Why Beginning Teachers Need Detailed Lesson Planning

Effective lesson planning is a crucial area of professional learning for beginning teachers. This guidance outlines why planning in detail, supported by mentors, is essential in helping them make sense of the complex and often invisible thinking that underpins successful teaching, while also supporting their development against the Teachers’ Standards.

Planning as a process, not a product

Planning for beginning teachers needs to be understood as a process rather than a product. It is a complex, multi-layered activity that involves pedagogical reasoning, subject knowledge and professional judgement. Much of the thinking required is inherently invisible, particularly to beginning teachers in the early stages of learning to teach. For this reason, they often find planning challenging and so it is essential that they are supported by making this process explicit. Detailed planning plays a crucial role in revealing and clarifying this thinking.

Making pedagogical thinking explicit through detail

Beginning teachers benefit significantly from planning in detail rather than relying on brief or bullet-pointed notes. While experienced teachers may be able to work from short prompts, beginning teachers are still developing their understanding of how lessons are constructed and how learning unfolds. Writing detailed plans forces them to think carefully about what they will teach, how they will teach it and why particular approaches are appropriate and others are not. For example, simply noting “model fronted adverbials” offers little clarity. Expanding this requires beginning teachers to consider the precise sentence to be modelled, how it will be deconstructed with children, the language to be verbalised aloud, and the questions that will promote learning and check understanding. This process strengthens subject knowledge for teaching and reduces beginning teachers’ cognitive load during the lesson itself.

During university sessions, beginning teachers start to develop an understanding of the key components that need to be incorporated into effective lesson planning. These include questioning, modelling, explaining and adaptive teaching, all viewed through an inclusive lens. Detailed planning helps them integrate these facets coherently, making explicit how modelling leads into guided practice, how activities are scaffolded or adapted, and how formative assessment informs next steps.

Working from school planning

Where beginning teachers are working from detailed school planning, much of the content and learning activity may already be provided. However, they may not yet be able to interpret these plans in the same way an experienced teacher does. Mentors should support beginning teachers in transferring the school plans onto the university lesson planning template, ensuring they understand the intention behind each IWB slide, each task, and each sequence of activities. This enables them to grasp the learning journey children are expected to take and to teach with purpose rather than simply deliver materials.

Where school planning is less detailed, beginning teachers may require additional support in identifying or creating appropriate learning objectives, success criteria and activities before they can complete the lesson plan. This support is vital in helping them develop the professional judgement required to design coherent and effective lessons.

The importance of mentor and beginning teacher planning collaboratively

In all cases, beginning teachers should not be planning in isolation. Planning together with mentors allows experienced teachers to share their thinking and make visible the complex decision-making involved in lesson design. Spending time planning collaboratively helps clarify expectations, strengthens pedagogical understanding, and provides professional reassurance. Over time, as beginning teachers become more confident and proficient, the level of detail in planning and the amount of mentor support required will naturally reduce.

Planning as evidence of meeting the Teachers’ Standards

In addition, detailed planning is not only a tool for effective teaching but also important evidence that the beginning teacher is meeting the Teachers’ Standards, particularly in relation to subject knowledge, adaptive teaching and meaningful assessment.

The university’s curriculum as detailed in the Tracker, contains in full details of what beginning teachers need to be able to do when planning lessons. In summary, beginning teachers must evidence competence in lesson planning by showing that their plans:

• Provide appropriate levels of challenge that appropriately stretch children.
• Support working memory through effective sequencing, small steps, and clear links to prior learning.
• Include well-structured tasks that prepare children for independent practice.
• Focus pupils’ attention on essential content and promote deep thinking.
• Use carefully chosen and well-sequenced explanations, examples, and analogies.
• Anticipate likely misconceptions and include strategies to prevent or address them.
• Draw purposefully on prior learning to support consolidation and application of new knowledge.
• Plan for effective modelling, scaffolding, and the gradual withdrawal of support.
• Sequence lessons coherently, securing foundations before introducing more complex content.
• Embed formative assessment opportunities with clear indicators of learning and next steps.

Hence the need for detailed planning.

This list is illustrative and not exhaustive. To provide evidence of meeting the Teachers’ Standards by the end of the programme, beginning teachers must demonstrate competence across all strands of the Tracker, including all elements of the lesson planning section, not just those listed above.