On Lesson Planning and Motivation

Writing something can be boring work. Writing something boring when there is a backlog of previous boring writing jobs can feel like climbing a mountain. Writing something boring, with a backlog behind it and a deadline in front of it, while you are tired, thirsty and hot, is surely one of the tasks human beings were not created for.

This was exactly what went through the mind of a nine-year-old student during science class.

There was a copybook called Classwork. Students were expected to copy bullet points from the board, copy the homework questions and decorate the page. All of this happened in the last five minutes of class because, of course, they were not allowed to hold a pen while the teacher was talking.

The little girl was never fast enough to copy anything before the teacher started. She could barely get the date onto the page before the announcement came: pens down.

She was relieved. It was now legitimate not to write. Unfortunately, this meant she had to pay attention.

The teacher was not cruel or apathetic. Quite the contrary. She seemed deeply passionate about what she was saying. She was loud, serious and intense. She seemed to say important things, which gave the girl all the more reason to feel guilty for missing them. Yet a decision had been made somewhere inside her a long time ago.

We’re tuning her out.

Another decision followed a few weeks later. The five minutes for writing became three because the teacher, carried away by all the loud enthusiasm, left very little time for the class to copy the classwork bullet points.

What were these points for? They meant nothing. They did not help anyone remember. They were not fun. Were they proof that the points had been covered? And wasn’t classwork decoration supposed to happen in class? The girl was not sure how to decorate at home, and she was far too independent to ask a parent.

So that day, she gave up on the writing. What would happen?

Nothing, actually. She got away with it.

One missed page became another when her hand hurt and the loud comparison between crocodiles and lizards did not make much sense. Then two empty pages became weeks of backlog. If she decided to rejoin the successful group, how many blank pages should she leave?

She remembers one day in particular. Her hands were dusty. There was a heatwave. She was hot, and there was absolutely no writing happening.

By the following lesson, she was not hot, tired or thirsty. She simply did not do it. Nothing would happen.

Except that it did.

When she went home, she faced the betrayal. Her mother was holding the copybook. She had seen the empty pages, the last lesson written weeks earlier, the red question marks and the deadline to fix all of it before Monday.

A weekend of this.

Her mother had borrowed an example copybook, one of the good ones. She bought stickers and crayons. The girl spent the weekend copying and following the frames. Her mother did the drawings and added the stickers. By Sunday night, the book had acquired everything it needed to look as if science had happened.

The girl did not suddenly fall in love with science after this incident. Quite understandable.

Years later, a sixteen-year-old student, could she be the same child? was telling her father about the geography teacher and her ridiculous conditions for giving a good mark to the classwork copybook. Again?

On the right-hand page, the students had to copy bullet points from the board. Sounds familiar? On the left, they had to add a map of the country mentioned in the notes. And not just any drawing of a map. The map had to be carefully traced on high-quality tracing paper, never directly onto the copybook, and no cheap kind would do. A specific brand.

So ridiculous. Who would do that?​

The girl had made her decision. All right, it is the same girl. She was not doing this. Where on earth would she find that paper? She had never asked. She was independent.

Her father listened. Instead of becoming angry, calling the teacher names or agreeing that the task was impossible, he said, “Why don’t you give it a try and enjoy it? Just enjoy the drawing. You love drawing. You love colouring. You have an atlas. You have two.”

The girl paused.

“But the tracing paper?”

He had that exact type. He would give her as much as she wanted. She could do it for the pleasure of it, since she did not really have to.​

So she did.

She traced and coloured. The paper was smooth and even smelled nice. The crayons moved across it beautifully, and when she smudged the colour with a little cotton ball, the maps looked gorgeous. Some countries were missing from the student’s book, so she opened the atlas and traced them from there. She copied the colour patterns. She drew maps in advance because she could not wait for the lessons to arrive.

The teacher was thrilled. The copybook earned a full mark and acquired a pocket full of tracing-paper maps.

The class was not happy.

“These maps aren’t in the school book. That’s not fair!”

