My view about short-term planning at Key Stage 3 is simple; keep it short. If you are following a detailed medium-term plan, as you should be, then most of the planning has already been done. All that needs attention now is:
a. differentiation
b. pace and timings
c. structure
d. transitions
e. groupings.
To my mind these are not quite ‘back of the envelope’ notes but they are for a limited audience and need not be typed out in detail. Clearly when a planned observation is taking place, you will need to have a detailed plan to help the observer make the most of the time. Schools that have gone down the route of insisting on detailed short-term lesson plans in my experience produce a higher proportion of lessons that are satisfactory or good but far less that are outstanding. We need to have a certain flexibility as even the
