forth. Alongside this, I complete my ‘planning for teachers’. This involves tracking across a period of time the progression of learning objectives/marking and resources used.
We will see how this goes…
