Teachers can spend an inordinate amount of time planning lessons, often using different planning processes and expectations at the teacher, team, department, and school levels.
This disparity and lack of school-wide planning processes often lead to tension among leaders and teachers and can hinder the embedding of best-practice pedagogy.
Our 2021 annual survey of teachers, school leaders, and administrators—compiled from over 1,000 respondents representing more than 590 schools (56% independent) from every state and territory in Australia—highlighted some compelling priorities regarding teacher planning.
The top priority for school leaders (57%) was ‘consistently embedding best-practice pedagogy across the school’, and for teachers, it was ‘improving workflow to reduce workload’ (42%). So, where should teachers and schools start embedding best-practice pedagogy across the school and improving workflow to reduce teacher workload?
Zunia can help. It’s a centralised system that streamlines teacher workflows and reduces administrative burdens by integrating student information, planning tools, and assessment management. This unified approach can support collaborative planning and help teachers focus more on teaching rather than administrative tasks.
Systems researchers will tell you that implementing system-wide educational improvement needs to be deliberate (Sinek, 2009) and that “the key to changing systems is to produce greater numbers of system thinkers” (Fullan, 2005). So, how can school leaders leverage the systems research to achieve their priorities? The key is identifying where actions and changes in their current systems can lead to embedding best-practice pedagogy.
Where do schools start?
The first step is to examine your current teacher planning systems to determine their effectiveness in meeting your pedagogical expectations. This step is critical in ensuring best-practice pedagogy is embedded across your school.
To ensure the effectiveness of your current teacher planning systems, consider using SEQTA. It centralises lesson planning, assessment, and reporting in one platform, making teacher plans visible to leaders and colleagues. This visibility fosters consistency and provides a structured framework for embedding best-practice pedagogy across teams, helping schools achieve their educational goals.
Key questions to consider:
- How visible is teacher planning to leaders and teachers?
- To what extent do our teacher planning systems embed best-practice pedagogy that focuses on improving student learning outcomes?
- Is there a consistent approach to teacher planning?
- To what extent do teachers collaboratively plan together?
- To what extent do our teacher planning systems improve teacher workflow?
Once you have answers to these questions, consider the common planning processes you want all teachers to undertake. I recently worked with two schools as their Visible Learning Consultant. They wanted to embed best-practice pedagogy, which focused on developing teacher clarity – a teacher influence linked to almost two years of growth in student learning (Hattie, 2009). Writing effective learning intentions and success criteria was one of the pedagogical tools they were learning and practising.
As we progressed through the workshop, I realised neither school had a consistent teacher planning system. Everyone was doing something different. Some teachers planned whole units, while others planned lesson by lesson with significant variation in their level of detail. I suggested to both groups of school leaders that they consider creating a consistent teacher planning system across their schools, which would facilitate collaborative planning across teams and departments and, consequently, reduce teacher workload.
Our product, Engage, fosters collaborative planning by offering an all-in-one hubthat enables parents, teachers, and students to work together seamlessly.
Both schools chose to implement the suggestion and created a unit overview planner. This planner required teachers to include the curriculum standards and content descriptors (from the Australian curriculum), along with the unit’s concepts, skills, context, learning intentions, and success criteria. This was the best-practice pedagogy they wanted to embed consistently across the school.
I recently returned to School A to conduct their Visible Learning (VL) School Capability Assessment to review their progress in implementing their VL plan. As part of the process, I talked to teachers, school leaders, and numerous students across all classes. I also reviewed a range of unit overview planners. These discussions and documents highlighted the significant progress the school had made in embedding best-practice pedagogy across the school.
Students now talked about what they were learning and how they knew when they would be successful rather than telling me what they were doing in class. The change in their teacher planning system had significantly impacted student learning.
