Room for Manoeuvre Lesson planning doesn't have to mean losing out on creativity, argues Robert Legg There's no doubt that the intricacies of lesson planning have become something of an educational obsession of late. I was beginning to wonder whether I could still blow my nose without first establishing written aims and objectives. But just when I thought it was impossible for the pendulum of pedagogic change to swing any further in that direction, I had an alarming conversation with a cello-teacher colleague that made me think again.

In his county, I discovered, instrumental teachers are required to provide detailed lesson plans for each of their pupils for the entire year - in advance.
At first I didn't quite believe it. ‘For every child?' Yes. ‘For every lesson?' Yes. ‘And a year in advance?' Absolutely.
This extreme position is patently pointless but also completely counterproductive: teaching from individual plans written months before they're needed, after all, must inevitably rule out the kinds of spontaneity and interactivity that are such an important part of one-to-one tuition. And as for the workload, the sheer weight of that mind-numbing paper chase would be enough to have most musicians running to the Job Centre.

It would be easy for a debate on planning to deteriorate into a classic ‘them' and ‘us' squabble. Those who embrace planning as the only useful modus vivendi tend to characterise everyone else as arrogant, ill-prepared and idle; whilst non-planners see their more prepared colleagues as appallingly uncreative plodders who probably spend Friday night putting their CD collections into alphabetical order.Of course, neither position is wholly true. But it's clear nonetheless that there are definite pros and cons to this pervasive ethos of planning. On one hand, it squeezes out the (extremely rare) kind of lazy incompetence that masquerades as spontaneity, reducing the likelihood that pupils will experience truly chaotic and worthless lessons. On the other, it can encourage teachers to make the fatal mistake of substituting routine planning ‘tasks' for genuine thought about pupils' learning needs. The trouble with observations such as these is that they are used as instruments with which to chastise teachers. And if there's one thing we can do without, it's further chastisement; we beat ourselves up quite enough already.

Where planning is concerned, what we don't need is more documentation. If anything, we need to work smarter, not harder. We need to ask ourselves how our planning can help children to learn and how we can plan to preserve aspects of spontaneity that are so valuable to children's learning.
There are various ways in which this can be achieved. An obvious way, and one that we are speedily moving towards in my school, is to hand back as much responsibility as possible to the pupils themselves. Rather than engaging them in a tedious process of spoon-feeding, we are trying to involve pupils in the process of managing – and planning – their own learning activities in a way best suited to them.
This approach is by no means limited to older pupils. The first group of Year 7 pupils at my school, for example, has recently finished a cross-curricular project on ‘Storytelling in Java and Bali', a project that was designed to allow pupils to take ownership of their learning across music, art and drama. Although activities weren't mapped out in the conventional way, a lot of time and energy went into the preparation of the course. We created a project pack for each pupil, comprising all kinds of resources and materials that were designed to be appealing and exciting to the 11-year-old eye. Amongst these resources were exciting tales of magic and adventure taken from real Javanese and Balinese folklore, recorded examples of genuine gamelan music and pictures of authentic Indonesian shadow puppets.

Further preparation enabled the department to procure a gangsa (a 10-keyed gamelan metallophone), an attractive Javanese stick puppet and even a framed silk painting of Balinese musicians at work. This was all designed to make the experience as close as possible to the 'real thing'. The literature and plenary sessions that accompanied this multisensory assault explained how ideas from Indonesian culture could be developed in the classroom. Suggestions for writing and producing plays, designing and creating puppets and composing gamelan-style music were all included.
Explanations were very clear and very brief, maximising the time pupils could spend managing their own learning.
Although the preparation was extensive, we limited the amount of formal lesson planning to a bare minimum. After an introductory lesson, all that remained was to make explicit the aims and objectives of the project. The pupils understood that it was down to them to organise, at the end of the 12-week course, a presentation of art, drama and music based on Indonesian storytelling culture. Staff would be on hand to help whenever we were needed but we would be guiding, not taking charge. The department agreed that, within the bounds of safety, questions that started ‘Can we' would be answered positively, whilst questions that began ‘Do we have to' would receive a negative reply. Pupils were allowed to change activities or develop new ones as they wished and there was no set format or structure for the finished product.

The maturity and responsibility with which the pupils approached this task was refreshing. With a few exceptions, pupils' group work has been less fraught with quarrels than we would normally expect, motivation has been higher and – almost universally – the standard of the work has been extremely impressive. Pupils have created astonishingly detailed shadow puppets, well-crafted scripts and carefully developed gamelan compositions. Given that this was, for most of them, the first time they had been allowed such a degree of self-determination, it is perhaps not surprising that some found aspects of time management difficult. No matter how frenetic the last available minutes, however, each of the groups involved in the project brought together a presentation in time for the final lesson of the course: for some, an impressive result in itself.

At this stage our achievements are relatively modest. Our Year 7 ‘Storytelling' project is a small step towards something much bigger and much more exciting. By building into our lessons opportunities for pupils to take charge of their own learning, we hope to increase pupil motivation wholesale. Some things are becoming clear. It is essential to prepare for the mechanics of a lesson. It is vital to plan for key objectives – and preparation directed towards positive, constructive learning goals will reap tremendous benefits. But minute-by-minute lesson plans prescribing classroom activities are nothing more than straitjackets that constrict teachers and pupils alike.

Robert Legg is an Advanced Skills Teacher and Head of Music at a large comprehensive in Oxfordshire