Lessons go wrong. They go wrong for teachers with twenty years in the classroom and for teachers with twenty days, and they go wrong after meticulous planning as often as after none. Quite often it isn’t even your fault: a fight at lunch, a wasp, a fire drill nobody mentioned.
You can’t stop lessons going wrong. What matters is what you do while it’s happening, and what you do afterwards.
You’re more resilient than you feel
If you’re an early career teacher, you’ve already got through training, placements and at least one observation that made your stomach drop. You got here. That doesn’t make a lesson falling apart in front of you any less horrible, but it’s worth remembering at quarter past three on a Thursday.
Spot the warning signs early
Most lessons that go wrong give some warning, and some of it arrives before the class does. Children bring the playground and last night’s group chat in with them, and they don’t leave it at the door.
That’s the case for meeting them at the door. Two minutes of hellos tells you the mood and who’s fallen out with whom. It also tells you who needs a quiet word before they sit down, rather than a loud one ten minutes later.
Once the lesson is underway, look out for chatter replacing work, and for several pupils asking the same question or getting the same one wrong. Watch the clock too. A task finished in half the time you planned is too easy; one nowhere near done at the halfway mark is too hard. Either way it’s telling you about the pitch of the work, not just the behaviour.
Pause
When a lesson starts to slide, the instinct is to talk faster and push on. Don’t. Stop for a moment and work out what’s actually wrong. Is it the task, your explanation, or something that happened before they came in? You’ll make a better call calm than flustered, and the class will read your calm as control, even if you don’t feel it.
Check understanding as you go
Quick checks during the lesson tell you whether to carry on or go back: mini whiteboards, a question to someone who hasn’t got their hand up, “show me on your fingers how sure you are”. They also break a lesson into pieces, so one bad piece doesn’t sink the lot. There are more ideas in our post on lesson plenaries.
Change the plan
The plan is there to serve the learning, not the other way round. If the task is too hard, strip it back or model another example. If it’s too easy, skip ahead. Coming at the same objective from a different direction can rescue a lesson that looked lost.
It helps to keep a couple of back-up activities that work with any class, like a retrieval quiz on last week’s work or five minutes of silent writing. Starters don’t only work at the start. They’ll refocus a room at any point, and sometimes nobody even notices the plan went out of the window.
Reflect, then let it go
Afterwards, think about what happened, what you did and what you might do differently. Try not to pin it all on the class, even when they deserve some of it: the useful question is what you could change. Then tell your mentor. ECT induction in England lasts two years and comes with a mentor for exactly this, and a lesson that went wrong makes a far better mentor meeting than one that went fine.
Then go home. One bad lesson doesn’t make you a bad teacher. Learning from it is a lot of what makes a good one.
If you’d like some help with the room itself, Manage Your First Classroom and Turn Around the Behaviour of a Tricky Class are both short and practical.
Adapted from an original post by Mark Richards.