What Makes A Great Lesson?
This week, I was invited to be a guest on a new podcast about Scottish education (‘Two Heads Are Better Than One’ – check it out: it’s good). The main theme was ‘What makes a great lesson?’, which is the question I was asked to unpack. I was very happy to do this because I think it’s an essential question for everyone who works in education to keep coming back to. However, I don’t think it is one that gets discussed often enough.
While your instinctive response might be, ‘Well, it depends on the subject or content at hand’, and to some extend this is true, I believe there are common principles (rules of thumb) that can be applied to all subjects and the vast majority of lessons. These are as relevant to whole-class lessons as they are small-group or one-to-one tuition.
In this article, I would like to share what I believe are seven fundamental principles about what makes a great lesson. The hope is that as teachers plan and reflect on lessons, and leaders get into conversations with teachers about these, the principles are useful as a guide to keep everyone of the right track. The specifics of how they are applied is up to the professional teacher.
If nothing else, I hope this article might serve as a useful starting point for others to reflect on the question of what makes a great lesson themselves, or with colleagues. For example, perhaps it is a question you would like to discuss at a forthcoming team meeting, twilight session or INSET day.
A Great Lesson – Principle 1: The teacher is clear about what they want students to learn.
Content clarity underpins purposeful pedagogy. The clearer teachers are about what they want students to learn (in a lesson or across a series of lessons) the clearer learning intentions and success criteria are likely to be, and the more likely activities will focus on clear learning goals. ‘Being busy activities’ – which occupy students and that they might describe as fun – aren’t the same as ‘learning activities’ – which are focused on students learning specific knowledge and skills.
Therefore, the first principle of what makes a great lesson is that teachers are clear in their own mind about what they want students to learn. This doesn’t mean that students can’t learn things that go beyond this ‘core content’ – they can and should. It just means the core content is clear in the teacher’s mind. The other six principles of what makes a great lesson depend on this.
A Great Lesson – Principle 2: The lesson is well organised.
In Why Don’t Students Like School?, Daniel Willingham highlights common points that students make when asked what makes a great teacher (which is closely related to the question, ‘What makes a great lesson?’). One of these points is that the teacher is well organised – they know they are talking about, and lesson activities feel well planned. High-quality teaching resources, the teacher being in control of what is happening and what is (probably) going to happen next, and effective use of the time available are all typically hallmarks of great lessons.
A Great Lesson – Principle 3. The teacher takes steps to make the content interesting.
Another common point made by students and highlighted in Daniel Willingham’s book is that great teachers take steps to make content interesting. Hence, this is the third principle of what makes a great lesson.
The way a teacher makes lesson content interesting can be varied, but a common thread is they are likely to be taking steps to encourage students to think about questions and problems. For example, a lesson might begin with a big, overarching question such as, ‘If we put a coat on a snowman, will it make it more or less likely that the snowman will melt faster, or will it not make any difference?’. The goal of the lesson would then be to learn knowledge that will help students answer the question successfully. This takes us to our fourth principle of what makes a great lesson…
A Great Lesson – Principle 4: Activities encourage students to think.
Sticking with Why Don’t Students Like School? (which is a book I would highly recommend to anyone who works in education), Daniel Willingham discusses memory as the residue of thought. In other words, learning is most likely to happen after thinking has taken place. This is a point that is repeatedly emphasised in educational literature, such as The Great Teaching Toolkit, which suggests learning is most likely to happen when students think (appropriately) hard. Thinking is the key to learning, which means in great lessons, students spend a lot of time thinking.
For example, they might do this by considering questions (in their heads or by giving verbal or written responses), discussing, and through practice. This is why in Principles of Instruction, Barak Rosenshine suggests that the most successful teachers typically spend more than half of the lesson time asking questions. Great lessons are interactive and focus on thinking as much as possible.
A Great Lesson – Principle 5: There are links backwards.
As well as encouraging students to think, questions, discussion and practice help the teacher find out what students know, understand and can do already, which is the fifth principle of what makes a great lesson.
Learning happens through connections: we learn new things (knowledge and skills) by making links to things that have already been learned. To make these connections, teachers need to find out what students have already learned (in or out of school), which includes any misconceptions they might have. Great lessons are responsive, with decisions about what to do (or not do) next based on visible evidence of learning. As Dylan Wiliam says, teaching needs to start from where students are - not where we would like them to be.
A Great Lesson – Principle 6: There are frequent checks for everyone’s understanding.
Building on this principle, in great lessons, there are frequent checks for understanding as content is being taught. Importantly, these checks target everyone’s understanding, rather than just individuals or small groups of students. While sampling approaches have a place, more often than not, checks for understanding should be universal. In that respect, tools such as show-me boards (mini whiteboards) can be a teacher’s best friend. A question is asked and every student is expected to respond to this on their show-me board, holding this up for the teacher to see when told. Such approaches encourage all students to think, give everyone time to think and, crucially, make everyone’s thinking visible.
A Great Lesson – Principle 7: Everyone experiences success.
The final principle about what makes a great lesson is that every student has regular opportunities to be successful. The experience of success is one of the powerful motivators for anyone in any walk of life. With this in mind, a great way to motivate students and help them enjoy lessons is to help them to be successful as much as possible. One way to do this is to differentiate the level of support students get whilst engaging with a task. Another way is to break complex tasks into smaller, component parts, before bringing these together after students have experienced success with the smaller blocks.
This isn’t to say that there should never be failure in lessons – if there isn’t, we almost certainly aren’t pushing students to achieve the best they can – but rather success should dominate.
References and further reading
Coe, R., Rauch, C.J., Kime, S. and Singleton, D. (2020) Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review. Evidence Based Education
Kirschner, P.A. and Hendrick, C. (2020) How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Oxon: Routledge.
Rosenshine, B. (2012) ‘Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know.’ American Educator, 36(1): pp. 12–19.
Wiliam, D. (2018) Creating the Schools Our Children Need: Why What We’re Doing Now Won’t Help Much (And What We Can Do Instead). West Palm Beach, FL: Learning Sciences International.
Willingham, D.T. (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Podcast link: Two Heads Are Better Than One (Episode 3)