Succeeding in Education: Shared Lesson Plans, Teachers’ Recipe for Triumph
Just as a chef relies on a curated set of premium ingredients, teachers can also rely on the bank of shared lesson plans.
Teachers in Indonesia, just like their peers worldwide, are dealing with a workload similar to educators globally. They are grappling with the challenges of planning and resourcing lessons. This situation calls for a collective effort from the government, educational authorities, schools, and teachers themselves to ease the burden on educators. Planning is crucial for effective teaching, playing a central role in shaping students’ understanding and progress. It’s an area where teachers can bring their passion for a subject to make a positive impact.
However, it’s essential to distinguish between the daily lesson plan and effective lesson planning. Often, ‘planning’ is associated more with the daily written lesson plans, becoming more of a bureaucratic requirement than a strategic process to foster pupil progress. Detailed plans can turn into a ‘box-ticking’ exercise, creating unnecessary workload and diverting attention from genuine planning, providing a false sense of purpose.
These challenges arise from perceived demands imposed by the government and educational authorities, leading school leaders and teachers to adopt unhelpful methodologies. School leaders need to reassess their perception of planning, ensuring the availability of fully resourced, collaboratively developed schemes of work. Once in place, these schemes empower individual teachers to teach based on their professional judgment and experience.
To support this shift, the government and its agencies must commit to providing sufficient lead-in times for necessary changes, including the timely release of relevant materials to support teachers in planning. The introduction of a bank of pre-prepared, flexible, and responsive curriculum materials serves as a promising solution. Inspired by successful initiatives in Australia, this bank, like a chef’s set of high-quality ingredients, offers teachers a wealth of resources tailored to specific classroom contexts, significantly reducing the burden of creating materials from scratch.
Learning From Australia
For instance, Perth’s Serpentine Primary School and Marsden Road Public School in Sydney’s south-west have successfully adopted a “whole-school approach to curriculum planning.” In these institutions, teachers collaboratively work together to create a detailed and comprehensive approach to teaching. This involves the development and utilization of shared resources, fostering a culture of collaboration and resource-sharing among educators. The result is a more streamlined and efficient planning process, reducing the burden on individual teachers and ensuring a consistent and high-quality educational experience for students.
Additionally, the Australian education system has recognized the importance of investing in high-quality curriculum materials. The emphasis on developing materials by teachers, non-profits, and educational companies, as highlighted in the Grattan Institute’s report, has proven successful in enhancing the overall quality of education. By providing teachers with access to well-crafted, pre-prepared curriculum materials, Australia has taken significant strides in reducing teacher workload and promoting a collaborative teaching environment.
Recognizing cultural issues at play, it is essential to challenge the prevalent mindset that seeks ‘silver bullet’ resources as a shortcut to effective lesson planning. Time can be more effectively spent on collaborative planning and engaging with a professional body of knowledge and quality-assured resources tailored to specific classroom contexts. School leaders must recognize and value this time spent planning as an investment in the quality of education.
Conclusion
Addressing the unnecessary nature of certain planning tasks, Indonesia can take a cue from the success stories witnessed in Australia by introducing a bank of pre-prepared, flexible, and responsive curriculum materials. As Indonesia navigates the challenges of lesson planning, these global success stories serve as guiding beacons. By adopting collaborative and strategic approaches to curriculum planning, enhanced by the introduction of a comprehensive bank of resources, Indonesia has a significant opportunity to revolutionize its education system, ensuring a consistent and high-quality learning experience for students nationwide.
