Science teachers' views and practices in planning for teaching

This article studies the views and practices of a group of secondary school science teachers toward lesson planning. The two main questions posed are: "What do teachers do when they prepare their lessons?" and "What do teachers think of their own planning?" We describe the decisions made by the teachers, the things they take into account, what they give most importance to, the time spent, the source of their knowledge, and how they evaluate the results. The information was obtained by structured personal interviews, which were compared with reports written by the teachers. Our findings led us to reflect on ways in which lesson planning may be introduced into training programs. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.