[I am currently working with a colleague who struggles to get their lessons to "flow". I've written this with them in mind but thought I'd share it because it's unlikely they're the only person in the world struggling with this particular aspect of teaching! I don't think I'm saying anything special; I'm just trying to verbalise what many experienced teachers do almost without thinking.]
When planning, it is vital to look at the whole curriculum sequence to make sure your lessons are properly sequenced and so that you know what comes next. I am, however, going to focus more on getting the “flow” of an individual lesson right. What I say can certainly be extrapolated to cover a whole sequence - in fact, this is a scaled-down version of what I do when I plan a whole sequence.
What is “flow”?
It’s a deliberately wishy-washy term for an aspect of planning that I can’t pin down to an easy definition. [I’m sure someone out there has given it a nice name, but as usual, I don't know of it.] “Flow” is the pathway through the learning [barf]. Curriculum content needs to be broken down into small steps (Sherrington, 2019); the flow is about knowing what each step needs to contain and how to order them so you don’t get cognitive whiplash from a sudden change. The “flow” of the lesson is based in the predictability of the lesson, in students knowing what lesson element comes next.
Why is the “flow” important?
Sequencing and Understanding
“Good sequencing helps build understanding” (Raichura, 2020). Now, Pritesh was somewhat more focusing on full units, but the concept can be scaled down to apply to semi-discrete lessons. Understanding happens because we have built the necessary schemata - we build on the foundations of what we know, we make links between the new and old, and we fill in gaps (Furst, 2019). When we do this in a clear and logical way, it is easier to build understanding.
(Furst, 2019)
This diagram, taken from Efrat Furst’s Understanding Understanding, shows how learning something new consolidates that new concept into a network of previously learned information. We need to help students 'activate' the relevant parts of their existing network, or schema, in order to correctly consolidate the new learning. If, instead of focusing on the most relevant parts of the network, we jumped around, focusing on, from this example, the concept of 4, and then on math, and then on +, it’s unlikely our students will be able to sufficiently consolidate their new concept (multiplication) into their existing schema and therefore learn it.
Bear with me for an example. Imagine you want to learn both how to make the perfect nachos, and the rules of American football. If your teacher started talking about bain-maries and then switched to first downs, you’d be especially baffled. It would be much more logical to cover the art of chips* and smoothly melted cheese and the rules of gridiron separately. At first glance these seem like disconnected examples, and therefore ridiculous - you would never have two such utterly random elements in your lesson. Except they’re not disconnected - they’re both vital prep for your first Super Bowl party. For novice students, a lesson could very easily be made of seemingly unconnected elements, which seem perfectly logical to us. An example could be frequency and foetuses (the connection being ultrasound). At first glance, a student might not see or realise the connections between frequency and foetuses, or indeed the above mentioned maths elements, we therefore need to make sure we sequence within the lesson in a way that ensures that they do at least have some idea of the connections. When these elements are correctly sequenced, both across the unit and within the lesson, making connections, building understanding, and therefore learning, is likely to be more successful.
Predictability and Thinking
This might ruffle some feathers but I believe a lesson should be predictable. During my PGCE, I planned and delivered a lesson made of repeating “chunks”. My university mentor wasn’t best pleased and called it “repetitive”. I disagreed that this was a bad thing [not that I said it to his face] and I still disagree [sorry, Dave]; looking back at it now, this repetition was about the only good part of the lesson! I’m not advocating for boring lessons where you do the same thing over and over and over again, and I’m not saying we need to be only drilling content and forcing students to learn by rote. (As Willingham (2010) put it: “change grabs attention”). But I am saying there is a benefit to predictability. If your lessons are unpredictable and disjointed, your students are likely to spend a fair amount of the lesson wondering what’s going to come next, instead of thinking about what you’re teaching them. When planning a lesson, it’s important to consider “what is the student likely to think about?” (Willingham, 2010) - you want them to be thinking about the learning, not about the impending cognitive whiplash of disjointed lesson elements.
Predictability and Stress
Change might grab attention, but uncertainty causes stress (De Berker et al., 2016). A certain amount of stress is good (Watson and Busch, 2021). It motivates us. But too much stress causes problems including early death. Now, I’m not saying that having poorly planned lessons is going to kill your students, but given how many kids have school-related anxiety, it might be useful to try to bring that level of stress down. It is, of course, important that students learn that uncertainty isn’t bad and develop the tools necessary to adapt to unexpected change, but a small amount of uncertainty is inherent in our day anyway. The students might know that the lesson has the same routine, but they don’t know the specifics of the content. They know they will have science with the same class every day, but they don’t know if everyone will be in. Perhaps it’s best if we leave the stress for things that can’t not be stressful - exams and the like - as opposed to everyday lessons.
