Preschool Teachers Should Stop Writing Lesson Plans

Children are learning when they play as members of a community and are given the time and space to answer their own questions.

I don’t make lesson plans, at least not in the traditional sense. I’ve certainly reflected upon what the kids were doing and talking about yesterday, then made my best guess about where they might want to take it today. Based on these reflections, I might make sure certain materials are available, but even after all these years I still get it wrong more often than not and spend much of my day running back and forth to the storage closet, which is my real lesson planning. That’s because there is no way to predict play.

Play makes its own “plan,” one that emerges as motivated learners come together to create, invent, and explore. In fact, it’s that unpredictability, at least in part, that makes a play-based curriculum such a powerful and motivating way for children to learn. Predictability is one of the hallmarks of rote and no one is motivated by that. No one is motivated by being told what to learn and by when, which are the hallmarks of a typical lesson plan. No, humans are at their intellectual best when they have the time and space to both individually and collectively pursue their own interests within the context of a community, and it’s impossible to know beforehand what discoveries they will make, no matter how much planning the adults have done.

Indeed, even after the fact, even as I take a moment at the end of the day to ponder what we have done together, I’ve come to recognize that I still have no idea what the kids have learned on any given day. I can tell you what I thought they might learn going in, I can describe their behavior and make a record of their words, I can speculate about what they might now know or not know, I can even directly ask them, “What did you learn?” but at the end of the day, the only ones who can ever know what they have learned are the kids themselves, and more often than not it’s so fresh…