Every so often there comes along a new daft idea (or a newly-packaged old idea that has been mangled out of recognition (and thereby rendered useless) so that its “inventor” can be designated as a guru. (Me? Cynical? Never!) One of the more unfortunate manifestations of this phenomenon was the three part lesson. It sounds good and logical, but then the thing that usually happens happened: Ofsted started insisting on it, and headteachers demanded to witness it in every lesson. Woe betide the brilliant but hapless teacher whose lesson plans failed to include the three parts.

This doesn’t just happen with things like lesson plans — it happens with everything. When I was an IT advisor the deputy headteacher of one school insisted on having students use a version of one of the systems called integrated learning for a whole lesson — despite my informing him that all the research suggested the optimum time was 15 minutes.

It happened when I was a senior manager in a local authority, when someone from Ofsted gave a talk in which he said technology should be used in every lesson — and that if the teacher couldn’t use it he or she should make sure to mention that technology could have been used.

It happened when I was involved in technology training for headteachers, in which role I heard of headteachers who insisted on interactive whiteboards or computers being on in every classroom in every lesson — not used necessarily, just on.

It happened when the Department for Education introduced levels, which were intended to give an idea of where students were at the end of a key stage in the National Curriculum. Some headteachers decided it would be far more useful to give a level to every lesson and every piece of work.

I daresay there are schools in which teachers are expected to divide all their lessons into manageable chunks in accordance with Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). The fact that CLT is light on the specifics and is a load of rubbish is seemingly no deterrent.

All of which is to say that although I’ve focussed on the three-part lesson in this article, I am really using it as a proxy for all the hare-brained policies I’ve come across that are founded on the myth that there is a magic bullet in education.

Anyway, I was trawling through the Freedman archives when I came across this article written in 2004. Although it originally referred to “ICT”, it could just as easily refer to “Computing”, so I’ve made a few changes accordingly. The insistence on the three part lesson has since been thrown into the dustbin of education history, thank goodness  -- though I daresay there are still some headteachers who swear by it.

Having a structure to your lesson is definitely good – but having a prescriptive approach like saying all lessons must have X number of parts, where X is any number you like, appears to have no firm basis at all. In fact, for a thorough debunking of the rigid application of the three part lesson structure, I recommend Tom Bennett's book, Teacher Proof, which I reviewed here. (I haven’t linked to it because its price on Amazon — the paperback version — is £73, which I regard as a tad expensive.)

Anyway, here’s the article. Enjoy.

The 3,000 Part Lesson

The idea of the 3-part lesson is not exactly new. Long-in-the-tooth educationalists will recall the original description of the 3-part lesson:

“First I tells ‘em what I’m going to ell ‘em, then I tells ‘em, then I tells ‘em what I told ‘em”.

To be fair, and also boringly pedantic and modern (which is probably a tautological statement in itself), the first part of that is a declaration of lesson objectives rather than of intended learning outcomes. Even so, you can see the similarities between this “old-fashioned” approach and the current “conventional” wisdom.

I wouldn’t mind – in fact, I think the formalisation of the concept of the 3-part lesson is very useful. But there is no consistency. The 3-part lesson has developed into the 4-part lesson, and I’ve recently come across a project that promotes the idea of the 6-part lesson, and a school which bases all its lesson planning on the model of a 7-part lesson.

None of these goes far enough.

I propose the 3000-part lesson. Based on the “ideal” lesson time for discrete Computing lessons of 50 minutes, the 3000-part lesson would itemise exactly what was to happen in each second of the lesson. Nothing would be left to chance.

I do have some philosophical questions though. For example, part 1 of my ideal lesson is “Preparing to change the mind set of the pupils entering the classroom”. Should this be counted as part 1 of the lesson or, because it actually starts before the lesson, is it more legitimate to regard it as part 3001 of the previous lesson?”

Please send your answers on a self-addressed postcard.