Video Lesson planning

0:00 Intro

0:05 so welcome back to com 335 communicating computer science uh today we leave the more theoretical topics behind and go into lesson planning which is very closely related to what teachers do and also what you will practicing for our taste today sessions again i hope not too much at dry theory this time and much more practice but a few things that i want to say up front

0:35 first of all why do we do this and what is it what is lesson planning some motivation there was a survey of teachers both primary and secondary school teachers and they both said for one they spend most of their time actually preparing lessons not delivering them which is quite a statement and they also say yes and it takes too much time that's at least their feeling a second piece of information you will know about ofsted the the office for standards and acute in education is inspecting schools every couple of years and then they get a rating and if a school gets an outstanding then this attracts the parents who look at this so they send their kids there and if a school goes down in the rating that's a bit a big headache for the head teacher so these are kind of important for the schools but ofsted does not explicitly ask for lesson plans um and it doesn't grade the schools depending on what the what the lesson plan really is yet the teachers seem to do it right so uh why well there seems to be an inherent value that teachers get out of this planning they don't just like wasting their time i suppose they feel it helps them to make the

1:54 delivery smooth if they prepare it properly so it's not that they're externally forced to do it but they seem to get value out of it and they seem to spend quite some time on uh lessons are are planned using a fairly standard format uh this is a bit of a contradiction i guess but what i mean is the the layout of what you exactly write down varies also because it's not enforced it's not like you have to hand in your lesson plans to ofsted and then maybe there would be some format in enforced but the content that goes into this is fairly standard we'll talk about this so planning is important because it seems to help teachers it seems to help them get through their lessons in the way they intended to and i suppose if if you've been teaching at in any context you you know that it's very hard to predict how things go especially if you want to involve the audience a lecture talk like this is fairly planable if you practice it a few times you know how long it will take but anything beyond that including activities it often doesn't go the way you originally thought it it would go so you plan ahead you learn if you deliver it one time what you have to do better

3:10 next time and you try to keep a written record of that that's that's all there is now my conclusion from this is if planning takes so much time but is also so valuable let's try to not do it from scratch for every single thing and every teacher again let's try to share these and reuse them and of course this is not something i invented there's the computing at school initiative which does exactly that is a big kind of forum where teachers share what they prepared and people can take it from there and comment on it and a bit more structured is this this teach computing curriculum where it's not driven by individual teachers and crowdsourced but instead a national institute and the raspberry pi foundation together set up this task force to to create a curriculum

4:05 Lesson Plan

4:08 so the lesson plan itself is uh the idea behind this is the sharing you're you're designing a good lesson and you will invest quite some time on it probably much more than a standard teacher can spend on their standard everyday lesson you will probably spend around three weeks not working full time but around three weeks of planning your lesson which goes one hour if you take that ratio it's quite insane right but you will also be um doing a lesson that's a bit more in the limelight than a standard school lesson you want to produce something that's engaging and particularly attractive to kids but the idea is uh we don't want to waste waste that effort that you put in so we want to make it useful and preserve it so make it so that someone else could take your lesson and deliver it and everything they need for that you should write down that's the idea it should come with some some slides like these for the presentation part and the material for the activities but the the part that's often missed if you if you don't think about it up front is all the the unwritten knowledge how to actually set up the delivery how long should things take what order um maybe at what points was it

5:22 particularly useful to ask a specific question to promote some some learning experience all these things should go into your lesson plan there's a few other things that are useful if you think about using this in the context of a longer journey through a subject like computing you want well to link link it to the national curriculum because schools have to show that they cover this and in your case it's useful to do that because you want to tie it into something that the kids already know or have seen before but you don't want to duplicate what the teachers showed them so by doing that you can make make sure both this birth is true

5:34 Other Useful Things

6:10 you should also be explicit about what you expect students at this point to already know because otherwise the the prerequisites don't match up and there will be frustration in the room if you write it down and it's not true on the day that's a different story we will try to not make that happen but at least then your lesson can still be valuable if it's used in a group where this this knowledge or skills are already there

