Best Practice

Sharing lesson planning with your teaching assistant

Good lesson outcomes can be supported by teachers sharing their planning with teaching assistants. Sara Alston offers three key questions to help facilitate this important process


None of us do our best work when we are not sure what we are doing. Yet, despite years of work by the MITA project (see further information) and the Education Endowment Foundation highlighting the key issues of teaching assistant deployment (Sharples et al, 2018), practice and preparedness, this is the position we put teaching assistants in on a daily basis.

Many teaching assistants enter the classroom with the children and have no time to liaise with the class teacher or read and understand the planning – when they are lucky enough to get a copy of it at all. Basically they are winging it which means they are not able to provide the best support for children.
Communication about planning is vital if we are going to support children’s learning effectively.


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