Getting the “flow”
Begin at the end (Lemov, 2015)
What is it you want the students to know by the end**? This is a good place to draw on Adam Boxer’s “core questions” (Boxer, 2018) where the curriculum is “repackage[d] [...] as a series of questions to be answered”. It is a lot easier to check if a student understands what you want them to understand if you can just ask them! Often we get lesson objectives [or are they outcomes?] that are irritatingly abstract and hard to assess. By rephrasing them as questions you can use them both for planning what you want to cover, and assessing if students have achieved the desired result.
When you start your planning with the end goal ('students will be able to answer X'), it’s much easier to keep it in your mind. For each lesson element you choose to incorporate, ask yourself ‘how is this helping my students to answer that specific question?’ (if the answer is ‘it isn’t’, consider removing it)
Break it down
Traditionally, a unit might be broken up into lessons:
I’ve not been able to find any reason*** why we stick so rigidly to this breakdown when we could take it a step further and have it be more effective:
Lessons are not “segments of time in which equal amounts of learning take place” (Raichura, 2020). Some things just take longer! And some things will take some students longer than others - what takes one class an hour might take another class 40 minutes - if your lessons are 50 minutes long, what do you do? You break your lesson into elements.
An element is a semi-self-contained chunk of learning. It is a nugget of lesson-y goodness that will enable a student to understand a part of what is being asked, and therefore answer the question. It is useful to look closely at the question and list what students need to be able to do in order to answer it. Some of these things will have been covered previously. For example: if you’re teaching students to answer ‘how does temperature affect rate of reaction?’, they probably have a fairly solid concept of particles, so you probably don’t have to teach them that in the lesson. They might have less of an idea about the impact of temperature on kinetic energy, so you might want to cover that. They should have addressed collision theory in a recent previous lesson, so you’ll want to check their recall and understanding of it and you might need to reteach it because if they don’t understand collision theory, they won’t understand how temperature affects rate. Once you've broken the question down into its constituent parts, you can start focusing on how you'll teach each of those parts. One part per element.
For my lessons, every element consists of information followed by practice. Pritesh refers to “teacher explanation, student practice [...], feedback” (Raichura, 2020) which is, in practice, arguably, the same.
- An element starts with what you want the students to learn. ‘What information do they need to know to be able to answer the question I am asking?’ I am a fan of explicit teaching because “the goal in teaching is to take the shortest path from A [...] to B” (Lemov, 2015) and I’ve not found anything quicker or more effective than telling students things and then checking that they understand what they’ve been told.
- The next part of an element is the practice. This doesn’t have to be written and I would argue there is a lot of value in having this as a verbal exercise; it allows differentiation more easily, it helps identify misconceptions much faster, and there’s an element of accountability - if students know they will be quickly noticed not participating, then they are more likely to participate. This part of the element is a great place to play with the pace of the lesson - understanding can be checked using written answers which slow the pace and often calm the room, or you can call for answers that are quick and punchy and verbal to build energy. When I teach, I incorporate the feedback into the practice. If answers are given verbally, the student will be told if they are correct or not, and in the case of the latter, how to improve. If they are writing, I will circulate, checking student work as they are producing it, prompting, coaxing, and/or correcting students as they need it.
- Does the order make sense (i.e. if a non-expert came in, would they be able to follow what was happening)? This question is potentially the hardest to identify - if you're not sure ask a colleague!
- Does each subsequent element build directly on the one previously (i.e. it doesn’t skip any steps, and it uses the most relevant previous learning to help build the student’s schema/network)?
- Will students understand the knowledge that will become prerequisite for the next element?
- Do your elements start with the concrete, before moving onto the abstract? (Greenshaw Learning Trust, 2021)
- Does it answer the question asked?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, move the elements around until the answers are ‘yes’. (This is where sequencing a whole unit is useful because you have a bit more freedom to rearrange things.)
As a slight aside: you’ll notice that the elements in the diagram are not all the same size. Some elements are larger than others. This is deliberate. Some things take longer to teach than others. Sometimes you need to give a more detailed explanation. Sometimes you need to give more practice. Sometimes, if it’s a particularly tricky topic, or there are lots of steps, you need to break the larger element into smaller sub-elements so you can focus on each bit individually. An element doesn't have to be a set length of time, or look exactly the same; if your students would benefit from 50 minutes of practice questions, give them 50 minutes of practice questions (they might need some support to work up to that, mind). If you, for some reason, wanted the class to have a debate, the prep could be regarded as the 'information' and the debate would be the 'practice' - the important thing is to make sure each element is in the best place within the lesson, and by thinking about them as little bundles makes it easier to move them around until they work.