6:40 listing learning outcomes is a useful way to just frame your thinking if you put together different activities sometimes um it's easy to get lost in the details of one activity you do something because it's kind of fun to do maybe you lose the site for the bigger picture and learning outcomes means you start with what do you want to teach and then you deliver an activity that's effective for that that's more important for for a school lesson where you have to get the kids to a certain point for outreach maybe it's a little less important because we're primarily interested in just provoking interest and we don't necessarily have a fixed agenda what we want what we have to teach but it's still useful what you think kids can take out of your lesson because then a teacher later could take your lesson and say i want them to learn this or that and this seems to match

7:35 and then the more practical things how much time do you allocate for each part how is it set up like do you want kids to work in groups etc do you need specific material list everything

7:53 Template

7:56 i made a template based on what we've had in previous years i'll um well you find it on on the website that was linked on the slides and i'll share it with you on teams in a second uh so this basically is just a scaffold of all the things that were on the slide put into headlines or given some some structure in the tables

8:18 Structure

8:20 one thing specifically you to think about should think about before you start designing or maybe um along the way when you design there's different ways how you can structure your lesson a fairly standard one might be you give some introduction to a topic then you do some activity with the kids where they do something and at the end you wrap it up a bit tell them a bit this is what you could have taken from it or maybe discuss outcomes from the activity but you can also have other models where you have activities that are shorter but then interrupted by some little presentation parts again from you is sometimes helpful because it gives more structure so you you avoid that some groups run too far ahead or others are completely disengaging it can be useful to have little checkpoints you could also have this where you just verbally take from one lesson to the other without going fully back to the plane when everyone takes their seat you put up slides etc that's that's up to you i mean the purpose of this picture is it's a good thing for you to include this picture in your lesson plan or have it as uh as a table uh just to give this high level picture

9:33 up front make it explicit okay so far for the general lesson plan what should go into this next let's look a bit um at the concrete assessment that we'll do for for this module

9:37 Concrete Assessment

9:54 and just to remind you about the timeline uh the final submission of this is in december i know long time ahead and we'll want to select the topics finally in late mid-november but of course you're very much encouraged to start thinking about this right now not right now just listen for now in five minutes we'll have some individual meetings in the meantime to discuss what you have come up with and i'll try to bring my experience into it to help you deliver something cool um and maybe we can also uh arrange that some of you uh discuss with each other what what you liked or what you would like to improve and then on on this second second session where we meet again here for two hours on campus i'd like you to give a very short pitch of your lesson note that this is after the submission so in a sense you write everything up including everything you need for this lesson i'll come back to this but you can see down there what i mean when i say lesson plan i really mean everything that's needed for the lesson uh so the idea is that you submit this in for this 13th of december to give me some days to have a look at it

11:20 and then we meet here and discuss it uh the idea there is for one i i'd like to give you an opportunity to celebrate a bit what you've done and show it to the others show your pride and also for the group to give some feedback because this is the final version for the assessment but it's not the written in stone version for the delivery so you can still make some changes and polish it a bit into a certain direction i hope this will be a bit of a fun session where you can just celebrate what you achieved but that means you'll have to work substantially before this deadline to make that happen yeah remember this is um this is the biggest chunk of the mark so this lesson plan uh it's on purpose to put so much emphasis on the planning and not the delivery itself uh one part because who knows what happens with the delivery if new restrictions come in force but also the plan is really something you have control over and teachers feel is important so this is something um that that yeah you should just keep in mind

12:34 um my my uh recommendation is try to block certain days in this time period you roughly know when it'll go it'll be happening you have roughly a month between when you definitely should know your topic and when you have to submit it as ample time but yeah try to block some time in that so that you have the the chance to work on this

12:57 you should think about some slides for the presentation parts and you should think about the activities anything you need for that should be prepared and well you should write a lesson plan like using the template i've shown that puts everything together so that someone could in theory take what you submit there and just deliver it without asking you further questions that's the i that's the ideal submission in a sense

