Chapter 15 highlights the role of an intentional, purposeful EC professional. It provides ideas and examples of how they can plan for and teach children through their individual and collective learning experiences. The chapter highlights the important place of verbal scaffolding and lesson planning. The components of a lesson plan are described and illustrated.

The study of teacher lesson planning is a thriving area of research in education, and understanding the process and products of lesson planning is needed to plan effective teacher education. This chapter will focus on how self-regulated learning strategies can be embedded through the use of a familiar tool, the 5E lesson format. An example of a physics lesson focused on investigating the movement of a pendulum with embedded science and engineering practices and SRL processes is explained at the end of the chapter.

This chapter offers a detailed description of important similarities and shared features among the eight teacher participants in the case study, discussing these commonalities as both a ‘quintain’ (Stake, 2006) and a ‘prototype’ (Sternberg & Horvath, 1995) of Indian secondary teacher expertise, offering extensive extracts from lessons and interviews to do so. It covers the participant teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning, their interpersonal practices, their languaging practices, how they managed their curriculum, prepared resources and planned lessons before offering a detailed description of aspects of their classroom practice, including lesson structuring, negotiation and improvisation, whole class teaching, learner-independent activities, teacher active monitoring of learners, assessment and feedback practices. Evidence is also provided on commonalities concerning their knowledge base, reflective practices and professionalism. The chapter closes by offering a number of brief examples that serve to relate the practices and cognition of these teachers to the contextual constraints, challenges and affordances typically experienced by teachers working in the global South.

This chapter offers a detailed ethnographic description of one of the participant teachers in the study as a concrete example of how teacher expertise may manifest itself in one of the many challenging contexts frequently found in the global South. It begins by summarising key features of her contexts and the challenges she faced in her work, also offering an overview of her personal background and her beliefs about teaching and learning. The chapter then discusses her interpersonal practices (relationships with learners) and her languaging practices – the complex ways in which she and her learners made use of resources from varied languages in the classroom. After this, I discuss how she managed curriculum content, developed resources and planned lessons before offering a detailed account of her classroom practices – how she structured lessons, balanced between whole class and learner-independent activities and offered individual support to learners in large classes. It also offers an account of her knowledge, reflection and professionalism, and closes with brief comparison of her expertise with the findings of prior expertise research, identifying both important similarities and insightful differences. Numerous lesson and interview extracts are provided to support the discussion and claims made.

Teacher quality – what teachers do, how they teach and the way they present information – impacts on student learning (Hattie, 2003; 2009). Effective teaching and learning are multifaceted. There is no one recipe for teaching that will suit every student on all occasions. In your journey as a pre-service teacher, your goal should be to learn as much as you can from your university coursework, your professional experiences, lecturers and tutors, and the school teachers that supervise you, as well as drawing on your background knowledge and experience, so you are prepared with a suite of ideas, strategies, frameworks and theories that will support you to implement effective teaching and learning.

This chapter expands on the principles of planning for teaching introduced in Chapter 7. Chapters 7 and 8 link together to interrogate what needs to be considered in planning for effective teaching and learning. Within this chapter, you will consider the processes and preparation undertaken by Hannah (a secondary pre-service teacher) and Matthew (a primary pre-service teacher) as they consider the learning needs of their students, select a suitable lesson plan template to guide their thinking, enact their lessons and reflect on practice. Hannah and Matthew are passionate and inspired pre-service teachers focused on making a commitment to challenge themselves and their learners to achieve success (Hattie, 2011). Factors related to effective teaching and learning, such as sound curriculum, knowing your students, selecting a range of teaching strategies, differentiation and embedding assessment to inform practice, are all considered within this chapter.

Intentional teaching involves educators/teachers being deliberate about their actions in order to develop children’s skills, concepts, understandings and dispositions. It is an important component of the teaching and learning process. This chapter describes intentional teaching and its purpose. It outlines the relationship between intentional teaching, guided play and child-directed play. The place of scaffolding in intentional teaching is described, with a range of verbal scaffolding strategies presented to extend children’s science skills, knowledge and understanding. The components of a lesson plan are then introduced and illustrated to demonstrate how to plan for intentional teaching in science.

Chapter 8 considers the methodology for implementing tasks. It identifies a range of options relating to each of the three phases of a task-based lesson – the pre-task phase, the main task phase and the post-task phase. Pre-task options have three purposes; (1) to motivate students to perform the task, (2) to prepare them to perform it and (3) to encourage the use of strategies that will help them. Special attention is given to pre-task planning and the various ways in which this can be carried out. The key option in the main task phase is the within-task focus on form. Various ways of accomplishing this are considered – in particular corrective feedback. Of the post-task options, asking learners to repeat a task has attracted most attention from researchers. The chapter does not seek to be prescriptive but it does point to particular options that research has shown to be effective.

This chapter examines basic principles and techniques of syllabus design and identifies the central components of a writing course. It focuses on practical aspects of the teacher’s planning tasks: conducting needs analyses, constructing a syllabus, and designing units of work and lessons.