Well, it’s not fair that you are all popular. At least in my home we’ve got tracing paper and atlas books.

The requirement remained ridiculous. The girl had found a reason that belonged to her. Pleasure came in. Choice came in. The feeling of being unusually good at something came marching in behind them. By the following year, she had transformed a whole geography chapter into one enormous map on her bedroom wall. It helped her remember details she would otherwise have lost.

Now let us meet a young teacher in her second year of teaching. She has recently learnt how to compose a lesson plan, and the template makes sense. You need to know what you are going to do in class.

She remembers her first year. Her first day.

She found herself standing in front of sixty little eyes. Thirty four-year-olds were staring at her. They were not noisy. She had skilfully captured their attention. They were all in, waiting for the fascinating words that would come from her mouth.

She stood there and had an epiphany.

Uh-oh. We needed to have a plan.

You bet.

She had absolutely nothing to say. She had no idea what was up for today or what wisdom she was supposed to impart to thirty four-year-olds. She turned around and started drawing with chalk on the green board. Thank God there was chalk. The children watched with curiosity. Luckily, it was their first day too, and they had no idea what to expect.

No, the drawing did not become the most wonderful lesson ever. She did not improvise a story and later write it at the beginning of her teaching book. You wish. No miraculous signature class opening emerged from the random moment, even though talent was there.

After class, she met her boss and was asked for the lesson planner for the whole semester.

Now that would have helped.

A year later, she has moved to a new school. She knows how to write a plan now, and she enters the meeting with her new boss feeling confident. Then comes the request. You will not believe it.

Scraps of coloured paper inside the lesson preparation notebook.

Why?

Because they show passion and organisational skills, they said. Because they demonstrate dedication, they said.

What is the point? This is ridiculous.

She sat in an empty classroom surrounded by construction paper and coloured foam. It was a hot August day. She had an entire classroom to decorate, and the lesson preparation copybook was staring back at her, echoing the smug smile of the boss who knew exactly what she was doing.

A fly kept orbiting her face. That fly had more motivation than she did at that moment.

She was not going to waste time cutting, pasting and colouring only for her planning book. She did not do pointless. It would do her no good. It would do the children no good. She would rather spend the time making classroom cards.

Don’t worry. She did not decide to refuse. This time she needed to get paid.

For the first few weeks, she did exactly what was expected. She cut out coloured frames, added headings in bubble letters and found decorative uses for pieces of foam that had never expected to participate in English-language education. Her notebook looked passionate. It looked dedicated. It looked as though it might soon require its own display board.

Then, one hot afternoon, she said aloud what she had been thinking for weeks.

“This doesn’t make sense.”

The notebook did not answer. The scraps of coloured paper maintained the dignified silence of people who know they have powerful friends in management.

By then, the copybook had caught up with the fly. Both looked remarkably passionate, annoyed everyone within reach and served no discernible purpose.

Enough.

She turned the page and took the book back.

She would make the book useful. She would put in only what would make the following week easier, better and more present in her head. And you know what? It ended up looking pretty good too.

We will come back to what she actually put in there.

Another teacher, somewhere else, another one, I promise, has been teaching for ten years. He teaches lower secondary. This is the fifth class his old notebook has seen.

He only has to open the right page. Then he asks whether anyone could lend him a pencil. It has to be a pencil. He changes the date, just the date, and returns the pencil.

That is the only moment of contact the old notebook has with her owner. Their relationship has been suffering the silent treatment for years. He has nothing more to give her. She has got nothing more to say to him.

Or so he thinks.

She believes there is always more. Why can’t he tell her about his day? His new students? That one who drives him mad? That other one who makes him look good in front of the boss when he participates in the assembly broadcast?

Ah, why can’t he talk?

She is sure she could give him something in return. Instead, she sits there in silence, page open, collecting dust from the chalk he uses.