13:23 Marking Scheme

13:26 i put up some some marking scheme i tried to break it down into different categories i hope this will be this will be feasible and as promising as it sounds in theory to uh to mark your submissions on this um i basically put most of the most of the weight on the actual content and what you came up with um and just very very little on the more tangential parts how it how it fits into the national curriculum um i think the the activities for me are are the key part because that's often where you make the difference between something that's okay-ish it teaches something and really it memorable and enthusing or creating creating interest so spend most of the time thinking about great activities i think the topic is kind of secondary especially in your case you can pick any topic you don't have a specific curriculum that you have to cover it's unlike teachers in school who are forced to do a certain thing you can pick any topic that you feel is suitable so you can start with an activity that's really fun to do and then as a second thought you can think about what can you teach about computer science as a as a secondary goal and then the rest

14:52 hopefully follows along this um yeah i should have mentioned somewhere on the slides um the whole thing is for one hour or a little short of an hour because we have our slots and you need probably five minutes from one session to the other also my my experience is if you plan something it always takes longer than you plan especially with kids so maybe plan for 50 minutes or 45 even and if it's then is conveniently delivered in 55 minutes you're good what's much worse is if you plan something that should really take 10 more minutes and you don't have them and you have to stop in the middle of something

15:47 and again on the other hand no one forces you to to push a lot of content through rather go easy on the number of things you do but try to make them somehow memorable and yeah thought provoking maybe for a follow-up follow-up thinking by those who are susceptible to the to this

16:11 okay other questions on on the submission so far i think have one yeah one more slide on things that might help you uh because you've probably never done this and it might be useful to have some examples i have some material from previous iterations of this module but unfortunately for one i'm i won't be sharing those widely maybe um we can internally look over some the other thing is i don't have the full package of things like i want you to submit so it's it's not exactly comparable but what we have now is this teach computing curriculum which basically tries to do the same thing except for the the standard coverage of the national curriculum but they worked out sessions on on all these topics and delivered exactly these these packets they have a lesson plan which is a little different in the format but not too far from what i'm asking you to do they have slides they have the activities described with all the materials so this is this is exactly what we're doing um and here's one specific example um i can show you in a second what it looks like but um i guess the more useful way for you to use this is um if you have a topic you go through

16:15 Teaching Computing Curriculum

17:37 that website and check if there's a topic that's related to yours or similar to yours and then you can see um what they've done i think it's a it's a great way to see if you're planning way too much or way too advanced material or the opposite and also check a little bit on the amount of detail that's that they thought was necessary to describe this then you can kind of get a feeling for how much is is useful

18:09 and you can check using that well we don't know if schools exactly follow this and it's very new so they probably don't all follow it but they will do something similar you can use this to check what the kids might know or what they might have seen in school yeah i listed a few things that are different or that you should not take as a literal guidance the format for the lesson plans is slightly different but you'll figure this out

18:36 they have they have the entire curriculum broken down by key stages and then the key stage is broken down by years and then each year is broken into units and that's one unit is for example here python programming with sequences of data so they learn about lists in python okay and this is six lessons and form these from this one unit so they take six hours to learn about lists in python and how to work with them and one of them is this one lesson which takes one hour and you can look at the details there okay it also gives you an indication one hour in school it doesn't cover a lot of things and maybe also this is this is the hint for you don't overdo it you can only cover so much in this one lesson of outreach sessions

19:36 there's a few things that uh they do there because it's embedded in the whole curriculum that i think we just don't necessarily need all right that's all i wanted to say in general or in theory about this uh what i'd like you to do next is put this in into practice now because we're well six is also an even number so we can still do this in in pairs um i asked you to have a look at this uh summer school thing this online online lesson online course that we developed last year because then you roughly know what this is about and you can practice writing a lesson plan about this we have half an hour left which should probably not be enough to write a full lesson plan so you you should pick out the topic that you think either is most important or is hardest for you to do and so you can practice that first and then i can have a look at or give you feedback what i think is good or bad it's my attempt to give you a chance to practice this on a topic where it doesn't hurt where also the session is already kind of worked out so you don't have to think about what to do and how do these lights

19:45 Practice

20:51 look like etc blah blah you just do the the lesson plan document at the end on top of that