The planning grid

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 I have already mentioned in some other blog entry that while developing this Approach to teaching English, I had the opportunity to participate in an Erasmus+ project about literacy teaching in the foreign language classroom. While designing the project, our coordinator Katarzyna Brzosko Barratt, suggested that we create a planning tool for teachers using this Appproach, and this turned out to be one of the most important outcomes of the project: the planning grid.

The reason why I consider it so important is twofold: on the one hand, in my experience, most teachers do not really plan their teaching but rather rely on textbooks to do it for them. Of course, this does not mean that they follow the textbook unblinkingly, but most of their planning consists in deciding which textbooks activites to do and which to skip, or selecting tasks that can complement the textbook. And, let's be honest, teachers don't have a lot of time to plan each one of their lessons as they would maybe like to do. So providing them with a tool that would make the task of planning easier, or at least guide them through it, made a lot of sense.

The second reason is that in the Literacy Approach it is really important to analyse the model text and make use of its features to then develop students' skill and understanding and enable them to produce their own texts. Again, doing this kind of analysis is something teachers are not used to, and a tool like the planning grid gives them a framework for this task. In fact, analysing the text and identifying what it has to offer is the focus of the first part of the grid that we developed, while the planning itself goes into the next pages.  

Having said this, teachers tell me the planning grid is too complex and difficult, mainly because the terminology in the first part is complex. We have tried solving this problem by creating a glossary to go with the grid, but when I look at the work done by teachers in the project I can see that they are not really using the tool. I am posting it here for the time being, and in the next entries I will try to explain how it works and why I still think it is useful.   

In the meantime, you may want to watch Irene, one of the teachers I work with, explain how the grid works



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