Car Crash Lessons: Stop following the educational sat nav and forge your own route

Scripted activities will not improve the quality of teaching and learning, says Sue Cowley. Working with children means you need to improvise...

You sacrifice your Saturday morning on a trip to a well-known furniture superstore. While there, you get suckered into buying a bizarrely shaped lemon juicer that will languish unused in your kitchen drawer for the next decade. But at least you return home with the flat-pack bookcase you set out to purchase. And now you are going to put it together.

Several hours and a couple of broken fingernails later, you fling the Allen key across the living room in frustration. The bookcase is completed, but it doesn’t match the diagram and is leaning at a rather alarming angle.

Sometimes, despite our best intentions, things don’t go to plan.

The latest ‘interesting new idea’ in education is that teachers should teach ready-made lessons – lessons that someone else has scripted for them to ‘deliver’. This idea seems to have come over from America, where scripted lessons are apparently quite common. To an extent, this kind of preplanning has always happened – a textbook is basically a set of lessons that someone else has planned for you, to get you through the learning in the right order. But this time round, the thinking seems to be that we need to overcome the potential ‘flaw’ that is the inexperienced teacher. If the teacher is new, or doesn’t know the subject very well, a ‘scripted lesson’, we’re told, can solve this.

The idea of scripted lessons comes at a time when there is a recruitment crisis in teaching, and when academies are allowed to hire unqualified staff. If your aim is to cut costs, there is an undeniable logic in the idea.

When I was a student teacher, my lecturers would ask us to plan our lessons in minute detail. Our lesson plans would go something like this: 9.03am – settle class on carpet; 9.05am – take register; 9.07am – explain lesson objective, 9.09am – start teacher explanation.

But I struggled when the children didn’t react as my detailed plan had anticipated.

At 9.08am, when a few latecomers straggled into class full of apologies, my carefully constructed lesson would fall apart. Or at 9.11am, when a child stuck a hand in the air and said “We did this last week with our normal teacher, Miss”, I would panic and have no idea what to do next. The detailed planning I did as a student was part of the process of learning to be a teacher – a way of getting me to think through my lessons ahead of time.

But it also helped me gain the sure and certain knowledge that the children would most likely have other ideas.

A scripted lesson assumes the teacher will control exactly where the lesson goes, and knows precisely how the children will react, ahead of time. But just like constructing a flat-pack bookcase, real life is often much messier. As you become more experienced and skilful as a teacher, you learn how to move sideways when needed. Your lessons are spent in a process of self evaluation – is this working, do they understand, are they finding it too easy or too hard, what could I try next? The only way to get to the point where you can ‘think on your feet’ is to experience the problem of having to do just that, in front of a class full of children – not by having someone else prepare a set of lessons for you to ‘deliver’.

The image of teachers ‘delivering’ lessons makes me think of a postal worker, trying to shove an oversized package through an undersized letter slot. We might have the correct address and the right package, but if the item doesn’t fit through the slot, then all the shoving in the world is not going to deliver it. In the same way that letterboxes and packages come in all shapes and sizes, so do children.

Planning to suit the needs of the children in your class is a crucial part of learning to be a teacher. The willingness to think on your feet when a lesson suddenly goes pear shaped is vital. And the ability to plan for and respond to the children in front of us, spontaneously and creatively, no matter what they throw at us, is what being a teacher is all about.

About the author

Sue Cowley is an author and teacher trainer. Her latest book is The Seven S’s of Developing Young Writers.