She could have whispered that the activity in the second paragraph might catch the attention of the mischievous girl at the back because she enjoys these puzzles. She might have pointed out that groupwork will probably collapse with this class, while pairwork still has a chance. She might have persuaded him to stop rushing the activity he always rushes because the group in front seem to struggle with this particular piece of grammar.

If only he would spend ten minutes with her at the weekend. She notices things. She could whisper. She does not ask for much. A sticky note would do.

She knows he does not want to spend time on pointless repetition. She knows about the date trick. She understands, and she is grateful that his smart solution allows her to stay. The notebook is not the cause of his anger. She is his accomplice.

They have been committing administrative fraud together for years. Surely the relationship deserves one honest conversation.

There is another teacher I want you to meet. This one is real. Her name is Myriam Monterrubio.

She is one of the most creative and insightful authors of English-language teaching coursebooks in the world. She has a way with words. Her vibrant smile shines through her characters, and mischief runs through the activities she puts into her books.

When she speaks, rooms move. Attendees forget the world for sixty minutes and feel one thing: her. The games, stories, songs, technique and theory arrive as one fascinating breath of fresh air. All those dragging, torturous classroom hours melt from working memory for a while. You know they are still lurking. This isn’t Disneyland. Still, the surface has butterflies and light.

And this wonderful author still teaches. She is not speaking from a high tower.

So what does an author like her do with lesson planning? Surely it must be language-rich prose full of arguments and reasoning. Reflections. Detailed descriptions of lesson steps. It must speak and speak.

Guess what?

Her lesson plan is one sheet of paper with almost nothing but drawings.

It is a circular diagram of how she sees the lesson happening. Names of students. Sequence. Repetitive activities. New mind-blazers. Joke here. Story there. The whole lesson is moving on the page.

She must have enjoyed making that.

Well, she is an artist. She enjoys it because she can.

And there it is. She uses a form that lets her see, create and craft. She can release some of the energy of the lesson onto the page. Her personal work notebook contains more text, alongside handmade frames, diagrams, notes, reflections and arrows. She writes when writing helps. She draws when drawing helps. The page changes shape with the thought.

Of course, someone could now instruct thirty teachers to plan in circles. Give them a template, perhaps. Add a compulsory reflection box. Myriam’s drawing would make a lovely new prison.

Hey! The circles are permission. Treat them as such!

Meanwhile, the young teacher is still in that hot classroom.

Planning survived her rebellion. Foam did not.

She began filling the notebook with things she might actually need. She wrote children’s names beside activities. Not all the children. She was not preparing personalised diplomatic relations with thirty four-year-olds every evening. Just the ones she needed to remember. The child who would need to sit near her. The child who could demonstrate the game without turning the demonstration into an independent production. The two children who should never be given the honour of distributing anything together.

She copied useful activities from the teacher’s book. And by “copied”, we do not mean that she lovingly rewrote three paragraphs by hand. She photocopied them, cut them out and stuck them onto the page. There are limits to passion.

Mostly, however, she planned time.

Not the imaginary kind of lesson-plan time in which every activity lasts precisely seven minutes, all children finish simultaneously and no one needs the toilet. She planned the time of the school day.

A forty-minute lesson first thing in the morning was not the same creature as a forty-minute lesson after break. The half hour before home time had technically been measured using the same clocks, but educationally it existed in another dimension. A long morning block could hold a story, a song, table work and a return to the story. The final lesson of the day could sometimes hold a pencil. If everyone was lucky.

She treated each pocket of time as its own small world.

What needed to be on the tables before the children entered?

What should remain hidden until the exact moment it was needed because displaying it early would end the lesson before it began?

Which lesson came after break, when half the class would arrive carrying water bottles, playground grievances and information about an insect?

What could be placed beside the board so she would not have to cross the classroom sixteen times later?

What could the children do while she listened to one group?

What could she prepare today that would save four minutes tomorrow?

The notebook did not contain every thought. Some happened in her head while she wrote. The page simply gave them somewhere to gather. By the time she closed the book, she could see the day.

The following year, the school began accepting typed plans. She discovered copy and paste and handled this new power responsibly.

