Tony Cassidy

I’m sitting feeling quite contented at the moment, but this morning I was in a state. Sunday is always a difficult day for me, because it’s the day that I devote to getting myself prepared for the week. I’m a planner at heart, and have to know what I’m doing, with a back up plan if needed- I suppose it’s a control thing.

I do ask myself the question, why does it take so long? I remember a head teacher who couldn’t grasp the time I was still spending on planning; after five years I should be resourced and set-up.

Over my teaching career I’ve tried to make myself more organised and productive, I moved from a paper planner to Word document weekly template, divided into individual days and lessons. I use this to fill in the details of my lessons, it also works as a diary, so I put in reminders of tasks to do during the day. I started to use red text as well to denote points of importance, such as students I wanted to speak to, or changes that I had made to the format of my lesson. With teaching multiple groups I also wanted a way to show what parts of the lesson I didn’t teach, so I now highlight these blue.

I’ve been developing my model of planning over the last three years, so I now have a detailed record of how my lessons progressed on any week or day, because I can go back and look at what I was doing previously it saves time, I can now easily cut and paste lesson ideas ,and adapt them to suit the present class.

I’m also a bit pedantic about my lesson resources, so tend to order them according to Key Stage, topic and lesson. I’ve also started to hyperlink between my planning template and individual resources and folders.

As I change or adapt resources, the old versions  go to a more general thematic folder.  I also keep an external hard drive of resources at home, in readiness for new lessons, or as potential inspiration.

I suppose the planning part will always take time- each class often requires a slightly difficult approach or adapted resource, within Geography topicality can quickly influence learning- old case studies are dispatched for new, and about every two minutes a syllabus changes.