Planning - a huge part of the working life of any student teacher, and (in the opinion of many of us who work in ITE) the key to all sorts of aspects of the process of learning to teach. We spend hours banging on about it, our student teachers spend hours writing them, and yet an experienced teacher appears to do the whole thing in their head, and be able to replan the whole thing on the fly during a lesson if needed. To a new member of the profession it looks like magic, and to someone who teaches new teachers, it makes the whole thing pretty tricky to capture and make sense of.

Today, Emma and Tom are in the studio discussing a 2011 article by three colleagues from the University of Oxford: Katharine Burn, Hazel Hagger and Trevor Mutton. In it, they use earlier work by Calderhead which outlines what experienced teachers’ planning looks like, and discuss the learning journeys of several student teachers they worked with at Oxford.

The findings point to some unexpected light-bulb moments about how the process of learning to plan is deeply intertwined with the process of learning to teach, the way that planning evolves over time, and how we as ITE tutors in university or school might go about supporting new members of the profession as the learn to plan, and plan to learn.

Thanks to Katharine, Hazel and Trevor (friends of the podcast all) for the very interesting paper, and we hope we did it some justice in our discussion.

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Recorded in Studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 11th August 2026