Mostly.

She could move activities around without rewriting them. She could keep instructions that worked. She could use coloured fonts because they helped her find things quickly. She began a new file for every class, leaving the ancient-plan-and-pencil arrangement to colleagues with longer marriages.

The plans became easier to write, so she put more thought into them.

If she needed to draw something on the board, she practised it on the printed plan. Sometimes she added arrows. Sometimes a small diagram of the tables. Sometimes a warning to herself in large red letters:

DO NOT GIVE OUT THE SCISSORS YET.

The pages began to look good. That was what happened when her thinking was alive on them.

Years passed.

It is 2030, and she is still teaching.

She can present the lesson blindfolded. In fact, some members of management seem to believe this is one of her contractual obligations. She knows where to stand, what to say and which expression will make the room go quiet. She knows three ways to explain the task, two ways to rescue it and one way to abandon it without anyone noticing.

Her planning app can produce a respectable plan in seconds. She enters the page number, selects the lesson duration and receives objectives, stages, timings, differentiation, anticipated problems and a closing reflection question before she has finished her coffee.

Very efficient.

Completely pointless.

She already knows how the lesson goes. The app can spend its energy elsewhere.

She opens the lesson-maker view and starts moving the lesson around.

Thirty children appear as small shapes on the screen. She drags them into pairs and groups. She changes the position of one child, then moves him back. No. Beside that group, he will spend the whole lesson performing for them. She turns the tables. Everyone can see the board now. Can they all see one another? Do they all need to be listening at the same time? Could one group begin while she gives a quieter explanation to another?

The app knows the pieces. She knows the children. It holds everything still for a moment while she thinks.

She tells it that one child has been absent for a week. Mercifully, it does not produce a magnificent individualised intervention involving new resources, three assessment tools and an additional adult who does not exist. It helps her search the lesson for one low-effort point of entry.

The child could join a familiar, repetitive activity first. A partner could quietly show him the previous page. Perhaps today’s hidden goal is one written sentence he can complete without feeling that the whole class has travelled somewhere without him.

She adds the goal in a layer no one else needs to see.

Then she adds a note beside the group that finishes everything early. “Extension activity” has spent years making one extra worksheet sound like a thrilling intellectual frontier. She gives them something worth noticing.

She checks the pocket-time tray. Three activities are already there. One needs no preparation. One uses cards she printed last month. One requires twelve bottle tops, which means it does not exist.

Delete.

The app asks whether she would like to rebalance the lesson.

“No,” she says. “I would like Thursday afternoon to rebalance itself.”

Still, she looks again.

There is too much whole-class listening. One explanation becomes something the children can discover in pairs. A four-minute gap appears while she checks notebooks, so she places a familiar language game there. One group will repeat yesterday’s activity. They had only just begun to understand what they were doing when the bell rang.

She looks at tomorrow before it becomes thirty moving bodies, six missing pencils, an unexpected assembly and a water bottle rolling very slowly towards the door.

She moves one group. She hides a small writing goal beneath the main activity. She places two pocket-time options where she can reach them. The final task needs materials, so she adds them to the tray beside her bag.

Ten minutes.

The app saves the plan.

Tomorrow will not happen exactly that way. Of course it won’t. These are children, not obedient little shapes on a screen. When the room begins to move, she will have more of her mind available to move with it.

Now that would help.

Before you close the copybook…

• The task was still ridiculous. She had found a way to make it hers.

• Motivation sometimes enters through a very small opening: a choice, a purpose, a private pleasure, a glimpse of capability.

• How much of the teacher’s effort was spent making her effort visible?

• The same page may survive for years. Every class arrives for the first time.

• One child’s name may carry more thought than three pages of procedure.

• If thirty teachers leave with the same circle, somebody has misunderstood Myriam.

• The app can hold the pieces still. Only the teacher knows why one of them moved.

• Tomorrow will not obey the plan. Good planning leaves more of the teacher available when it arrives.