Teachers are a resourceful bunch: any time an activity, question or explanation works well, they’ll keep a mental note of it, remembering to repurpose it in a future lesson. For them, identifying a new teaching ‘hack’ is a bit like discovering a new keyboard shortcut or a better route from home to work: it saves time and helps get the job done more efficiently.
This repurposing of learning activities is often evident in one of the main building blocks of a lesson: the plenary activity. By their very nature, plenaries rarely change from one lesson to the next, as their purpose remains the same: to evaluate learning.
So what is a plenary?
In a classroom context — a plenary is an activity done to evaluate the learning of all pupils. In its purest form, a plenary is this question:
“What have you learnt today?”
It’s a powerful question that helps the teacher determine what their pupils have understood. It allows pupils to reflect on what they have just done and how what they have done fits into a broader context. This question is at the heart of all plenary activities.
Naturally, plenaries are invariably done at the end of a lesson, but good teachers plan for ‘mini-plenaries’ throughout a lesson, too. They will regularly check to make sure that all of their pupils are on track and understand the learning objectives so that they can address misconceptions before the end of the lesson.
Now, it’s no good just asking children to consider “what have you learnt today?” That would be boring; pupils would soon tire of the task. Having a bank of varied plenary activities which can be tweaked to suit the learning is vital.
I’m a former primary school teacher, and I spent many years building up my own ‘toolkit’ of tricks that I could draw upon when planning. This included my ‘go-to’ plenary activities — ones that I knew worked well and were quick and easy to prepare.
Since leaving the classroom to write lesson planning for PlanBee, I’ve often drawn upon my bank of tried and tested plenary activities. Recently, I realised I was starting to get stuck in a rut. I needed some new ideas to keep my lesson plans fresh! Since then, I’ve had a significant rethink about planning plenaries. Taking the time to reflect on the purpose of plenaries has helped me improve my planning. Hopefully, my reflections will help you improve yours, too:
It’s not what they ARE; it’s what they DO.
We all understand the broad aims of plenary activities: They help teachers check for understanding and evaluate teaching and learning, and they help pupils consolidate the knowledge, skills and understanding they have (hopefully) developed during the lesson.
With that in mind, try to adopt an insightful approach to planning plenaries: Don’t think about what the summative activity should be — instead, consider its purpose. What do you want pupils to be able to do? Start by writing a simple statement which describes this. For example:
Use times tables knowledge to solve problems involving direct proportion.
This statement probably looks pretty similar to your learning objective. If it does, great! You’ve probably planned a fairly good lesson! So far, so good. Based on that statement, you can probably come up with a straightforward activity which helps determine which children can and can’t yet do that. If you’re in a rush, or new to teaching, you might stop thinking about what your plenary should do at this point — choosing instead to spend the rest of your limited time planning how to make it interesting or fun. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — but we want to polish our plenaries!
Let’s look at how to plan summative activities that deepen understanding, too:
Don’t let the learning stop.
As teachers, we’re usually pretty good at identifying next steps for learners. When planning, we ensure we have questions, extension activities or prompts for discussion, which will keep learners moving forward and deepening their understanding once they’ve grasped the core objectives of the lesson. Why shouldn’t end of lesson plenaries provide opportunities to extend learning, too?
Think about how you’d like children to grow and deepen their understanding of the skills and knowledge they’ve been developing in the lesson. You might like children to think about the ‘real world’ implications of their learning, or, you might have an eye on starting to address the next level of National Curriculum objectives above those at which your pupils are currently working. Take the first statement you wrote, and grow it in a few different ways. For example:
Use times tables knowledge to solve problems involving direct proportion AND recognise when using a calculator may be necessary.
Or:
Use times tables knowledge to solve problems involving direct proportion, INCLUDING those resulting in repeating or recurring decimal numbers.
Planning a plenary that addresses a statement like one of these — rather than just the learning objective of the lesson — will let you see not only if children have learned what you hoped they would, but whether they can apply what they’ve learned in other contexts.
Sow seeds in the minds of your learners.
Using plenaries to extend learning is great if you’re nearing the end of a teaching sequence. However, if you’re starting — or in the middle of — a series of lessons, you might want to maximise the effectiveness of your plenary by using it to prime children for the next lesson. To do this, try taking your original statement and linking it to some next steps, or the next lesson’s objective. For example:
Use times tables knowledge to solve problems in direct proportion problems about map scales and scale drawings.
Designing a plenary to evaluate this outcome will not only work for the lesson you’ve just taught but give you a bit of an idea of where your children are before the next lesson. You might even be able to improve your future planning to ensure misconceptions are addressed, or that time isn’t wasted on concepts with which your class are already familiar.
Save time: keep it simple!
I’m not suggesting that every time you write a lesson plan, you slavishly write out half a dozen different statements as I’ve outlined above! I certainly don’t do this often, but I’d recommend giving it a go a few times — you’ll find yourself doing it instinctively in your head after a while if you’re anything like me!
The great thing about taking the time to consider the purpose of your plenary in this way before you choose, or devise, an activity is that it helps you to focus on what’s most important to evaluate. I like to think about the most straightforward way I can help myself — and the children — evaluate the learning against these statements, without having to use much in the way of resources or spend time getting into groups. Anything involving talk is a double-win because it’s super-quick to plan, easy to assess quickly at the end of a lesson, and keeps the classroom activity pupil-led.
And finally: don’t reinvent the wheel!
I, and the rest of the small team of former primary teachers at PlanBee, have created a list of 10 Powered-up Plenary Ideas for teachers. They’re all created with the principles I’ve talked about, above, in mind. Hopefully, you’ll find a few new plenary activities you can add to your toolkit of teaching tricks!
