Instructional planning is one of the most essential skills needed for professional teaching. It calls for significant theoretical as well as for practical knowledge. However, uncovering of strategies, models and skills that teachers use when planning instruction or lessons has turned out to be a rather difficult task for researchers. One of the main reasons is the complicated nature of the planning process itself. In their review of research on teacher planning Yinger and Hendrics-Lee (1998) outlined at least four aspects. First,  prior to 1980 the study of teacher planning revealed that experienced teachers rarely follow  the Tyler’s  (1949) linear planning model that recommends teachers to specify objectives, select and organize learning activities, and specify evaluation procedures. Second, much of what teachers plan is not reflected in their written plans. Third, the real planning is a rather progressive elaboration of both goals and activities over time based on a teacher’s knowledge of past success and failure. Fourth, written plans rarely serve the purpose of providing detailed lessons scripts to be implemented as the real class activities are interactional and mostly not fully predictable and, therefore, are not planned. Planning frames the broad outlines of what is possible or likely to occur while teaching but once interaction begins, planning moves to the background and instructional improvisation becomes more important (Yinger and Hendrics-Lee, 1998). As concluded by Carter from studies using stimulated-recall interviewing, teachers seldom make logical choices among several different alternatives during interaction. Their actions are rather “governed by rules and routines, with decision making in a studied, deliberative sense taking a minor role in their interactive thinking” (1990). Furthermore, the investigation of teacher planning activities is complicated by the fact that practice of writing lesson plans is not common for experienced teachers.

The researchers have used teachers’ lesson plans with following interviewing (Carter, et al., 1987; Lai & Lam, 2011), concept mapping of lessons (Powell, 1992; Morine-Dershimer, 1993; Meijer, Verloop ja Beijaard, 1999), and stimulated recall based on commenting on videotaped lesson recordings (Bond, Smith, Baker ja Hattie, 2000; Vesterinen, Toom ja Patrikainen,2010) as main methods for investigating teacher planning skills and pre-lesson thinking. However, none of these methods or their combinations has proved perfect for revealing the essence of teacher planning in different contexts or differences in teachers with different teaching experiences.

The aim of the present study is piloting concept mapping and interviewing of teachers’ as main approaches to investigating beginning and experienced teacher’s lesson planning skills in Estonian school conditions. The main objectives of the study are to develop a reliable method for identifying differences in beginning and experienced teachers’ lesson analysis skills and to propose a training methodology for promoting these skills in student teachers. We used teacher practical knowledge (Meijer et al., 1999) and Kagan’s (1992) four dimensions for characterizing differences in teachers’ professional behavior as main theoretical concepts underlying the analysis and interpretation of differences in teachers’ lesson planning skills.    

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