Composite Planning

Hey 👋

Hope all’s well. This is the last full fat Snack before I take a break over August (to spend some time with the fam). Let’s wrap up this series on planning…

Big idea 🍉

The quality of any lesson plan (or sequence) is limited by the expertise of the planner and the amount of time available for planning. Also, the things we teach are often largely similar across many classrooms and schools.

It is for these 3 reasons that—as a profession—we should be thinking hard about composite (rather than solo) approaches to planning.

When we set things up in ways that encourage teachers to solo plan, we are essentially pushing ourselves to re-invent the wheel, in a fraction of the time required to create the ideal design, while leaning on our varying levels of expertise.

As a result, every driver ends up with a different set of wheels, not all of which are optimal quality, despite costing a lot. Under pressure and lacking support, many teachers end up using poor quality resources found on the internet as the basis of their planning.

By contrast, composite planning has the potential to be more effective for learning, less workload for teachers, and more equitable for students. At its heart is the 'economics of scale'. When we collaborate—distributing our time and expertise—we can achieve more.

At the crudest level, 4 teachers sharing out their planning could achieve double the original quality in half the original time. 16 teachers could achieve 4x the quality in a quarter of the time. And so on.

Of course, it's not as simple as that. What we teach might be similar between classrooms, but who we teach (and their prior knowledge) varies a lot. Materials or guides created by someone else still need to be adapted for our own students. This work of 'intellectual preparation' is hugely important (and where our thirst for teacher autonomy should be directed)… fortunately, the economics of composite planning create even more time for it.

There’s plenty of innovation going on around composite planning approaches in schools, and they often include 3 core elements:

• Group planning at departmental level (including collective decision making, the sharing out of tasks, and quality assurance).

• Drawing on high quality resources developed at central level (built with time and expertise, eg. Oak National or great textbooks).

• Intellectual preparation at individual level (to adapt and ensure relevant expertise is front of teacher mind).

🎓 For more, check out this think piece on the importance of a more composite approach, by Robert Pondiscio.

Summary

• Effective planning requires lots of expertise and time.

• Composite planning (vs solo planning) can be more effective, efficient, and equitable.

• Intellectual preparation (adapting a plan for our class) is an essential component of this.

Little updates 🥕

• Paper on encouraging students to interleave their study → finds that ‘explaining the why’ and visually showing students the benefits makes them more likely to use such effective-yet-effortful strategies.

• Analysis of forgetting rates → finds that initial repetition helps memory initially, but doesn't change how quickly they forget.

• Study on the impact of GPT-4 based tutors → while AI improves practice problem performance, it can harm subsequent exam performance without proper safeguards. Author summary here.

• Update on the Next Education Workforce initiative → where thinking is at in this innovative approach to organising teachers (in pursuit of better learning and teaching) in US schools.

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