Once you have your elements you can start thinking about the periods, the actual lesson time that you have. Different classes will get through different amounts of content in the same amount of time. To expect them all to get through the same amount of stuff in a 50-minute (or 1-hour) block is unreasonable. In the diagram above we have two classes: Class 1 and Class 2. Class 2 readily grasps the content being taught and can get through elements 1, 2, and 3 in the same time that it took Class 1 to get through just elements 1 and 2. This is fine, and (if I’m being honest with you) to be expected! There is always a concern that you will run out of time which raises the age-old question: is it better for the students to have a solid understanding of 75% of the course content, or a vague understanding of 100% of the course content? Whatever your answer, you can still split your lessons into elements - if you’re going for the latter, you’ll just have to move on before they know what they’re doing. I think it's okay if a period ends up being a little ‘bitty’, as long as each element is clearly defined and sequenced. That’s the beauty of elements - because they always have a clear start (information) and a clear end (practice), you can have as many or as few as you need in the time and content you’ve got. It is important not to muddle the elements. By all means revisit previous content, or end a period halfway through an element (you can always pick up where you left off), but don’t start one element, switch to another, and then go back to the first. Think about our nachos/football scenario from earlier. Finish one element before going on to the next.
On plenaries: Some people really like plenaries. Some people really hate plenaries. I fall closer to, but not entirely in, the second camp. If you're giving students the opportunity to practice and then assessing what they know regularly throughout the lesson, then you don't need a plenary. Plenaries can be dangerous because they allow you to leave some aspect of the lesson until the last moment - what do you do if 90% of the class tanks the plenary? You've got under five minutes to "fix" it otherwise they're walking out the door potentially having wasted a lesson. By having repeating elements there's never too long between information/knowledge, and assessment and feedback - you will only ever "lose" a single element before realising there is a problem, as opposed to a whole lesson. Of course, some schools expect you to have a plenary (my current school included) in which case, this is where those core questions are great - stick the questions they were learning to answer on the board and get the students to answer them. Simples.
- Phrase the LO as a "core question"
- Split the content into discrete element(s) that will give students the tools to answer said question
- Order the elements so they:
- make sense
- build directly on the previous element(s) without skipping any important steps
- equip students with the prerequisite knowledge needed to tackle the next element
- Finish one element before starting the next
- If necessary, use core questions as plenaries.
*It felt wrong saying “crisps” when referring to tortilla chips.
**What is it you want the students to know by the end of the lesson, or the end of the sequence, or the end of the unit.
***ngl, I didn’t look very hard.
Ashman, G., 2021. The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction. California: CORWIN, p.118.
Boxer, A., 2018. Fixing Key Stage 3: Core Questions. [Blog] A Chemical Orthodoxy, Available at: <https://achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com/2018/03/02/fixing-key-stage-3-core-questions/> [Accessed 15 May 2021].
De Berker, A., Rutledge, R., Mathys, C., Marshall, L., Cross, G., Dolan, R. and Bestman, S., 2016. Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans. Nature Communications, 7(10996).
Furst, E., 2019. EfratFurst - Understanding Understanding. [online] Bridging (Neuro)Science & Education. Available at: <https://sites.google.com/view/efratfurst/understanding-understanding?authuser=0> [Accessed 21 May 2021].
Greenshaw Learning Trust, 2021. GLT National Inset Day: Adam Boxer - Getting Better Faster: How To Actually Help Early Career Teachers. [podcast] GLT is Always Learning. Available at: <https://open.spotify.com/episode/2M9QBoewTS5BBXAAtmy7Vm?si=QCPcysKHS4KWSF9Y0jao6g&utm_source=native-share-menu> [Accessed 21 May 2021].
Lemov, D., 2015. Teach Like a Champion 2.0. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass..
Raichura, P., 2020. Building Understanding. In: The Early Career Framework Handbook. California: CORWIN, pp.55 - 66.
Sherrington, T., 2019. Rosenshine's Principles in Action. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational Ltd.
Watson, E. and Busch, B., 2021. The Science of Learning. 2nd ed. Milton, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge, pp.124-125.
Willingham, D., 2010. Why Don't Students Like School?. 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.