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4 Part Lesson Plans Part 1 – Activate Access prior knowledge / activate students’ schemas Part 2 – Acquire Promote higher order thinking – enable students to make connections and interconnections between the course material and real life experiences Foster inquiry throughout lessons and among students Part 3 – Apply.
Starter - guided - independent - plenary - dung. 'One of these things,' to quote the old Sesame Street song, 'does not belong here, one of these things is not the same.' The first four are the sequence the Department for Education and Skills recommends teachers follow for more or less every lesson; the fifth might profitably be employed as a collective noun for the other four in sequence.
The literacy and numeracy hours in primary schools were set up on such a model, and, since their introduction seemed to have paid dividends in terms of Sats results, this style of teaching was rolled out across key stage 3, and thence onwards, until it is now perceived in many schools as the only acceptable approach.
Briefly, the four-part lesson works (or doesn't) like this. You tell children what they are going to learn (if you really want to waste some time, you can get them to copy it off the board); then you do some completely unrelated 10-minute activity that took an hour to prepare. After 20 minutes' tidying up, you launch - half an hour into the lesson - into teaching them something. In theory, your class would then apply this knowledge independently, but you took too much time on the starter.
At the end, you do a recap, in which you ask your class what they have learned, and they reply: 'Nothing. We spent most of the lesson tidying up the Scrabble boards.' Simple, really.
The phrase 'four-part lesson plan' is controversial. Many feel it goes together with good teaching like a horse and gherkin, and is yet another symptom of modern education's inexorable path towards its own antithesis. It is a process through which the genius of teaching can be homogenised into mechanistic mediocrity. You wouldn't invite a master carpenter into your house to do some work and tell him to get rid of all that fancy joinery and put the shelves up with Evo-Stick. Why, then, are experienced teachers told they must follow such a reductive and simplistic formula?
If nothing else, the four-part lesson plan guarantees a modicum of pace. Only the most blindingly slack teacher will have the gall to write a four-part lesson plan thus: 'Starter: word search. Guided: how to copy off the board. Independent: intense copying off the board. Plenary: how might we improve copying off the board?' It does, at least, build in some variety.
Routine and formulaic
But it's a dunce's dictat. The four-part lesson plan promotes and rewards teaching that is routine and formulaic; teaching in which there is no room to run with some brilliant idea that occurs to a pupil, because we, a set of fantastically creative professionals, are scared of being ticked off.
A good teacher may well use some model to structure the learning of their pupils. I had some success with Gardner's multiple intelligence theory as a model for a seven-part lesson - write about it, calculate it, sing it, dance it, think about it, talk about it, paint a picture of it - until Gardner extended the intelligences to include naturalistic and existential, and now we have to spend the plenary outside relating everything to God.
A confident teacher might plan a lecture that takes a week of lessons to deliver, followed by a lesson with 25 separate two-minute activities. How's about that for pace, Mr Inspector?
Each teacher has their own unique style. The four-part lesson plan is only of use as a default setting for the sort of bread-and-butter, run-of-the-mill lesson on a wet Tuesday that both teacher and pupils have already forgotten before it started. The moment the teacher has a better idea, they should follow their nose to where the real learning is.
It is no coincidence that the idea of an 'appropriate' model of teaching flourished at the point that Chris Woodhead was in charge of the enforcement arm of the standards police. Questions have been raised as to whether there is a broader political agenda behind this.
This suspicion appears to have been proved right. Some teachers believe that the four-part lesson plan is a move to standardise to such an extent that anyone can deliver a lesson. It seeks to take the element of professional judgment out of teaching, so that it is no longer a graduate job, and lessons can be delivered by teaching assistants.
Teaching assistants do fantastically valuable jobs, supporting children who desperately need it. But teaching assistants command sweatshop salaries. If teaching is reduced to a formula so simple that you require no serious training to do it, then it makes sense to the paymasters that it is done as cheaply as possible.
The four-part lesson plan is part of a process of deskilling teachers to such an extent that they can be replaced by someone who has probably not been educated to degree level, leaving children to be taught by people with no professional or subject expertise.
路 Philip Beadle is a former Guardian teacher of the year