School Planning: Functions, Requirements, and Objectives
Functions of School Planning
Explicit principles, guidelines, and procedures for teaching that ensure coordination between schoolwork and the demands of the social context and the process of democratic participation.
Express the links between philosophical, political, pedagogical, and professional positions and the effective actions that teachers will perform in the classroom through objectives, content, methods, and organizational forms of education.
Ensure the streamlining, organization, and coordination of teaching so that the estimations of teachers’ actions allow them to carry out quality education and avoid improvisation and routine.
Provide objectives, content, and methods based on the demands of social reality, the level of preparation, and the socio-cultural and individual needs of learners.
Ensure the unity and consistency of teaching by interrelating the elements that make up the teaching process: the goals (to teach), content (what to teach), students and their possibilities (who to teach), the methods and techniques (how to teach), and assessment, which is closely related to the others.
Update the contents of the plan, review it regularly, perfect it based on progress made in the field of knowledge, and adapt it to students’ learning conditions, methods, techniques, and teaching resources that are being incorporated into everyday experience.
Facilitate the preparation of lessons: select teaching materials on time, know what tasks the teacher and students should perform, and redesign the work ahead to adapt to new situations that may appear during classes.
Ensure that plans are practical instruments for action, serving as guidelines and providing sequential order, objectivity, consistency, and flexibility.
Characteristics of an Effective Plan
- Guidance: The plan establishes guidelines and means of achieving teaching work. As its function is to guide practice based on the demands of the practice itself, it cannot be a rigid and absolute document due to the dynamic nature of the teaching process, which is always in motion and undergoing modifications in relation to real conditions. Constant revisions are thus needed.
- Sequential Order: To achieve the goals, several steps are necessary so that the teaching follows a logical sequence.
- Objectivity: The plan should correspond with the reality in which it will be applied. There is no point in making predictions outside the human and material resources of the school or outside the scope of students. By being aware of the limitations of reality, we can make decisions to overcome existing conditions.
- Consistency: There must be consistency between the overall objectives, specific objectives, content, methods, and evaluation. Consistency refers to the relationship that should exist between ideas and practices. It is also the logical connection between the components of the plan. If the purpose of teaching is to teach students to think and develop their intellectual abilities, the organization of content and methods must reflect this purpose. If we recognize that there is no education without the consolidation of knowledge, our evaluation of learning cannot be confined to a test every two months but should include many forms of assessment throughout the learning process.
- Flexibility: The plan is a guide, not a rigid stance. The pedagogical relationship is always subject to specific conditions, and reality is always in motion, so the plan must be adaptable to change.
Planning does not, by itself, ensure the actual process of teaching. Its production is a function of the direction, organization, and coordination of education. It is necessary that the plans are continuously connected to practice, so they are always revised and reissued. The teacher uses the plan as an opportunity for reflection and evaluation of their practice.
Requirements for Planning
School planning is an activity that guides the decision-making of schools and teachers regarding faculty teaching and learning situations to achieve the best possible results.
The key requirements for planning are: the objectives and tasks of the democratic school, the requirements of the official plans and programs, the preconditions of the students for learning, and the principles and conditions of the process of active assimilation and transmission of content.
Objectives and Tasks of the Democratic School
The first condition for planning is to have secure convictions about the direction we want to give the educational process in our society, namely, the role of the school in emphasizing the education of our students.
A democratic school enables all children to assimilate scientific knowledge and develop their intellectual capabilities, preparing them to actively participate in social life (profession, politics, culture). The tasks of the school, focusing on the transmission and active assimilation of knowledge, should contribute to training objectives: understanding the realities of the job; political training that allows for the active exercise of citizenship (participation in popular organizations, conscious and critical attitude in the election process, etc.); and cultural training to acquire a worldview consistent with the emancipatory interests of the working class.
School education will be more democratic the more it is universalized to all, ensuring both access and retention in early grades, mastery of basic and socially relevant knowledge, and the development of students’ intellectual skills.