It has taken hours of late-night planning. You have created resources from scratch and made clear links to prior learning. It is a lesson-planning masterpiece. But when you try to deliver your plan the next day, the lesson falls flat on its face. When starting out in teaching or when preparing for an interview lesson, the temptation is to over plan to try to avoid lessons being poorly received. The problem is that there will always be events in school that are out of our control - and no amount of planning is going to change that.

We therefore need to make peace with the unpredictable realities of the classroom and embrace “door-handle planning”. Yes, that is exactly what you think it is: planning your lesson when you have one hand on the door, ready to let the students in.

There are moments in the day where it is fairly easy to predict the receptiveness of a class. Your lesson may fall just before lunch, when energy is flagging, or follow a riotous drama lesson with a struggling cover teacher.

Other times, the class dynamic can be affected by less obvious events, such as the aftermath of a hostile encounter that took place between two students in the previous lesson or a rumbling discontent in a whole year group because of a cancelled school trip.

Teachers need to be flexible with lesson plans

These are the lessons when you need to take the temperature of the room and consider your students’ readiness to learn.

If that temperature check tells you that the conditions for learning aren’t great, the best policy is to adjust your plan or abandon it altogether. This is where the principles of door-handle planning can be really useful. Rather than staying fixated on an overworked, unyielding lesson plan, you will already be in a position to rethink your lesson.

Going into lessons with clear ideas of what you want to achieve but without heavily scaffolded plans can lead to a much more dynamic experience for all. No longer wedded to a script, you are in a position to respond to the circumstances in front of you.

This approach comes down to confidence. A lack of confidence is what can hold us back and stop us thinking on our feet. When we do not feel confident, we are more inclined to stick to a pre-prepared plan, even if we are aware of its futility.

Yet being spontaneous and adaptive triggers adrenaline, invigorates and refreshes. This is perhaps why we are advised not to rely on reams of notes when it comes to public speaking; it is almost always more engaging to be spoken to rather than read to, even if the delivery of information is not as crisp as a result. The same is true, I believe, of door-handle lessons.

That said, not every teacher’s temperament is suited to door-handle planning and not every lesson is suitable for such an approach. But if you feel the circumstances are right, trust your instincts, lean on your knowledge and back yourself to hold the room. Believe in yourself and give it a go: you may well find it leads to your best lesson yet.

Andrew Copeman is assistant head of Year 12 and teacher of English at Latymer Upper School

This article originally appeared in the 28 May 2021 issue under the headline “If your lesson plan isn’t going to fly, just wing it”