Wednesday 21st October

We are learning how to design lesson plans. First of all we reflected about the different curriculum approaches. Secondly, we identified the different elements in a lesson plan. In this process there are certain educational principles we should take into account. Some of them are more important than others, so we should think about them before designing our lesson plans. Scaffolding is one of these basic pedagogical principles, included in the constructivist approach developed by Vigostky and other authors. Another very important principle is cognition.

Cognition is a basic tool for problem solving. In order to solve a complex problem, we can work individually or we can do it in a big group. But if we collaborate with other people we foster interaction and we develop our cognitive skills. These activities are connected with Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) applied to education. When we face a challenging problem, we must work on it in teams to find possible solutions. In these cases, many different answers are possible, as there is no single straight solution for these situations. This kind of activity can be very interesting when teaching ethics or philosophy – ethical dilemmas or philosophical problems are so complicated that can only be managed in collaboration, and they don't have a single unique solution, but there are many different possibilities to address them. Big problems cannot be solved individually, they can only be managed collaborating in teams.

All these issues make me think about what we are actually doing in this lesson planning strand. These wonderful lesson plans are great, with so many activities and such detailed programming. But are they really useful when you are teaching 17 year old students in their sixth form? The time invested in these activities seems to be far too much, if you want to cover the complete syllabus for the A levels! I wonder how many of the teachers in this group really use these kind of approach in their everyday teaching. I, personally, combine lecturing and traditional teaching with some teamwork, which I introduce for some weeks every term. This is the only way I have found to match the requirements of our official syllabus and my own personal wish to make my classes more dynamic, engaging and motivating. We all love this methodological approach but, what if we bring the teacher's performance down to earth?

I am also troubled about the extensive amount of time required to prepare these wonderful lesson plans. In Spain we teach 20 periods every week, which means 20 different lesson plans that should be prepared in advance in a detailed and accurate way. I'm afraid I can't cope with such a huge amount of work!