In your first planning meeting it is important to ensure a collaborative and purposeful way of working is established. Make sure that everyone knows their own role and is comfortable with that.
1. Welcome everyone and remind them of the timescale of the process.
2. There are two main aspects to this meeting:
Identifying the research focus and questions. (For further details of this see here)
Selecting a suitable problem solving task (See below)
3. Once you have identified the task that you are going to use, it is very important that every member of the planning team does the task themselves, attempting to think as a student might. If there is not time to do this during the planning meeting then it could be set as "homework" for participants.
4. It is a good idea to try out the task on a different class - not the one that you are planning to use for the research lesson. Ideally, several members of the planning team might be able to do this and report back next time. Doing this makes it much easier to move on with the planning in the second planning meeting, where anticipating what students will do is central.
5. Make sure everyone has each other's contact details, and set a date and time for the next planning meeting, if you haven't already done so.
6. Set the between meetings homework (See here)
You might like to watch the following videoclip, showing a group of teachers during one of their planning meetings.
From left to right, they are Malcolm (university professor), Dominic (the head of maths), Dawn and Steve (two teachers).
During the discussion, they refer to the Progression Grid, (page 4 of the Outbreak lesson plan) which shows how observers might recognise progress on each of the research foci. Steve also has the idea that students should perhaps be encouraged to adopt the role of a teacher at some point and critique the reasoning of others. This was eventually incorporated into page 8 of the final lesson plan ("the green sheet").
The research focus they eventually decided upon was to help students:
plan their problem solving approaches before embarking on them;
monitor their approaches while they work.
At this point in the discussion, they have decided upon these goals and they are beginning to discuss what they want observers to look for.
They have chosen a task and written a rough lesson plan
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