Helping beginning religious education teachers plan effective and creative lessons

Effective planning is at the heart of good teaching. Religious education (RE) teachers are focused on helping pupils learn and progress within the subject and this requires careful planning and preparation. However, careful planning also ensures that beginning RE teachers walk into their classrooms with confidence. They need to know they have planned a lesson which develops pupils’ knowledge but in which they have also considered pedagogical approaches, the needs of individual learners and how they will manage pupils’ behaviour. If beginning teachers have not thought through these elements, it is more likely that the lesson will not go as they intend. There is much to think about when planning a lesson and, as an experienced teacher, you will do much of this unconsciously. Therefore, supporting a beginning teacher in planning lessons may require consciously identifying things that you do automatically so that you can support them to build up their own knowledge and skills. Lesson planning is an aspect of teaching where beginning teachers look to their mentors for guidance and where the level of support required may change through the mentoring period. This chapter works through the different stages that you might go through with a beginning teacher – from a novice planning part of a lesson for the first time to a beginning teacher focused on learning how to construct their own lesson plan and resources to a teacher in the early years of their career who is looking to develop their skills further as they take on responsibility for developing sequences of learning.