Traditionally lesson planning is a part of good teaching practice.
When crafting your lesson plan, clearly defining the learning outcomes is essential. Agree on what you want your student to achieve by the end of the session.
How are you planning to guide them towards these outcomes?
Additionally, your plan should address differentiation, considering what steps to take if the material is too easy or challenging for the student.
Creating an agreed lesson plan will give you a structured approach to achieving the learning goals. It will break down the required skills into smaller, bite-sized chunks, accelerating learning by making the goals small enough to be achieved more rapidly.
Driving is a practical skill, and practising is essential to mastering it. Repeating focused tasks will help the student learn those skills more quickly.
The above method helps develop the driver’s confidence, as repetition is the key to mastering skills. The instructor can also observe the improvements made by performing small, easy tasks.
This is the same for your part three or standard check. However, the plan should include many mini-lesson plans for what could happen during the session, whether for the standard check or the Part 3 assessment.
Remember, the examiner will only see part of the lesson, so they won’t see the goal-setting part.
This begs the question of how we should plan the assessment.
What do we know?
The Driver:
When choosing a driver, it’s important to have a great rapport with them, work well together, and be capable of developing discussions during the session.
The driver should be halfway through training. The danger of using a test-ready driver is that there may be less opportunity to make the session more challenging within the time constraints.
If using a full licence holder, developing advanced driving techniques during the session will prove to be more effective.
The training area:
The training area should relate to the students’ needs and be within easy reach of the driving test centre. It should also include areas to make the training easier or more challenging. Understanding how to effectively change the session’s difficulty effectively is vital for risk management and learning needs.
The key to a successful assessment is ensuring a backup plan for all the critical control points in the training area. Critical control points mean understanding what and where errors might occur and having a mini-lesson plan. Sometimes, you’ll need to return to the junction or area; sometimes, you can solve the problem in the next similar situation. Understanding how to return to the critical control points or recreate them in a different location will help achieve the learning outcomes.
Often, you hear the examiner say that you can only plan for the first 10 minutes. However, if you’ve planned the session correctly, you’ll have a plan to adapt the lesson at the appropriate time.
The DVSA error marking guide This document explains how driver errors are assessed and what the examiners look for. The examiner will know when to look during a driving test, how to give directions, and how the driving errors are assessed. If you replicate the driving examiner’s expectations, you’ll give them a great customer experience, resulting in a great grade for you.
The DVSA Learning to drive a car syllabus
This document explains what topics should be taught when learning to drive. Understanding the contents will help deliver the learning outcomes to drivers.
Lesson planning should include the following.
- The learning outcomes for the session.
- The methods you will use with the student to achieve the goals.
- The training area.
- How to adapt the lesson to meet your pupil’s needs.
